NBB AN178 K1 Introduction to Literary Studies
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Dr. Dolmányos Péter
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Introduction: literature and literary study
Literature: problem of definition. Everything in print – disregarding oral traditions, including
all kinds of writing, marginalising literature itself. Other position: ‘great books’ only,
introducing value judgements based on aesthetic concerns. Sometimes philosophers,
historians, theologians, moralists, politicians and even scientists are included. Best:
imaginative literature
Literature: creative activity, an art. Medium: language – a creation of man, charged with the
cultural heritage of a linguistic group. The nature of literature: different use of language (Ù
scientific language, everyday language). Literary language: expressive (tone and attitude),
ambiguous (memories, associations, etc), sound symbolism (metre, sound patterns); more
deliberate exploitation of the resources of language than in everyday use. Different
referentiality – the reference is to a world of fiction. Descriptive conception of literature:
organisation, personal expression, realisation and exploitation of the medium, lack of practical
purpose, fictionality – these distinguish literature from non-literature
The function of literature: ?. Horace: dulce and utile; ‘Poets wish either to instruct or to
delight or to combine the two’(Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, p.68). Literature
presents experience – typical as well as particular experience. Others: it offers a kind of
knowledge (‘truth’ – systematic and publicly verifiable knowledge), or rather, it helps us
perceive what we see. Yet others: catharsis – to relieve us from the pressure of emotions; but:
does it relieve us from emotions or incite them? Many possible functions; the prime one:
fidelity to its own nature
Literary study: ‘if not precisely a science, a species of knowledge, or of learning’ (WellekWarren, Theory of Literature, p.15). Controversy: the nature of literature as art → the
problem of method. The nature of criticism: something of an art too, giving rise to the idea of
the critic as parasite. ‘Science of culture’ – presents the concrete and individual in reference to
a scheme of values (= culture). No universal laws – either trivial or false
The argument against criticism: the critic is a second-rate artist, criticism is a parasitic
activity. Other: criticism is artificial, public taste natural. An extreme position: art for art’s
sake – art as mystery, an initiation into a closed and privileged community
The argument for criticism: ‘A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it
knows what it wants or likes, brutalises the arts and loses its cultural memory.’ (Frye,
Anatomy of Criticism, p.4).
Literary study translates the experience of literature into intellectual terms and assimilates it
into a coherent scheme. It uses methods employed by the natural sciences (analysis, synthesis,
deduction, induction) as well as its own valid methods (c.f. philosophy, history, theology –
these all have their own valid methods of knowing different from those of the natural
sciences). Literary study: general idea – not possible to study literature itself; possible to study
things about it. Literary theory, literary criticism, literary history. Literary theory: the study of
the principles of literature, its categories, criteria etc. Literary criticism: the interpretation of
concrete works of literature (NB: criticism implies nothing negative). Literary history: the
interpretation of works of literature in a chronological framework. Theory: universal terms;
the basis of criticism and literary history. Literary history: problem of point of view – present-
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Dr. Dolmányos Péter
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day or historical. Literary criticism and literary history are closely connected: the critic needs
knowledge of literary history, the literary historian must be a critic as well
Reading:
Wellek, R., Warren, A. Theory of Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 (1942); chapters
1-4, pp. 15-45
Frye, N. Anatomy of Criticism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990 (1957); ‘Polemical
Introduction’, pp. 3-29
Bókay, A. Irodalomtudomány a modern és posztmodern korban. Budapest: Osiris, 1997;
‘Bevezetés – Az irodalomtudomány természete és szükségessége.’ pp. 13-23
(2) Elements of literature: rhythm and metre
Literature: divided into genres, categories – yet there are common elements. Rhythm: present
in most types of writing but most easily observed in poetry.
Rhythm: regular pattern of change; ‘the movement or sense of movement communicated by
the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables and by the duration of the syllables’
(Cuddon). Periodicity is sometimes required as essential – problem of prose rhythm. Rhythm
has a power of its own (→ lullabies, charms etc.), and it contributes to meaning. Verse
rhythm, prose rhythm – difference in the unit: the line (verse) and the sentence (prose).
Underlying idea: the human need for order, organisation. Our focus of attention: verse
rhythm; it is created by the use of metre
Metre: the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse – in English. There are
different verse systems / types of versification: syllabic, quantitative, accentual. Syllabic:
based on the number of syllables per line; not natural in a Germanic language. Quantitative:
based on the duration of syllables (short and long syllables); possible but not natural –
imported from classical languages, only a few experimental examples in English. Accentual
(also called accentual syllabic): based upon stress, the alteration of stressed (heavy) and
unstressed (light) syllables; the most common in English poetry since the Renaissance
Rhythm in verse: considering the individual line – a separate entity on the printed page,
representing a pattern. Base – regular rhythmic pattern, independent of words, an abstract
pattern; metre – language shaped to suit the base (language = stressed and unstressed
syllables; => metre = the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables); modulation – departure
from the abstract pattern. The base must be dominant, esp. towards the end of the line. Line:
consists of metrical feet. Foot: unit of rhythm. Base feet: rising – iamb: x / (= a metrical foot
consisting of an unstressed (x) syllable followed by a stressed (/) one), anapaest: x x /; falling
– trochee: / x, dactyl: / x x. Feet used only in modulation: spondee: / /, pyrrhic: x x,
choriambus: / x x /
Stress patterns – three major factors determine the stress:
• Accent – the pattern of polysyllabic words (e.g. descending – x / x)
• Monosyllabic words: grammatical function and rhetorical accent / emphasis
(nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs have stronger stress than articles,
prepositions, particles and conjunctions)
• ‘metrical accent’ – the stress pattern of the line
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Dr. Dolmányos Péter
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Examples of lines:
iambic:
x
/ |
x
/|
x
/|x
/
|
x
/ |
‘I saw the sky descending black and white’
x
/
│
x
/
│
x
/
│
x
/
│
(R. Lowell)
x
/ │
’Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea.’
(Shakespeare)
anapaestic:
x
x
/| x
x
/|
x
x
/ |
x
x
/ |
‘There are many who say that a dog has his day.’
x
x
/ │ x
x
/ │ x
x
/ │ x
x
(D. Thomas)
/│
‘And the fiddler’s old tune and the shuffling of feet’
(W. Morris)
trochaic:
/
x | /
x| /
x|
/
x |
‘Let her live to earn her dinners.’
/
x │ /
x│ /
x │/
(J. M. Synge)
x │
/
x │
‘There they are, my fifty men and women’
(R. Browning)
dactylic:
/
x
x|
/
x
x |
‘Take her up tenderly.’
(T. Hood)
Example of modulation:
/
/ | x
/ |
x
/ |
x
/ |
‘Smart lad to slip betimes away.’
– a spondee as modulation, iambic line
Base foot: dominant but not the only kind in a poem – significant variations to reinforce
meaning. The importance of reading for sense
Some further examples:
/
/ │
/
/ │
/
/
│ x
/ │
x
/
│
‘Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death’ (Milton)
x
/│ x
/ │
x
/
│
x
/ │
x
/
│
‘When I do count the clock that tells the time’ (Shakespeare)
/
/ │
/
/ │ x /│x
/ │ x
/ │
‘Good strong thick stupefying incense smoke’
(R. Browning)
Strong stress metres: only the strong stress counts, the number of unstressed syllables is
highly variable. Examples: Anglo-Saxon poetry, several Middle English poems, Coleridge:
Christabel, modern poetry
Lines: classified according to the number of feet they contain; monometer (a line consisting
of one metrical foot), dimeter (2 feet), trimeter (3), tetrameter (4), pentameter (5), hexameter
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Dr. Dolmányos Péter
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(6), heptameter (7), octameter (8). The most common in English poetry: iambic pentameter.
End-stopped line: concludes with a distinct syntactical pause; run-on line (enjambement):
sense carried over into the next line without a syntactic pause. Caesura: a marked pause
within the line (║)
Stanza: a group of lines of verse / grouping of a prescribed number of lines, usually with a
particular rhyme scheme, repeated as a unit of structure; other unit: paragraph (varying length
of units, no fixed number of lines). Most common types: couplet (a stanza consisting of two
lines), triplet (3) /tercet/, quatrain (4) /heroic – abab; ballad – abxb/, sestet (6), ocatve (8).
Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), free verse (no regular metre).
Suggested reading:
Wellek, R., Warren, A. Theory of Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 (1949); ch. 13:
‘Euphony, Rhythm, and Metre’ pp. 158-173
(3) Elements of literature: figurative language
‘Poetry – metre and metaphor.’ Literary language: expressive, ambiguous, sound symbolism;
more deliberate exploitation of the resources of language than in everyday use. Much of this
is present in everyday use though often without our awareness
Relationship with rhetoric: rhetoric: the art of speaking; persuasive and ornamental rhetoric;
in literature: often seen as ornamental rhetoric (?). Figurative language → departure from the
standard meaning of words or from the standard order of words. ‘Figures of thought’ or
tropes – change in meaning (figurative as opposed to literal meaning); ‘figures of speech’ or
‘rhetorical figures’, schemes – change in the order or position of words. There is no sharp
division between figures of speech and figures of thought (→ different treatment of them in
different critical writings)
Types: great variety – about 250 figures. The most common ones: allegory (abstract quality
personified), anaphora (repetition of a word or group of words at the beginning of successive
clauses), epiphora (repetition of a word or groups of words at the end of successive clauses),
anticlimax (the last part of a sentence contains something of a lower class than the first),
apostrophe (addressing someone not directly present or listening, addressing a thing),
invocation (addressing a god or a muse to assist the poet in his work), kenning (a descriptive
phrase standing for the ordinary name for a thing; Anglo-Saxon lit.), metaphor (one thing is
expressed in terms of another), metonymy (the name or an attribute of a thing is substituted
for the thing itself), palindrome, onomatopoeia (vocal imitation of sound), prosopopoeia
(personification; human qualities are attributed to nonhuman agents), rhetorical question (a
question asked to achieve a stronger emphasis than a direct statement would give), simile
(explicit comparison with ‘as’ or ‘like’), synecdoche (the part stands for the whole or the
whole stands for the part), tautology (redundant words or ideas)
Examples:
allegory:
anaphora:
epiphora:
anticlimax:
‘Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flatt’ry sooth the dull cold ear of Death?’
(Gray)
‘See it in your face. See it in your eyes.’
(Joyce)
‘Working away. Tearing away.’
(Joyce)
‘Whence flow those Tears fast down thy blubber’d cheeks,
NBB AN178 K1 Introduction to Literary Studies
Dr. Dolmányos Péter
Like swoln Gutter, gushing through the Streets?’
‘Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!’
‘And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples th’upright heart and pure,
Instruct me…’
kenning:
‘whale-road’
metaphor:
‘Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Drinker of horizon’s fluid line’
metonymy:
‘Sceptre and crown must tumble down
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade’
palindrome:
‘Madam I’m Adam’
onomatopoeia:
‘murmuring of innumerable bees’
prosopopoeia:
‘But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away.’
rhetorical question: ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’
simile:
‘a face like an old lemon’
synecdoche:
‘Give us this day our daily bread’
tautology:
‘Our old ancient ancestors’
apostrophe:
invocation:
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(Fielding)
(Shelley)
(Milton)
(Spender)
(Shirley)
(Tennyson)
(Herbert)
(Shelley)
(Conrad)
(Joyce)
Literary images: synecdoche, metonymy, simile, metaphor, prosopopoeia, allegory.
Function: not (simply) ornamentation; used when language is felt to be inadequate to express
what is meant
Basis of imagery: sensation. ‘Signifier’ and ‘signified’; analogue and subject; vehicle
/pictorial image/ and tenor /general idea/. Classification: 1. Relationship between analogue
and subject: contiguity – synecdoche, metonymy; similarity – simile, metaphor, allegory,
prosopopoeia. 2. Sensory field: visual (majority), auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory
Some important ideas:
Metaphor: not only nouns – other word classes are also possible (shady character, ‘golden
daffodils’). Explicit metaphor (tenor and vehicle; cf. example above), implicit metaphor
(vehicle only – ‘golden daffodils’). Dead metaphor – not recognised by native speakers any
more. Mixed metaphors (e.g. ‘To be or not to be…’), extended metaphors (‘Sometimes we
think of the nations lying asleep, / Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow.’ – Muir)
Allegory: two meanings. Image (abstract quality personified); narrative (a story with two
levels of meaning, surface and undersurface levels, correspondence between them in terms of
character, action and place). Allegory as narrative – J. Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress (17th
century; Christian’s pilgrimage to the Celestial city)
Symbol: not an image in the narrow sense of the word – only vehicle apparent, tenor: rather a
broad field of associations; cf. Blake: ‘The Sick Rose’. Symbol: ‘a word or a phrase that
signifies an object or event which in turn signifies something, or has a range of reference,
beyond itself.’ (M. H. Abrams); ‘An object which refers to another object but demands
attention also in its own right, as a presentation’ /Wellek-Warren/. Conventional/public
symbols – ‘the Cross’; private symbols → poetry (e.g. W. B. Yeats’s ‘tower’ or ‘Byzantium’)
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Myth: an anonymously composed story of origins and destinies. Different spheres: the
supernatural – the natural, the divine – the human; often understood as a record of
fundamental human experience. Use of myth in Modernist literature (T.S. Eliot: ‘The Waste
Land’, Joyce: Ulysses). Myth criticism – viewing all works of literature as recurrences of
archetypes and mythic formulas
Reading:
Wellek, R., Warren, A. Theory of Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 (1949); ch. 15:
‘Image, Metaphor, Symbol, Myth’ pp. 186-211
(4) Elements of literature: sound patterns
Literary language: sound symbolism utilised. Using the potential ‘musicality’ of language –
cf. Poe: ‘music … combined with a pleasurable idea.’ Devices of verbal music: alliteration,
assonance, consonance, rhyme; not only ornamentation – as hythm and figures, it contributes
to meaning
Alliteration: close repetition of identical speechsounds (mainly consonants) at the beginning
of words. The principal organising device in Anglo-Saxon poetry, later used only for special
stylistic effects.
Examples:
‘A wild cat, fur-fire in a bracken bush’ (Norman MacCaig)
‘When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Assonance: close repetition of identical vowels between different consonants.
Example:
‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time’ (John Keats)
Consonance: close repetition of identical consonants with different vowels. More frequent
type: similar vowels followed by identical consonants → slant rhyme.
Examples:
‘‘Out of this house’ – said rider to reader,
‘Yours never will’ – said farer to fearer,
‘They’re looking for you’ – said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.’ (W. H. Auden)
Rhyme: the identity of the last stressed vowel and of all the speech sounds following it. The
most common sound pattern. Aesthetic satisfaction (echoing sounds) and structural
importance (intensifying meaning, binding the verse together).
Examples:
‘There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies grow;
A heavenly paradise is that place
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.’ (Thomas Campion)
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Types of rhyme: masculine (single stressed syllable), feminine (stressed syllable followed by
an unstressed syllable), single, double, triple, internal, end, perfect, slant / approximate /
suspended (similarity instead of identity), eye (identical spelling but different pronunciation)
Examples:
masculine: face - place
feminine: daughters - waters
triple: ‘But – Oh! ye lords and ladies intellectual
Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?’ (Byron)
internal: ‘In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud’ (S. T. Coleridge)
slant: flower-fever (Dylan Thomas)
eye-rhyme: prove - love
Rhyme scheme: the sequence of rhymes represented by the letters of the alphabet. (Rhyme
scheme of the example by Campion: abab)
More examples:
rhyme, alliteration, assonance (as in low), assonance (as in round)
‘The Lotos blooms below the barren peak:
a
a
The Lotos blows by every winding creek:
All day the wind breathes low with mellower tone
b
Thro’ every hollow cave and alley lone,
b
Round and round the spicy downs the yellow Lotos-dust is blown.’
b
(Alfred Lord Tennyson)
consonance, slant rhyme
‘The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned,
Whose warmth shall lull their dreamy lids,
While songs are crooned.
But they will not dream of us poor lads,
Lost in the ground.’
(Wilfred Owen)
John Keats: ‘Last Sonnet’
‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art –
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors – ’
‘No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
a
b
a
b
c
d
c
d
e
NBB AN178 K1 Introduction to Literary Studies
Dr. Dolmányos Péter
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To
for ever its soft
and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever – or else swoon to death.’
Alliterations: s, w, m, f, h, st, t
Assonances: /eι/, /u:/
Consonances:
, h*r
8
f
e
f
g
g
rhyme scheme
(5) Theory of genres
Arts: differences between them and within them. Aristotle: all art is imitation (mimesis); the
arts differ from each other ‘in three respects – the medium, the object, the manner and mode
of imitation.’ Medium and genre → division between the arts and within the arts
Medium: material vehicle of art; inherent possibilities and limitations, accounting for
differences between the arts. Written and plastic / visual arts; temporal (moving in time) and
spatial (moving in space)
Genre: type or species of literature; literary form, aesthetic convention. Theory of genres:
classifying literature by specifically literary types of organisation or structure. Numerous
categories, variable criteria for classification; questions of division – categories, historical
kinds, fixed forms
Earliest theory: Aristotle; epic (narrative), lyric, drama. Differentiation according to manner
and mode of imitation (when the medium and the object are the same) → ‘the poet may
imitate by narration – in which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or
speak in his own person, unchanged – or he may present all his characters as living and
moving before us’ (Poetics). Still prevailing in literary studies and university courses
Modern revisions: Northrop Frye – using Aristotle’s categories as a starting point, he adds a
genre which addresses a reader through a book → fiction. Ancient times: literature was
recited; today: only drama is performed, most literature is read silently → need for revising
the categories. Drama, epos, fiction, lyric – based on the supposed presence or absence of an
audience. Drama – spectators present, the concealment of the writer from the audience; epos –
recited in front of an audience; fiction – written for readers; lyric – the audience concealed
from the poet, the poet ‘overheard.’ Epos and fiction are related – e.g. Dickens reading his
novels to an audience (fiction to epos). Epos and fiction: central area of literature; lyric:
internal imitation of sound and imagery; drama: external imitation, outward representation of
sound and imagery (cf. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, ‘Fourth Essay: Rhetorical Criticism:
Theory of Genres’)
Other ideas: defining the categories in terms of grammatical structures – lyric: first person
singular, present tense, epic: third person singular, past tense (R. Jakobson); basic types of
poetry: play, tale and song – with their corresponding categories and criteria. Some more
recent opinions: Fredric Jameson: genres – institutions, social contracts between a writer and
a specific public. Roland Barthes: genre – a set of conventions and codes shared by an
implicit contract between writer and reader; these sets of conventions make possible the
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writing of a particular work of literature. Writer: may work against the conventions; reader:
conventions function as expectations
More general view: three overall classes in literature, corresponding (roughly) to the
categories of Aristotle → poetry, fiction, drama. Most common genres: epic, tragedy,
comedy, satire, lyric, biography, essay, novel. Sonnet, ballade, rondeau – defined by metre
and stanza form → fixed forms. Genres considered to be fixed categories from the
Renaissance to the 18th century; Neo-classical critics: genres should remain pure, no mixing;
hierarchy of kinds with the epic and the tragedy at the top. From Romanticism onwards:
genres are convenient but arbitrary categories; general values of literary works instead of
hierarchy of genres. Genres: depending both on outer form (metre and structure) and inner
form (attitude, tone, purpose – i.e. ‘subject’ and ‘audience’)
Required reading:
Wellek, R., Warren, A. Theory of Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 (1949); ch. 17:
‘Literary genres’ pp. 226-237
Suggested reading:
Frye, N. Anatomy of Criticism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990 (1957): ‘Fourth Essay:
Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres’ pp. 243-337
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981
(6) Poetry I. Narrative and Lyric
Poetry: a comprehensive term for metrical composition; reservations, in contradistinction to
verse (poetry suggesting a distinctive, higher quality). Types: epic/narrative, lyric, dramatic,
satiric. Generally: narrative and non-narrative poetry, Aristotle’s epic and lyric
Narrative poetry: the narrative poem tells a story; mimetic aspect dominant. European
literature begins with narrative poetry (Homer); non-literate societies: storytellers memorised
poems; literate societies: oral verse narratives remained popular even after the invention of
printing. Narrative poetry: epic, ballad (folk and literary ballads), metrical romance. Beowulf,
Milton: Paradise Lost; Scottish popular ballads. The most well-known English examples of
narrative poetry: Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales.
Satiric poetry → satire in verse, basically narrative with a distinct approach. Satire: ‘the
literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward
it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation’ (Abrams). Satirical mode and
satirical elements. Satire in verse was popular in the late 17th century and in the 18th century;
Dryden, Pope, Johnson; also: Romantic period, Lord Byron’s satirical poems (Don Juan, ‘The
Vision of Judgement’)
Lyric poetry: essentially non-narrative poetry, dealing with emotions, states of mind,
thoughts, moods. There is a narrative base though (‘story’) but the focus is not this; cf.
Wordsworth: ‘I wandered lonely…’; Frost: ‘Fire and Ice.’ The expressive aspect is more
prominent than the mimetic
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Subject/theme, tone, voice, speaker, persona. Poem: an utterance → a speaker with certain
personal qualities, expressing attitudes towards elements within the work and towards the
audience. Tone: the poet’s attitude towards his theme and his audience. Voice: what we hear
in the poem. Different kinds of voices – T. S. Eliot: three voices → the poet talking to himself
or to nobody (first), the poet addressing an audience (second), the poet creating a dramatic
character speaking in verse (third) (cf. ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’)
Second voice – raising the question of the speaker. Persona – a character invented for a
particular purpose. Poet vs persona; cf. Frost – a poem is written by an author but it is spoken
by an invented speaker. Autobiographical personas – there is always some distance between
the poet and his persona – cf. Larkin: ‘To my Wife’. The distance is the most apparent in
dialogue poems
Third voice → dramatic poetry; a speaker in a particular situation. Dramatic monologue,
dramatic lyric. Dramatic monologue: an imaginary character addressing an imaginary
audience, presenting himself in a significant moment in his life, revealing his personal
qualities, temperament etc.; cf. Browning: ‘My Last Duchess’. Dramatic lyric: the speaker’s
thoughts revealed (not his personal qualities); Wordsworth: ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles
above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour’
(7) Poetry II. Lyric Poetry
Emotion – central concern in lyric poetry; the way emotion is expressed. Poetry: thoughts
communicate emotions => centrality of the understanding of the relationship between thought
and emotion.
Schiller: earlier thought and emotion were not separated, the Greeks as example; growing
complexity of civilisation leading to their separation. Also: the fragmentation of human
personality. Consequence: the poet expresses his feelings – which may have nothing to do
with the feelings of others.
Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800; 1802): ‘’All good poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings’ and it ‘takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquillity.’
Attempting to overcome the split between though and emotion, intuition and intellect.
Wordsworth’s poetic practice: often disguising the general as autobiographical (cf. Schiller)
T. S. Eliot – ‘the dissociation of sensibility’. Separation of thought from feeling, losing the
‘unified sensibility’ of earlier periods. Renaissance, early 17th century (Metaphysicals) still
had it. Eliot also claiming the separation of ‘the mind which creates’ from ‘the man who
suffers’, poetry is not the expression of emotion but an escape from it, ordinary emotions
instead of private ones (‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, 1919), the idea of the ‘objective
correlative’ (‘The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must
terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.’) – cf. the
opening lines of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’:
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Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Poetic diction – the language of poetry. Poetry has always been written in a distinctive
language. The characteristic language use, kinds of words, phrases and sentence structures of
a poet; also used to refer to the general poetic language of a period. Modern meaning:
deliberate departure from the common practice of the given period
General meaning in the period sense: Neo-classicism, 18th century – decorum (diction suited
to the genre); frequent use of archaism, invocation, personification and periphrasis
(circumlocution) in poetry → Pope, Thomson, Gray. Other famous instance: Wordsworth,
Preface; ‘the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated
character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that
of good prose’; ‘the very language of men’
(8) Drama I. Tragedy
Drama: literary work meant to be performed in the theatre; ‘the literary form designed for
performance in the theatre, in which actors take the roles of characters, perform the indicated
action, and utter the written dialogue’ (Abrams). Literature and theatre. Not static; rather a set
of meanings. Dramas intended to be put on stage and dramas intended to be read only (closet
dramas)
Origins: Greece, 6th century BC; connected with ritual – festivals for Dionysus. First: singing
the myths of Dionysus, later other myths; dialogues – enacting the myth; chorus: commentary
and interpretation. Main types: tragedy, comedy. Later also: tragicomedy, mystery, miracle,
morality, chronicle play, romance
Tragedy
Aristotle: Poetics – dealing with the genre of tragedy. Tragedy: noble action of noble
characters; ‘the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete
in itself’, ‘with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such
emotions.’ Elements: external – spectacular presentment, lyrical song, diction; internal – plot,
character, thought. Plot: simple – ‘an action one and continuous, the change of fortune in the
protagonist’s life takes place without reversal of the situation and without recognition’;
complex – ‘the change is accompanied by reversal, or by recognition or by both.’ Unity of
action – central idea; beginning, middle and end (later: French and Italian Neo-Classicists:
including place and time as well, talking about the three unities) Reversal (Peripeteia): ‘from
good to bad; the result not of vice’ – hamartia /some great error of judgement/, hubris
/shortcoming in the hero’s character which leads him to ignore the warnings of the gods; cf.
Creon in Antigone/. Recognition (Anagnorisis): the moment when ignorance gives way to
knowledge. Catharsis /purgation/: ‘a discharge of bad emotions’, ‘a kind of cosmic awe in
the face of suffering.’ Somewhat dubious – audience or character
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Structure: protasis (characters introduced, situation explained ≅ exposition), epitasis (the plot
thickens, preceding the catastrophe), catastasis (major crisis = climax), catastrophe (tragic
dénouement)
Characters /dramatis personae/: protagonist, antagonist. The interpretation of characters –
moral, emotional characteristics, action, motivation. Chorus
Types: Senecan tragedy, Revenge tragedy, tragedy of blood, heroic tragedy, bourgeois or
domestic tragedy
Comic relief: comic episodes or interludes to relieve tension and heighten the tragic element
by contrast; cf. Hamlet. Antique tragedy: pure, no comic elements
Later periods: not many connections with the Greek. Middle Ages: Christian tradition,
liturgical drama – no real tragedies. Renaissance: Classical influence, Roman tragedies. 20th
century: difficulty of writing tragedy; fate located in the human psyche – successful attempts
(Eugene O’Neill)
(9) Drama II. Comedy and other forms
Comedy: a work dealing in an amusing way with ordinary characters in rather everyday
situations; usually happy ending for the main characters. Characters: less favourable types,
‘smaller than life’ figures. Comedy as a term is reserved for drama; comic form appears in
poetry and prose fiction as well
Theory of comedy: less treatment, Aristotle: remarks only, no full treatment (probably lost).
First real theory: Renaissance – comedy teaches good behaviour (by negative examples).
Later: distinction made between low comedy (little or no intellectual appeal) and high comedy
(George Meredith: ‘intellectual laughter’)
Types: farce, comedy of manners (Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest), comedy
of humours (Ben Jonson), comedy of ideas (Shaw: Man and Superman), comedy of intrigue
(Beaumarchais), comedy of menace (Pinter: The Birthday Party), comedy of morals
(Moliére), satirical comedy (Jonson: Volpone); for definitions see Cuddon
Tragi-comedy: also called dark comedy or black comedy; characteristic of Elizabethan and
Jacobean drama. It mingles the subject matters and the forms of comedy and tragedy; a rather
problematic category
Medieval drama: developing independently from the drama of antiquity. Christian tradition –
parts of the liturgy were elaborated as chanting between priest and choir, later this developed
into performance. Moving out of the church into the marketplace – secularisation. Mystery
plays: based on the Bible, concerned with the stories of the Creation, the Fall and
Redemption. Miracle plays: later development from mystery plays; dramatising saints’ lives
and divine miracles, legends of miraculous interventions by the Virgin. Morality plays: not
dealing with biblical stories but with personified abstractions of virtues and vices struggling
for man’s soul. Interlude – a type of morality play, general moral problems treated in an
allegorical way with more pronounced realistic and comic elements – secular morality play;
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marking the transition from medieval religious drama to Renaissance drama. Renaissance:
drama of classical antiquity rediscovered, influencing the native tradition
The Theatre of the Absurd: 20th century, rejection of traditional concepts of plot, character,
different language and stage. Underlying idea: the absurdity of life and of the human
condition; life with no apparent purpose, out of harmony with its surroundings; meaningless
life in a meaningless universe. Roots in expressionism and surrealism; current movement
emerged after WW2. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942): ‘In a universe that is suddenly
deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile. … This
divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of
Absurdity.’ Samuel Beckett’s definition of life
(10) Fiction I. From the Short Story to the Novel
Fiction: ‘a vague and general term for an imaginative work, usually in prose’ /Cuddon/.
Common meaning: ‘an invented story’= not fact. (Though: may have been taken for fact in
the past; euhemerism: myth is a story based on actual reality; Euhemerus, 4th-3rd century BC).
Most general sense: any form of prose narrative – novel, romance, novella/novelette, short
story.
Elements of fiction: story, plot, character, experience, time, point of view
Story: mere sequence of events. Plot: causal link between the events that make up the story.
Beginning or exposition, middle or the body, end or conclusion. The body: the major
action, containing conflict and complication, characterised by unity and coherence. Suspense
(‘concerned uncertainty about what is going to happen’ /Abrams/), surprise (what happens
violates our expectations). Dénouement – the sorting out of conflicts. Organic plot: events
move towards resolution of conflict; favourable to main characters, unifying factors in the
subject matter. Inorganic plot: perception of life as an endless series of crises, no apparent
faith in divine dispensation. Open- or broad-ended novels; story/plot rejected as distortion of
life. Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady; ‘the whole of anything is never told.’ The structure
of the plot: gradual development, revelation (no change; we get to know more); rising action climax - falling action - conclusion
Character: character and plot are interdependent in criticism: ‘What is character but the
determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’ (Henry James).
Function: protagonist, antagonist. Types: E. M. Forster’s division (Aspects of the Novel): flat
and round characters. Flat characters (types): ‘built around a single idea or quality’, no
change in the course of a story or play (may be adequately described in one single sentence);
round characters: complexity, represented with subtlety, showing development (‘capable of
surprising us in a convincing way’). ‘Intermediate’ category: flat character appearing to be
round (surprising but not convincing). Caricatures, stereotypes. Methods of
characterisation: showing (merely presenting the character talking and acting) or telling
(describing and evaluating the motives and dispositions of the character).
Experience: external (adventure) and/or internal. Modernism: shift from external to internal.
Walter Pater: experience – a group of impressions in the mind of the observer
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Time: external/objective – the time of the clock. Internal/subjective – the time of the mind.
External: dominant in older type of fiction (the time of external experience). Subjective and
objective may be represented simultaneously /Joyce: Ulysess, Woolf: The Waves/. Timeshift: moving back and forth in the objective time of fiction; broken chronology /Conrad:
Lord Jim or Nostromo/
Point of view: who talks to the reader, ‘the mode or perspective established by the author by
means of which the reader is presented with the characters, actions, setting, and events which
constitute the narrative in a work of fiction.’ (Abrams). 1st and 3rd person narrators. 1st
person: the narrator is a character (a witness, a minor or a major character); the most limited.
3rd person: the author is simply a narrator; either limited (the story is told from within the
confines of what is experienced by a single character) or omniscient (the narrator knows
everything about the agents and events, having access to the thoughts, feelings and motives of
characters). The limited point of view was developed into the technique of stream of
consciousness (outer observations presented through their impression on the current of
thought, memory, feelings and associations of the character). Other narrative tactics (cutting
across diverse points of view): self-conscious narrator (revealing to the reader that the
narration is a work of fiction), unreliable narrator (the perceptions and interpretations of the
narrator do not coincide with the implicit opinions and norms manifested by the author)
Setting: the where and when of the story. Local colour (details characteristic of a region).
Background – though a work of fiction, the character comes from a social milieu
Consistency and credibility: approaching a story with a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’
(Coleridge). Probability, universality and the illusion of reality
*
Short story: difficult to define. Poe: can be read between 1/2 hour and 2 hours. Less complex
than a novel, swift, one line of action, small number of characters, one or two well-drawn, the
rest only sketches. Minimising the exposition and the details of the setting, focusing on the
selected central incident which reveals as much as possible of the totality of the life and
character of the protagonist, details carry maximum significance
(11) Fiction II. The Novel
Novel: extended work of prose fiction; more complicated plot (or plots), greater variety of
characters, subtle exploration of character, motive and circumstance. Problems of definition
and theory – a relatively new genre
Theoretical considerations: developing without a comprehensive theory, laws not defined,
aesthetic function not clarified; in its highest form seen as the modern descendant of the epic
(Fielding described his Joseph Andrews as ‘a comic epic in prose’). The lack of theory has
been an advantage at the same time: more flexible, ability to adapt itself to contemporary
demands
History: relatively recent in its present form. Antique precedent: Petronius, Satyricon (1st
century AD); Apuleius, The Golden Ass (2nd century AD); Heliodorus, Aethiopica (3rd century
AD); all extremely popular in their own time. Middle Ages: the tradition of storytelling was
still popular; romances – mainly in verse. Development of adequate prose style: towards the
Renaissance. The modern European novel: 16th and 17th centuries. Rabelais, Gargantua and
Pantagruel (1532-34), Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605-15). England: early 18th century; Daniel
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Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722); Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740).
Victorian novel, the Modernist novel
Types: picaresque (orig. the life of a knave/picaroon; loose, episodic structure, adventures
connected by the main character; Fielding: Jonathan Wild, Smollett); Gothic (tales of mystery
and horror, stock elements; late 18th and early 19th centuries; Stoker: Dracula); historical (Sir
Walter Scott; reconstructing and imaginatively recreating history); psychological (spiritual,
emotional and mental lives of the characters); Bildungsroman (education novel; the
development of the protagonist from childhood to maturity; Dickens: David Copperfield);
Künstlerroman (development of an artist from childhood to maturity; Joyce: A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man); documentary (based on documentary evidence; Dreiser: An
American Tragedy); key novel (actual persons presented under fictitious names; Huxley:
Point Counter Point); anti-novel (experimental, breaking with traditional story-telling
methods, little attempt to create an illusion of realism; Beckett; Flann O’Brien: At Swim-TwoBirds); epistolary (written in the forms of letters; Richardson: Pamela); social or thesis novel
(a social, political or religious problem treated with a didactic purpose; Dickens: Hard Times;
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
Recent developments: nouveau roman – sequences of perceptions instead of traditional
elements such as plot, character, a frame of reference to the outside world; France, Alain
Robbe-Grillet; magic realism – interweaving realism with fantastic and dreamlike elements;
Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
*
Romance: entertainment; elements of coincidence, fantasy; myth; medieval times: verse
romances mainly, later giving way to prose works
(12) An Outline of the History of Literature in English
English literature vs literature in English – the concepts of American, Australian and
Canadian literature; Irish, Scottish and Welsh literatures – in English
Britain:
Beginnings: Anglo-Saxon period (ca. 449-1066); alliterative meter; heroic poetry (most wellknown: Beowulf), religious poetry, prose (chronicles, translations of works of theology and
philosophy)
1066 – end of the 15th century: Middle English period. 1066: Norman Conquest – important
cultural consequences as well as historical ones. Aristocracy: French-speaking. Revival of
interest in the English language: 14th century. Geoffrey Chaucer – the father of English
poetry, the first significant poet to use metrical forms in English; The Canterbury Tales.
Romances, dream allegories, lyric poetry; medieval drama
16th century – early 17th century: Renaissance. Humanism. Drama: tragedy and comedy,
chronicle plays. Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson – the
culmination in the history of English drama. Poetry: great period of the lyric, sonnets and
sonnet sequences. Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey), Sir Philip Sidney,
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Edmund Spenser. Early 17th century: Metaphysical poets and Cavaliers; John Donne, Ben
Jonson. John Milton
1660: Restoration; John Dryden. Restoration drama – another flourishing period for drama.
18th century: Neo-classicism – strict principles of form and decorum; Alexander Pope,
Samuel Johnson. Satires, journalism, essays, pamphlets. Beginnings of the English novel –
Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding. The Age of Reason (Enlightenment) –
leaving little space for lyric poetry
ca 1798-1832: the Romantic period. ‘Official beginning’: 1798: Lyrical Ballads (William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge). Interest in nature, in the self, in the Middle Ages;
the great potential of man. The revival of the lyric; William Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge;
John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron
From the 1830s on: Victorian era. The flourishing of the novel – Charles Dickens, William
George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy. Belief in progress and development, the
British Empire – though not without problems. Charles Darwin and the ascent of science,
spiritual uncertainties
First part of the 20th century: breakdown of Victorian values, disintegration of the Victorian
age becomes complete, loss and disillusionment culminating during and after WW1. New
ideas in philosophy and psychology. Modernism, experimenting with the form to suggest a
different kind of experience. The novel – Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence,
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf; poetry – William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot
Post-WW2 scene: return to traditional forms in the novel and in poetry, avoiding ‘bad
principles’. Experimentation also present – the postmodern (‘fabulation’ and ‘metafiction’)
North America:
Beginnings: colonisation, 17th century. 18th century: independence – the birth of a nation,
reflected in literature as well. The American Renaissance: the Transcendentalists – Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau; and others – Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville,
Edgar Allan Poe. The Civil War and the Gilded Age – Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson,
Mark Twain
Modernism – significant experimentation; T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, the Imagists. The Lost
Generation – Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner. The 1930s – the
Depression, after the Jazz Age of the 1920s; John Steinbeck, the Fugitive poets. Post WW2:
experimentation, the Beat Generation, Confessional poets
20th century American drama: new direction for the tragedy. Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee
Williams, Arthur Miller. Black American writings – exploring a different experience
Australia:
18th century colonisation, imported models for literature. Romanticism and post-Romanticism
dominant until the second half of the 20th century, bypassing modern masters then and
catching up with later developments. Thomas Kenneally, Patrick White