ESZTERHÁZY KÁROLY FŐISKOLA
ANGLISZTIKA TANSZÉK
ANGOL IRODALOM SZIGORLAT
TÉMAKÖRÖK (AT, AN)
History of English Literature
Comprehensive Examination
I. Poetry, Drama and Generic Theory
1. Christian and Heathen Elements in Early English Literature
General Characteristics of Anglo-Latin Writings. Venerable Bede: De Ratione Temporum, Historia
Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglo-Saxorum. Bishop Asser: Life of King Alfred. Runes, “The Dream of the Rood.”
Popular Poetry: “Death Song.” Courtly Poetry: “The Fight at Finn’s Borough,” “Battle of Maldon.” Caedmon
and His School: “Christ and Satan.” Cynewulf and His School: “Phoenix.” Secular Poetry: “The Ruin,”
Beowulf. Beowulf the Great National Epic. Character Delineation and Plot. The Presence of Christian and
Heathen Elements in the Epic and their Function.
2. Famous English Sonnets. 16th Century Sonnet: Origins and Importance
Sir Philip Sidney, Innovations of the Petrarchan Sonnet: the English Sonnet. Sir Thomas Wyatt: “The Long
Love That in My Thought Doth Harbour”; “Farewell, Love.” Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: “Love, That
Doth Reign and Live Within My Thought”; “The Soote Season.” Sonnets in Sidney’s Arcadia and Astrophel
and Stella: “ Sonnet 1.” Edmund Spenser: Amoretti “Sonnet 75.” Shakespeare’s Sonnet Cycle: “Sonnet
18.” The Romantic Sonnet: William Wordsworth: “Nuns Fret Not.” John Keats: ”On First Looking into
Chapman’s Homer.” Shelley: “Ozymandias.” The ‘Deformed’ Sonnet: Yeats: “Leda and the Swan.”
3. Drama at the Crossroads: Classical Modes of Expression and Innovation in PreShakespearean drama
Mysteries and Moralities. Mediaeval Drama Versus Renaissance Drama (Form and Concept) Main Features
of Classical Tragedies: Sophocles’ Antigone. Classical Comedies. The University Wits. Thomas Kyd: The
Spanish Tragedy. Pre-Shakespearean Drama: Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus.
4. Shakespeare’s Comic Might and its Artistic, Social and Philosophical Implications
Varieties of Comedy. Romanticism in Shakespearean Comedy. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Unity of
Comic Idea, Structure and the Technicalities Which Support the Unity of Matter and Control the Point of
View. The Vital Temper of the Elizabethan Age. The Comic View of the Status of Art. The Pains and the
Pleasures of Love as Romantic Ecstasy. England, the World of the Fairies and Pre-Homeric Athens. The
‘Darker’ Comedies. Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing. Cynicism Expressed Through
Dialogue, Plot and Character Delineation.
5. Shakespeare’s Concept of the Tragic Aspects of Existence and its Artistic, Social and
Philosophical Implications
The Conflict Between the Mediaeval and the Renaissance Periods. The Dark Side of Humanism. Varieties of
Tragedy. The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy. Construction in Shakespeare’s Tragedies. The Role of
Comic Elements in Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet.
6. Power, History, Life and Responsibility in Shakespeare’s Chronicle Plays
Chronicle Play as a Type of Drama. The Question of Legitimacy in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Comedies and
Chronicle Plays. Shakespeare’s Concept of Legitimacy. The Centrality of the Problem of Legitimacy in
Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Macbeth), and Chronicle Plays (Richard III.).
7. Milton and His World. The Civil War
Puritanism. Milton’s Temperament. L’Allegro, Il Penseroso. Milton’s Masks: Comus. Lycidas Warning of
the Political and Religious Strifes to Come. Paradise Lost a religious Epic. Plot, Structure, Technique and
Vision.
8. Early 17th Century Poetry. General Characteristics
John Donne: ’The Flea’; ’The Canonisation’; ’Hymne to God my God in my Sicknesse’; ’A Hymne to God
the Father. ’ Ben Jonson: ’To Celia’; ’To John Donne’; ’An Ode: to Himselfe.’ Robert Herrick: ’To the
Virgins to Make Much of Time’; ’To Daffodils.’ George Herbert: ’Easter Wings’; ’The Church-Floore.’
Andrew Marvell: ’To His Coy Mistress’; ’A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body’
9. The Poetic Diction of the 18th Century
Alexander Pope: Essay on Man, An Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, Moral Essays,
Epistles and Satires, Imitations of Horace. The Translation of The Iliad. Dryden: An Essay on Dramatic
Poesy, Annus Mirabilis.”’Absalom and Achitophel,” “London Reborn,” “A Song for St Cecilia’s Day.”
Thomas Gray: “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”
Robert Burns: “Tam O’Shanter,” “A Red, Red Rose,” “Auld Lang Syne.” William Blake: Songs of
Innocence and Songs of Experience.
10. Philosophy, Art and Re-Formulated ‘Enthusiasm’ in William Blake’s Works
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The Cultural, Social and Ideological Structures as
Organizational Patterns. “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” “London,” “The Chimney Sweeper.”
11. The First Wave of Romantic Poets
General Characteristics. Development of the Romantic Thought and Mode of Expression. William
Wordsworth: “I Wandered Lonely,” “To the Cuckoo,” “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” “Tintern
Abbey.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Kubla Khan,” “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” “Frost at
Midnight.”
12. The Second Generation of Romantic Poets
General Characteristics. John Keats: “When I Have Fears,” “La Belle Dame Sans Mercy,” “Ode on a Grecian
Urn.” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” “Last Sonnet,” Percy Bysshe
Shelley: “To the Skylark,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “Mont Blanc,” “The Mask of Anarchy.” George Gordon
Byron. Hebrew Melodies: “She Walks in Beauty,” The Prisoner of Chillon, “Prometheus,” “Darkness,” “The
Vision of Judgement.”
13. Art, Life and the Romantic Solution Regarding the Qualities, Status and Function of
the Artist
Romantic Poetry: Theories, Generations, Industrial Revolution, French Revolution, European Connections.
Edmund Burke: Philosophical Inquiry. William Blake: All Religions Are One. William Wordsworth
“Advertisement” and the “Prefaces” to the Second and the Third Editions of Lyrical Ballads. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge: Biographia Literaria. Colerdige on Wordsworth. Shakespearean Criticism. Percy Bysshe Shelley:
“The Defence of Poetry.”
14. Victorian Criticism and Poetry
Matthew Arnold: Homer and the Grand Style, Essays in Criticism and Culture and Anarchy. General
Characteristics of Victorian Poerty. Elizabeth Barret Browning: “Sonnet 21” and “ Sonnet 43.” Tennyson:
“Mariana,” “The Lotos Eaters,” “Ulysses.” In Memoriam A. H. H” Robert Browining: “My Last Duchess,”
“Parting in the Morning,” “Love Among the Ruins.”
15. Dramatic Interpretations of the Nonsense Quality of Life: William Shakespeare,
George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett
The Nature of Life as Defined in Hamlet, King Lear and Timon of Athens. The Worth or Worthlessness of
Morality and Knowledge in The Tempest. The Deconstruction of the Concept of Heroism, Loyalty and
Responsibility in the Plays of George Bernard Shaw. Caesar and Cleopatra, Mrs. Warren’s Profession. The
Emergence of the Absurd in Literature. Samuel Beckett’s Theory of the Absurd. The Characteristics of the
Absurd Drama through Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
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16. The Irish Renaissance: Humanism, Symbolism, and Romanticism
Varieties of Drama. Symbolism, Realism and Romanticism as Modes of Expression in Drama and Poetry.
The Definition of Renaissance in the Context of the Irish Revival. Re-definitions of Humanism in the Works
of the Representatives of the Irish National Movement in Literature: Yeats, Synge, O’Casey. The
Coexistence of Realism, Romanticism and Symbolism in the Art of William Butler Yeats.
17. Eliot and Yeats: Theories of Poetry: Classicism, Romanticism, Symbolism and
Imagism
Yeats on Symbolism: “The Symbolism of Poetry.” Yeats’s Indebtedness to Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist
Movement in Literature. T. S. Eliot on the Metaphysical Poets, Romantic Poets and Classicism. (“Tradition
and the Individual Talent”, “Byron,” “The Metaphysical Poets.”) Eliot as Modernist, The Sacred Wood and
the Dissociation of Sensibility. The Criterion. The Idea of a Christian Society.
18. The State of Poetry at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
William Butler Yeats: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Coat,” “Easter 1916,” “Sailing to Byzantium,”
“Byzantium,” “The Second Coming,” “Among School Children,” “Leda and the Swan,” “The Circus
Animals’ Desertion.” Thomas Stearns Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “ The Waste Land;”
Four Quartets.
19. New Romanticism in Twentieth Century Poetry
Dylan Thomas the Modern Welsh Bard. Romantic Solutions to the Problems of Human Existence: “And
Death Shall Have No Dominion,” “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night.” A Modern Romantic’s Artistic
Creed, Reshaping William Wordsworth’s Metaphor, Romantic Irony and the Invisible Poetic Structure in
“Author’s Prologue.” “Fern Hill,” “Poem in October,” “The force that through the green fuse drives the
flower,” “After the funeral.”
20. Post WW2 English Poetries: away from Modernism (proper) – Philip Larkin, Ted
Hughes and Seamus Heaney
Philip Larkin: “Church Going,” “The Whitsun Weddings,” “The Importance of Elsewhere,” “High
Windows,” “Sad Steps,” “To my Wife.” Ted Hughes: “Crow’s First Lesson,” “February 17th,” “Daffodils,”
“An Otter.” Seamus Heaney: “Digging,” “Personal Helicon,” “Bogland,” “The Tollund Man,” “Casualty,”
“From the Frontier of Writing.”
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II. Fiction and Its Theory
1. Heroes, Heroines and Protagonists (Concepts regarding the status of art, fictional
characters and their social, historical, aesthetic and philosophical backgrounds)
Anglo-Saxon Heroic Poetry. Beowulf: a Typical Hero of Early English Literature. Arthur the Legendary
Hero. Chaucer’s ‘Noble’ and ‘Less Noble’ Heroes. Abandonment of the ‘Lofty Dimension’ of the Heroes in
Elizabethan Literature: the Complex Status of Marlowe’s, Kyd’s and Shakespeare’s Heroes. The Appearance
of the Middle Class Hero in Defoe’s and Swift’s Fiction. Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s Handling of their
Heroines. Thackeray’s Novel Without a Hero.
2. The Adventures of ’Revival’ and its Philosophical Implications
Humanism in Mediaeval, Victorian and Twentieth Century Literature. Chaucer’s ‘Early’ Humanism in The
Canterbury Tales. European Connections. Shakespeare’s Interpretation of Humanism in Hamlet. The Crisis
of Humanism as Formulated in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. The Dilemmas of Early Twentieth
Century Humanism in Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer.” John Fowles’s Interpretation of Humanism in
his Fiction and Non-Fiction.
3. Vanitas Vanitorum: From Bunyan to William Makepeace Thackeray
Art as the Critique of the ‘Establishment’ and its Ideological, Ethical, Social Parallels. Bunyan’s
Interpretation of Life in the Context of Christian Moral Principles. The Centrality of Christian’s Visit to
Vanity Fair in The Pilgrim’s Progress. The Critique of the Social and Moral Developments in Victorian
Britain in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The Loss of Faith and
Morality in the Nineteenth Century and its Artistic Implications in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity
Fair.
4. Optimistic and Pessimistic Interpretations of Utopia
The Definition of Utopia in Literature. Humanism and Utopia. Thomas More: Utopia. Posterity Misreading
Utopia. Negative Utopia and Dystopia in the Modern World. George Orwell: 1984, Aldous Huxley: Brave
New World.
5. The ‘Adventures’ of the Myth of ‘Englishness’ in the English Novel
Journalism and Essay Writing: Addison and Steele. (The Spectator and The Tattler. Mr. G.) The Rise of the
Modern Novel. The Englishman Creator of Christianity- Based Civilisation. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe.
Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim. The Dilemmas of the Englishman’s Superiority. Rudyard Kipling: the White
Man’s Burden. William Golding: Lord of the Flies. John Fowles: The Magus, and “On Being English, Not
British.” Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day.
6. Reshaping the ‘Ways of the World’
The Satirical Mode of Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels). New Age New Responsibilities: Robert Louis
Stevenson. (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). “Imagining” the Scientific Imagination Herbert George Wells (The
Time Machine, The Invisible Man). Varieties of Reality.
7. The Growing Emphasis of the Aesthetic Categories in the Art of John Keats, Oscar
Wilde and Lawrence Durrell
Art and Life. The Function of Art. John Keats’ Aesthetic Creed as Formulated in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
Oscar Wilde’s ‘Decadent’ Aestheticism in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lawrence Durrell: Alexandria
Quartet. The Aesthetics of Bad Taste in Post-War British Fiction.
8. General Characteristics of the Victorian Novel and Individual Solutions
New Function- New Form - The Dickensian Novel. Charlotte Bronte’s ’Happy-Ending.’ The Adequate
Narrative Frame for Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Passions. Manipulation of Temporality.
9. Belated Dreams of the British Empire: The ‘Optimistic’ Adventure
Robert L. Stevenson: Treasure Island. The Relevance of the Plot. Joseph Conrad on Books Like Treasure
Island. De-Constructing the Empire. Forster: A Passage to India.
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10. Aestheticism and Decadence in the Later Nineteenth Century
Oscar Wilde’s Definition of Beauty in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Short Fiction. Walter Pater: “Preface”
and “Conclusions” to The Renaissance. The Greek Spirit, the Oxford Hegelians, Imaginary Portraits.
11. The ‘Intellectual’ Journey of Ulysses: Homer, Byron, Joyce
The Odyssey and the Illiad Two Essentially Different Heroic Epics. The Open-Endedness of the Odyssey.
Classic Art ‘Prey’ to Romantic Irony: Byron’s Handling of the Odyssey in Don Juan. The Twentieth Century
Variant of The Odyssey: James Joyce’s Ulysses.
12. Sharing the Craft of the ‘Creator’: ‘Fictional’ Theoretical Elements in the Works of
Henry Fielding, William Makepeace Thackeray and John Fowles
Narrator and Point of View. The Novelist as the Reader’s ‘Guide.’ Henry Fielding: Tom Jones. The Novelist
as Puppeteer. William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair. The Novelist as Impressario. John Fowles: The
French Lieutenant’s Woman.
13. The ‘English’ Historical Novel: Realism and Romance – Walter Scott
Walter Scott’s Handling of History and Romance. Realism of Details and ‘Minimal’ realism in Ivanhoe and
Rob Roy. Walter Scott’s Influence on the Development of the English and Continental Historical Novel.
14. Early ‘Feminism’: Richardson, Austen, Charlotte Brontë
Virtue Rewarded or the Proper Way of Defying Male Dominance in Richardson’s Pamela. Models of Gender
Conflicts and Reconciliation in Jane Austen’s Novels. Charlotte Brontë’s Interpretation of the Natural ManWoman Relationship.
15. ‘Seeing the Blindness’ and its Technical Implications: Emily Bronte, Joseph Conrad,
Virginia Woolf and John Fowles
The Social and the Supernatural as Sources of ‘Blindness’ in Wuthering Heights and their Technical
Implications. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the Critique of the Official Version of Reality and its
Discourse, The Secret Sharer, as the Discourse of the Doppelgänger. Virginia Woolf’s Variant of Heart of
Darkness as a Source of ‘Blindness’ in Mrs. Dalloway. The Late Twentieth Century Forms of ‘Blindness’ in
John Fowles’s “Poor Koko”
16. The Odd Ways of Realism: from Charles Dickens to the ‘Angry Young Men’
The Characteristics of Charles Dickens’s Realism. Realism and Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century
Novel. Realism Reformulated in the Age of Modernism. Not so ‘Angry Young Men’: the Odd Careers of
Post War Novelists and their Fictional Characters. Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim, The Old Devils. Allan Sillitoe:
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
17. The Edwardians: Wells, Bennet, Galsworthy
Materialists Versus Modernists. General Characteristics of Edwardian Literature. Main Features of Herbert
George Wells’s Realism and Science Fiction in The Time Machine and The Invisible Man. John Galsworthy’s
‘Nostalgic’ Interpretation of the Social and Intellectual Changes of the Period. The Forsyte Saga. Arnold
Bennet’s ‘Suffocating’ Realism and His Conflict with the Modernist Artists. Virginia Woolf: “Mr. Bennet
and Mrs. Brown.”
18. Shameful Secrets of the World: The Aesthetics of Passion Versus Art, Community,
Race, Imperialism and History
Walter Pater’s Interpretation of the Aesthetic Impression in Marius the Epicurean. Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic
Creed. James Joyce’s Narrative, Technical Solutions and Employment of a Great Variety of Styles when
Interpreting the Relationship of Art, Community, Race, Imperialism and History in A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man and Ulysses. Salman Rushdie’s Interpretation of History in Shame and Midnight’s Children.
19. Feminism Revisited: From Virginia Woolf to John Fowles
The Multiple Sources of Virginia Woolf’s Feminism: Classic Feminism, Feminism as Mode of Expression
and Existential Strategy. (Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Waves.) John Fowles’s
Interpretation of Creativity and Imagination as the Basic Dilemma of Man-Woman Relationship. (Mantissa.)
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20. Thomas Hardy: Modernist Poetry Explaining Victorian Fiction
The Last Victorian Novelist and the First Modernist Poet. Thomas Hardy’s Interpretation of the Dark Side of
Human Existence in the Nineteenth Century. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the
Obscure. Thomas Hardy’s ‘Determinism,’ ‘Fatalism’ and His Search for New Interpretations of the
Dilemmas of the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Hardy’s Re-Interpretation of Man’s
Possibilities. The Modernist Characteristics of His Poetry: “Hap,” “Neutral Tones,” “The Convergence of the
Twains,” “The Self-Unseeing,” “The Darkling Thrush,” “In Time of ’The Breaking of Nations,”
“Afterwards.”
21. The Novel of Transition
The Situation of Literature at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. The State of the Novel at
the Turn of the Century. The Technical and Narrative Solutions Devised by Henry James and Joseph Conrad.
Henry James’s “Centers of Consciousness” in What Maisie Knew and The Ambassadors. Henry James “The
Art of Fiction.” Joseph Conrad’s Definition of “One of Us” in His Preface to Lord Jim and the Need for
Solidarity of All Human beings in His Introduction to The Nigger of the Narcissus. Conrad’s Narrative
Strategies and Manipulation of Time, Setting and Point of View in Lord Jim.
22. Innovations of the Narrative Technique
The New Experience in the Novel: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrencwe. Technicalities: Stream of
Consciousness, Epiphany, ’Fictional’ Psychology. Narrative Strategies in the Novel: Objectivity and the
Portrayal of the Social and Intellectual Scape. Henry James and the Trans-Atlantic Dilemma (The Portrait of
a Lady). Joseph Conrad’s Narrators (Marlow). James Joyce and the Twentieth Century Revision of the
Concept of Life. (Dubliners, Ulysses) Virginia Woolf’s Feminine Fiction. (The Waves) Aldous Huxley’s
Interpretation of the Individual’s Possible Choices. (Point Counterpoint). George Orwell’s Bitter Irony
Concerning History (Animal Farm)
23. The Experiments of Metafiction with Classicism, Realism, Romanticism and
Modernism
Definitions of the Above Modes of Expression. The Relationship of Metafiction with Postmodernism.
Metafictional Strategies in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and John Fowles’s The Magus. (Chinese
Box, Authorial Intrusions, ‘Play’ with different Genres et al.)
Eger, 2004. április 22.
Dr. Antal Éva
Anglisztika Tanszék
tanszékvezető
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