FACULDADE INTERMUNICIPAL DO NOROESTE DO PARANÁDEPARTAMENTO DE LETRASDISCIPLINA: Literatura da língua InglesaCódigo: GLET 053Turma: 4º AnoAno Letivo: 2011Professor Responsável: Prof. Ms. Marcelo José da Silva

O QUE É A LITERATURA INGLESA?

A literatura inglesa é a literatura escrita em inglês. Não é apenas a literatura da Inglaterra ou das Ilhas Britânicas, mas um corpo vasto e crescente de escritos constituídos pela obra de autores que usam a língua inglesa como um veículo natural de comunicação. Em outras palavras, o “inglesa” de “literatura inglesa” refere-se não a uma nação mas a uma língua. Joseph Conrad era um polonês, Demetrius Kapetanakis era um grego, Ernest Hemingway era um americano, Lin Yutang era um chinês, mas o inglês é o veículo que tinham em comum, e todos eles pertencem – com Chaucer, Shakespeare e Dickens – à literatura inglesa. Por outro lado, uma boa parte da obra de Sir Thomas More e de Sir Francis Bacon – ambos ingleses – está escrita não em inglês, mas em latim, e William Beckford e T. S Eliot escreveram em francês. A literatura é uma arte que explora a língua, a literatura inglesa é uma arte que explora a língua inglesa.

THE MIDDLE AGE

The Anglo- Saxon Period

Very little is Known about the Britons, a Celtic people who were early inhabitants of Britain. They were conquered by the Romans in the first century A.D. and became a part of the Roman Empire. Around the year 410, when the Roman legions were required at home to protect the capital, the peoples of Britain were left unprotected and fell prey to raiding and looting from their neighbors on the Continent.

According to the tradition, it was in 449 that the first band of people from the great North German plain crossed the North Sea to Britain and settled in what is now the county of Kent. They were Jutes, perhaps from the peninsula of Jutland in Denmark, and they were the first of many Germanic invaders. Following the Jutes came Angles and Saxons. The Britons were no match for the invaders, but they did not retreat to the mountains and moors without a struggle. The legendary King Arthur may have been the leader of the Celtic People who were driven into Wales.

These Germanic tribes brought with them a common language, the ancestor of our present-day English, which we call Old English or Anglo-Saxon.

During the Anglo-Saxon period, England was not the unified country it is today. Most of this time the land was divided into separate kingdoms. The most important areas were Kent, Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex. During the last two centuries of this period, the Anglo-Saxons were compelled to organize themselves to resist further invasions from the Vikings, or Nornemen, whom they called “Danes”. King Alfred of Wessex (871-899) was able to unite his people and to force the Danes to the northeastern half of England.

Anglo-Saxon Civilization

Although the Anglo-Saxons frequently fought among themselves, they had a great deal in common. Besides a common language they shared a heroic ideal and a set of traditional heroes. They admired men of outstanding courage, whatever tribe they came from.

Anglo-Saxon society was comparatively well-developed. While the Anglo-Saxons easily developed great loyalty to their chosen leaders, they had a natural tendency toward what

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we should call now a democratic habit of mind – that is, they liked to hold meetings in which people openly express what they thought and felt.

Although it is widely known that the Anglo-Saxons were hardly and brave, it is not generally realized that they had a highly developed feeling for beauty. They were in fact a more artistic and poetic people than their Norman conquerors, who were essentially soldiers and administrators.

One aspect of Anglo-Saxons civilization that survives in our daily lives is the names of certain weekdays. The names of theses days are derived from the names of old Anglo-Saxons gods: Tuesday from Tiw, the god of war; Wednesday from Woden, the chief Teutonic god; Thursday from Thor, the god of thunder; and Friday from Frigga, goddess of the home.

Anglo Saxon Literature

Anglo-Saxon poetry was an oral art. Poems were not written down until a much later period. Poems were sung, frequently to the accompaniment of a harp. Poets recited well-known poems from memory and at times created new ones. The professional poet, or scop , had a very important function in this society. He was the memory and historian of the tribe. It was he who remembered the important heroes, the kings, the important battles, and the folklore of the tribe.

The two most important traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry were the heroic tradition and the elegiac tradition, which mourns the passing of earlier, better times. Of the 30,000 lines of Anglo-Saxon poetry that remain to us, the most important single poem is the epic Beowulf. Of the great elegiac lyrics, the personal, dramatic “Seafarer” is a good example. It may be that the poems to have survived are the ones that appealed to the monks who finally committed them to writing.

The churchmen who wrote verse generally wrote in Latin, though occasionally they included lines in English. The earlier prose writers and chroniclers among the Anglo-Saxon churchmen also wrote in Latin. The greatest of theses was known as the Venerable Bede, a monk who lived between 673 and 735, the most learned and industrious writer of the whole period. Bede wrote many books, mostly about the Bible, but he is remembered also for his History of the English Church and People written in Latin and completed about 731. An excellent historical authority of its time. As a historian, Bede is rightly regarded as “the father of English history”.

Nearly two centuries later, Alfred the Great, the ablest and most remarkable of all English Kings, not only became the patron of scholars and educators but also turned author and translator himself after delivering his kingdom from the Danes. Anglo-Saxon prose and history owe most to his influence and his example. Rather than use Latin, as had been the custom, Alfred promoted use of written English and was responsible for the initiation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle [chronicle = record of events], the first historical record to be kept in English and one of the first books of history. It was written over a long period of time, and tells the history of England from the beginning of Christian times, around AD 600 to 1154, with details of invasions and battles. Some of its is in poetry, and it is very important for our knowledge of the history and the language of Old English. King Alfred the Great was probably one of the people who helped to put the Chronicle together. Alfred ordered many translations of religious texts, and helped to bring the West Saxon dialect into a strong position as the language of literature and history.

Old English

The language of the earliest English literature came from many different places. The literature itself and its subjects were influenced by different countries, and by different places, peoples and cultures.

The subjects of the first literature are subjects which are familiar even now: war, religion, personal sadness and happiness. It was the Christian monks in the monasteries who first wrote down the words of the early literature – they were the only people who could read and write, and for many centuries they guarded culture and learning. But only a few fragments

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remain of all the writing that the monks kept. They reflect the two cultures, of Christianity and of heroic actions.

Several poems are preserved in the Exelter Book. Two others personal but anonymous poems are: The Wanderer and The seafarer. These are elegiac poems – the speaker is always alone, and his memory becomes very important. They are memories of old legends, old battles, and old heroes.

The main heroic text is called Beowulf, the name of the hero of the long anonymous poem. It describes events which are part of the period’s memory: invasions and battles, some historic, some legendary. The poem is set around the sixth century, but was probably not written down until the eighth century. Beowulf is the first hero in English literature, the man who can win battles and give safety to his people over a long period of time.

Many of the earliest books were histories, rather than imaginative writings. They give us a lot of the information we have of this period.

The themes of Old English literature are security, both for the individual and society, and in religious faith. This literature gave comfort, or provided reflection. Usually the poems were sung in the hall of a castle, and these songs and poems were passed on from generations to generation before they were written down. Thus, the spoken tradition led to the first tradition of written literature. At the same time, Old English was beginning to develop into a different language, called Middle English, closer to the English we know today.

The Medieval Period

The history of the medieval period begins when William “the Conqueror” invaded England. He was an efficient soldier and an able administrator. With his followers, many of whom were adventurers and soldiers of fortune, he was soon able to conquer the whole country.

Since most of the great Anglo-Saxons landowners were wiped out by the invasion, William had a great deal of land at his disposal. Thus, he introduced into England the feudal system as it was practiced on the Continent.

The Medieval Church grew and prospered during the period and continued to be the dominant force in preserving and transmitting culture – in teaching, writing, translating, copying, collecting and distributing manuscripts.

Most people lived in the country and were attached to a feudal manor. There they worked their own fields and the lands of the lord, to whom they owed their allegiance. The wool produced by English sheep was considered preferable to that of almost any other part of Europe. It became profitable, to turn cornfields into pasture land for sheep. Some large cities had gown up, more and more people began to live in towns and cities rather than on manors. A whole new class of merchants grew up. These populous centers developed native forms of literature, songs and ballads, and a native drama with good deal of color.

The most significant law that came into effect during this period was the law of primogeniture, which gave the firstborn son exclusive right to inherit his father’s titles, lands and estates. It is still the rule in England today.

The first Crusade was proclaimed in 1905 by Pope Urban II. Each Crusade began in high hope, in a genuine desire to rescue Jerusalem from the Turks, but most ended squalidly in raiding, looting, and a tangle of power politics.

In the Medieval Period, wars and tragedies took place. There was the Hundred Years War between France and England (1337-1453), as well as the Wars of the Roses between the royal houses of Lancaster and York for the throne of England.

The form of literature much favored by the Anglo-Normans was the romance. Medieval romance consisted largely of tales of chivalry to which were added a love interest and all sorts of wonders and marvels.

Middle English

In Middle English literature the hero of earlier times now became the man of romance, as love poetry began to come in. Women began to appear more in poetry, usually as objects of

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desire and perfection. But later also as very human beings with feelings of their own. The literature of Europe, particularly France and Italy, began to influence English writers, and there was a clear desire to begin a purely English tradition in literature and in history. The name of King Arthur became important as a figure from the dark past of history, and he later became a symbol of English history for many centuries.

Chaucer

The first truly great figure in English literature that we know much about was Geoffrey Chaucer. One of the best-known names in English Literature. He saw himself as the first great poet of the nation and the language, and he remains the reference point which other writers have used through the centuries.

Chaucer was a European in outlook and experience, but his ambition was to make the literature of English the equal on any other European writing.

One of Chaucer’s most important contributions to English literature is his development of the resources of the English language for literary purposes. England’s Norman rulers had introduced French to England, and this language had displaced English for literary purposes, especially in the upper-classes. By Chaucer’s day, English was coming into upper-class use again, although French was still spoken in court circles and by the aristocracy. Church Latin was used in the monasteries, the centers of learning, and was still at the command of the educated.

The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer’s best-known work, and the first major work in English literature. It is a series (never completed) of linked stories. Medieval literature questions its society, making its readers think about the times they live in, as well as giving us a picture of the fast-changing society oh the time.

The Renaissance 1485 – 1660

The Renaissance in Europe

The period of European history and culture traditionally known as the Renaissance began in Italy during the fourteenth century and extended, in England at least, past the middle of the seventeenth century. Renaissance means “rebirth” – the rebirth of those intellectual and artistic energies that characterized ancient Greek and Roman civilization, and with this the awakening of a whole range of new interests in human beings and the world they lived in.

People in the Middle Ages were not entirely ignorant of those aspects of Greek and Roman culture supposedly “reborn” during the Renaissance. But is true that in the Renaissance people came to take a revitalized interest in Greek and Roman civilization and often thought of their own times as a return to the glorious achievements of classical antiquity.

The Renaissance had its origins in Italy, in the writing of Petrarch (1304-1374) and Boccaccio (1313-1375), in the painting of Giotto (1266?-1337?), in the architecture of Brunellischi (1377?-1446), and in the sculpture of Donatello (1386-1466). The fifteenth century saw the culmination of the Renaissance in Italy.

Scholars and educators who called themselves humanists began to emphasize the capacities of the human mind and the achievements of human culture, in contrast to the medieval emphasis on God

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The Renaissance in England

There is considerable truth in the observation that England was slow to participate in the European Renaissance. The reasons for this are largely political.

But the progress of the Renaissance in England was to be slow. Henry VIII came to the throne when his father died in 1509. He saw himself mainly as a powerful political leader. But he was aware of what the Renaissance had achieved in Europe, and he wanted also to be thought of as an enlightened Renaissance prince.

By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the movement of religious protest against the authority and corruption of the Roman Catholic Church had been simmering for several years. This movement, known as the Protestant Reformation, was accelerated in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, his famous Ninety-five Theses, declaring his objections to certain long-standing abuses in the Church. The Protestant Reformation deeply altered the course of the Renaissance in England. Henry VIII had always presented himself as a loyal champion of the Roman Catholic Church, and there was no religious motive for England to align itself with the Protestant revolt against the Pope and Rome. There were, however, political and personal motives. Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, had not produced a male heir to the throne. When Henry asked for a divorce, the Pope refused. Henry not only defied the Pope and remarried – he also declared himself Supreme Head of the Church in England (also known as the Anglican Church).

In 1553, Mary; Henry VIII’s daughter, was declared Queen. She became the wife of Philip II of Spain and instituted a reign of terror against English Protestants in an attempt to return England to Catholic authority. But Mary died after only five years on the throne, and her half-sister Elizabeth, Henry VIII’s daughter by his second wife, Anne Boleyn, became queen. Elizabeth I (1558-1603), only twenty-five when she came to the throne, was to lead her country forward again in the direction of the strong national unity and triumphant cultural achievement begun, however imperfectly, by her father.

Elizabeth promoted peace and prosperity by steering a moderate religious course between Protestant extremism and capitulation to Catholicism, and by directing the country’s precarious financial affairs with realistic ingenuity.

Elizabethan Literary Achievement

As Elizabeth led England through difficult times toward increasing national confidence, her court in London became the center of an exuberant literary culture that was “Renaissance” in the fullest sense of that term. Many individuals of talent came to the court either to contribute what they could to the government, to distinguish themselves artistically, or both. In the late 1570s two writers of real genius, Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) and Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), emerged to bring the promising developments of sixteenth-century English poetry to triumphant fruition.

The greatest and most distinctive achievement of Elizabethan literature is the drama. In contrast to the poetry we have just been surveying Elizabethan drama had its origins as much in native folk culture and popular entertainment as in the sophisticated, aristocratic world of literary circles and the court.

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

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He was born in Stratford-on-Avon in April (probably on the 23rd), 1564, and his father, John, was a fairly prominent citizen of the town.

Shakespeare was presumably educated at the local school in Stratford. He never attended a university. In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway. They had a daughter in 1583, and twins, a boy and a girl, in 1585. After this there is no factual information for seven years, but we know that by 1592 he was in London working as an actor and a playwright.

In 1593 the London theaters were closed because of the plague, when the theaters reopened, Shakespeare became a member of the most successful company of actors in London, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. In 1599 Shakespeare’s company built the famous Globe Theater, where most of his best-known plays were performed. When James I came to the throne in 1603, he took over the Lord Chamberlain’s Men as his own acting company and renamed it The King’s Men.

It is not possible to know exactly when Shakespeare wrote each of his thirty-seven plays. We know when most of the plays were first published.

History Plays and Romans PlaysMany of Shakespeare’s plays are history plays. These usually have as their

title the name of an English king, such as Henry IV (which is in two parts), Henry V, Henry Vi (in three parts) and Henry VIII. They study what is to be a king. Shakespeare examines every king as a human being first, and they are very human, strong or weak, clever or not so clever, good or bad. Some of theses history plays are more than historical stories, and become tragedies, like Hamlet.

In a similar way, Shakespeare describes the classical history of Ancient Rome in the Roman plays, which also combine the historical with the tragic: Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus make up this group of plays.

Very often the political questions examined in the history plays and the Roman plays have clear links with the political situation in England at the time Shakespeare was writing – but he is always careful not to offend the monarch, or the lords who financially supported his theatrical company. Many others writers at that time were not so careful (or clever) and were put in jail for criticizing their superiors.

The TragediesMost of Shakespeare’s great tragedies were written in the years between

1598 and 1607, sometimes called his ‘black’ period.Romeo and Juliet, the most famous tragedy of love in all literature, was one

of Shakespeare’s earliest tragedies, and it is less complex and philosophical than most of the later tragedies. As we have seen, some of the history plays and Roman plays are also tragedies.

The major tragedies are Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. They are tragedies of revenge, jealousy, family and ambition. They have in common the fact that mankind is constantly trying to go beyond its limits in order to achieve perfection and harmony in the world. But mankind itself is not perfect, and so must fail in theses attempts.

The ComediesThe question of the future harmony of the universe is also important in

Shakespeare’s comedies. In the tragedies the harmony is lost, and, as Othello says, ‘Chaos is come again’; a tragedy always ends with the death of the hero. In the comedies, the world is threatened and shaken but a comedy always ends happily. But

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the subject of the comedies are just as serious as some of the subjects of the tragedies: identity in The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night and As you like it, the tale of women in The Taming of the Shrew; love and jealousy in Much Ado abut Nothing; love and power in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the power of money and the attempt do deceive in The Merchant of Venice.

The Final PlaysShakespeare’s final plays are difficult to define – some of them are

considered serious comedies or problem plays. Some critics prefer to call them pastoral comedies, since their settings often involve an escape to the countryside. Others call them fables. Whatever we call them, they are different in tone from all Shakespeare’s earlier plays, although very close to them in the themes they handle. The Tempest is the most perfect of these plays.

Shakespeare was an actor himself, as well as a playwright and the director of his company, the King’s Men, and he often uses this kind of theatrical metaphor. The nature of human life was a new theme in literature, and shows the Renaissance concern with how to understand life and death in the modern world. Religion no longer gave the answers as it had done in earlier periods of literature. The literature itself questions and discusses and looks for answers. Shakespeare’s plays are still performed all over the world. The questions he asked are still relevant, the characters he invented still living in the imagination of audiences and readers four hundred years after they were first created.

Shakespeare’s SonnetsThey were published in 1609. There are 154 sonnets in all, and together they

suggest a “story”, although the exact details of that “story” are mysterious. The first 126 sonnets are addressed mainly to a young man of great beauty. The speaker expressed his affection and admiration for the young man, urges him to marry and perpetuate his virtues through children, and warns him about the destructive power of time, age and moral weakness. Sonnets 127-152 are addressed to a lady with dark hair, eyes, and complexion. Both the speaker and the young man seem to be involved with her romantically.

The situations and relationships suggested in the sonnets are best understood as the fictional means through which Shakespeare explores universal questions about time and death, about beauty and moral integrity, about love, and about poetry itself.

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate.Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimmed.By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.But thy eternal summer shall not fade,Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shadeWhen in eternal lines to time thou grow’st. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and and this gives life to thee.

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Sonnet 130

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,Coral is far more red than her lips’ red.If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun,If hairs be wires, blak wires grow on her head.I have seen roses damasked, red and white,But no such roses see I in her cheeks.And in some perfumes is there more delightThan in the breath that from my mistress reeks.I love to hear her speak, yet well I knowThat music hath a far more pleasing sound.I grant I never saw a goddess go,My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. And yet, by Heaven, I think. I thinj my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.

The Plays of ShakespeareEarly plays from 1589 to 1593

1. Henry VI, Part One2. Henry VI, Part Two3. Henry VI, Part Three4. Titus Andronicus5. The Comedy of Errors

6. The Two Gentlemen of Verona

7. The Taming of the Shrew8. Richard III

Plays from 1593 to 1598 9. Love’s Labours Lost10. A midsummer

Night’s Dream11. Richard II12. Romeo and Juliet13. King John

14. The Merchant of Venice

15. Henry IV, Part One16. Henry IV, Part Two17. The Merry Wives of

Windsor

Plays from 1598 to likely 160818. Much Ado About

Nothing19. Henry V20. Julius Caesar21. As You Like It22. Hamlet23. Twelfth Night24. Troilus and Cressida25. All’s Well That Ends

Well

26. Measure for Measure

27. Othello28. King Lear29. Macbeth30. Antony and

Cleopatra31. Timon of Athens32. Coriolanus

Late Plays33. Pericles34. Cymbeline35. The Winter’s Tale36. The Tempest

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37. Henry VIII

The Jacobean Era (1603-1625)

On the surface the final years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign were a time of confidence and security.

In the early part of the seventeenth century, even deeper philosophical and intellectual changes were beginning to undermine faith in the older Elizabethan world view. The forerunners of modern astronomy, Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo (1564-1642), had argued that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the universe, and that there might even be a plurality or infinity of worlds. These and other early scientific investigations called into question the very basis of the divinely ordered, hierarchical universe. Most people rejected the new discoveries and clung to their old ideas, but not without being disturbed by the dawning of a new age of scientific thought.

The Metaphysical Poets

It is term coined by Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century. The metaphysical poets are also referred to as the School of Donne, after the most important explorer of this style. The metaphysical poem is more argumentative in tone; its language is more colloquial; its meter is usually varied, irregular.

One monument of seventeenth-century prose deserves to be singled out for special attention. This is the translation of the Bible organized and sponsored by James I and known as the Authorized or King James Version (1611). The language of this book, the work of many translators, is so familiar to us that we are often unaware of just how moving it can be in a literary sense. Until the end of the nineteenth century, most fine prose in English was to some degree indebted to it.

The King James Bible

The significance of the King James Bible lies not only in its own intrinsic merits but in the fact that it represents the culmination of many efforts throughout several centuries to provide English-speaking peoples with a Bible written in their own tongue. Throughout most of the Middle ages, the bible was written in Latin and was therefore inaccessible to most people.

Under the auspices of Henry VIII, the Great Bible in 1540 was finally established for use in the churches. It was not until the appearance of the King James Version in 1611, however, that there existed a well-translated English Bible that was both authorized by the Church and generally accepted by the people.

THE RESTORATION

After the war between the Puritans (Roundheads) and the king’s followers (Cavaliers), the Roundheads led to the execution of king Charles I. After this, Oliver Cromwell became the leader of the commonwealth. In 1660 Parliament invited Charles I’s son to return from France. He was made king as Charles II.

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The term Restoration refers to a specific event, Charles’s recovery of his throne, rather than to a definable historical period. Although the monarchy was restored most of the power was held by parliament. The main concern of the time was to avoid another revolution. The spirit of the Restoration was one of reason: society did not want to see again the kind of problems of the first half of the century. The new middle classes had more and more influence as their wealth grew and they wanted stability above all. This was also a time of great commercial growth, and of scientific advances.

The new society of the Restoration gave much more importance than before to stable values and much less importance to the search for new values, or the exploration of new worlds, as in the Renaissance.

After the Restoration, drama and the theatre were quite different from what they had been during the Renaissance. The audience was at first upper class or upper-middle-class. The plays of the time reflect the manners and morals of the men and women who had returned with the king from France-so Restoration comedy is often called the comedy of Manners.

The main subject of these plays was love, but there were new concerns, developed from the earlier city comedy: older men or women looking for younger lovers, upper-class manners contrasting with middle-class values, and country life contrasting with city life. Sex was a major subject, and the plays became more and more obvious in their comic treatment of sexual themes.

The main tragic form of the restoration was heroic tragedy. In the plays the moral is that it is wrong to be different and to threaten the stability of society.

At this time there were many theories about realism, how to show reality on stage, and the role of theatre. But pressure was growing to limit what theatre could say: it was not only a danger to public morals, but it also became too controversial politically. In 1737 the Stage Licensing Act was introduced to prevent playwrights making fun of politicians - of course religion and moral were part of the problem. Theatre and drama were not any longer the main forms of literary exploration - the novel was becoming the most important literary genre.

In the time of Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution, new inventions made manufacturing processes quicker, and British trade with the rest of the world grew enormously.

Towards the end of the century a new mood of freedom began to grow: the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 was the first sign of this, and later the French Revolution in 1789 brought the spirit of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ to Europe.

Drama became less important, but the novel became more and more important, reaching a huge number of readers as the profession of writing became more important.

At first, and for more than a century, the novel was not well regarded by serious critics. Poetry was a higher form of literary art. But there was a growing market among the middle classes, especially among ladies, for novels, and this market grew during the eighteenth century until the novel reached a huge readership all over the world.

THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ROMANTICISM

Therefore if one side – one spirit, really – is reasonable and calm, the other will be unreasonable, agitated, dubious, and troubled. If one side likes company, the other will

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love solitude. If one side flourishes only in cities, then the other will not only want the country but also the least inhabited parts of the country – the mountains, forest, the desert. If one side believes in a highly civilized and artificial style of life, the other will turn away from it in disgust and praise all that is simple, natural, even primitive. If one side believes there is no mystery left in the universe, the other will see mystery everywhere – in a flower, a tree, a cloud, and a star. If the writing of one side is a kind of public performance, the writing of the other will be intensely private.

We should note in passing that Romanticism was a European movement, though it did not succeed in all countries at the same time. It was seen first in Germany, then in England, than in Russia and elsewhere, and then, in France as late as 1830. Its main influence on both North and South America was later still. As a period in English Literature, Romanticism can be said to extend from about 1798, which marks the publication of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, to the mid-1830’s.

There is another important point that must be made. We have called this the Romantic Period, but what we really mean is the Romantic Period in English literature. For the age itself, outside literature, was not “romantic”. It was only the poets and their friends and some of the younger people who could be said to belong to the Romantic Movement. The politicians, bankers, merchants, soldiers, editors, even most of the literary critics, remained quite untouched by Romanticism.

The loss of a central position for literature signals our arrival in the modern world.

THE ROMANTICS AS CHAMPIONS OF FREEDOM

The older poets, William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834), and Robert Southey ((1774 – 1843), were eager revolutionaries in their youth. With many other Romantics, they believed in individual liberty and the brotherhood of man and sympathized with those who rebelled against injustice and tyranny. Later, when the France they had admired became Napoleon’s empire and Britain herself seemed to be in danger, they renounced these early opinions.

Among the younger poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) was famous throughout Europe as a champion of liberty, and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822) was an out-and-out revolutionary with a special brand of anarchy all his own. John Keats (1795 – 1821) was not politically minded, but because he was one of the young Romantics, he was viciously attacked in the Quaterly Review.

INTEREST IN THE PAST

Although the true Romantic poets, from Coleridge to Keats, appeared to be always writing about the past, they had not in fact the solid interest that historians and antiquaries and archaeologists have. This is an important point without which Romanticism cannot be properly understood.

The Romantics made frequent use of rather vague medieval settings just because the Middle Ages of their imagination were so entirely different from the complicated and rather ugly industrial society which was growing up all around them. The earlier times were simpler yet more picturesque and, what was more important, they seemed more magical.

THE IDEALIZING OF WOMEN

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Again, in Romanticism women can hardly ever be simply fellow creatures of the opposite sex, seeking a lasting relationship, a home, and children; instead, they must be strange and magical. This does not mean that the Romantics were indifferent to ordinary girls and women; far from it. What they were doing was dramatizing and overemphasizing the aspects of real womanhood that appear strange and magical to a man’s inner life. The Romantics pictured women in the same way that even the girl next door might appear in the inner world of dream of a young man who falls in love with her. And all this was instinctively understood by the feminine readers of the Romantic poets and storytellers.

ROMANTIC MELANCHOLY

Because it is itself one-sided, never moving toward a balance between what is real and what we feel ought to be real, Romanticism always tends to find existence less and less satisfying. This is why poets such as Wordsworth are always praising the lost kingdom of childhood, where dreams and reality are not yet separated. The real world remains obstinately itself, refusing to be shaped and colored by what the Romantic feels. So the literature of Romanticism, as we can easily discover in the poetry of this age, is filled with melancholy and regret and hopelessly unsatisfied longing.

ROMANTIC POETRY

The Romantic Age in English literature, though glorious for what it achieved, was strong in some forms of writing and curiously weak in others. Though most of the poets wrote verse dramas, the wonderful command of the theater that the Elizabethans had was not recaptured. The Romantic poets were at their wonderful best in lyrical poetry and, as a good second best, they often succeeded with narrative poetry too.

ROMANTIC FICTION

The age was also not uniformly successful in its prose forms. In spite of the novels of Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) such as Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility, and those of Sir Walter Scott, its fiction as a whole was inferior to that of the eighteenth century or that of the Victorian Age. There was, however, an increasing output of popular fiction – either Gotic tales of mystery and horror, and satirical novels about society.

The Romantic period was particularly rich in fascinating characters, in and out of literature.

THE VICTORIAN PERIOD

Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 until 1901, but the Victorian Age is sometimes said to begin with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. In literature the period starts with the death of Sir Walter Scott in 1832, and sometimes goes up to 1914.

When Victoria became Queen the monarchy was not very popular. There were many social problems: members of the working class were severely punished if they wanted to join together in trade unions; the Corn laws kept the price of bread high; the Chartist movement wanted votes for all and social reforms. During Victoria’s reign the population grew from two million to six and a half million and the cities grew bigger. Britain became the richest manufacturing country in the world. The Great Exhibition at

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Crystal Palace in 1851 became the high point of this worldwide success; the colonies and Empire were a huge market for Britain’s products.

In 1859 the beliefs of the age were questioned in the book On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, which showed that man was descended from apes.

There were many protests against the monarchy, and a strong republican movement grew in the 1870s.

The move towards democracy, giving the vote to all men over 21, continued after the first Reform Act of 1832 with another act in 1867 – but the slow process was not completed until women got the vote in 1928.

This was an age of extremes: the working classes were poor, and lived and worked in terrible circumstances; the middle classes grew rich and comfortable. There were double standards in this society. Many writers used their works to show that although on the surface this was a successful society, below the surface there were many problems.

VICTORIAN NOVELS

In the Romantic period, poetry was the most important literary form. In the Victorian period, the novel became the most popular and important form; in Britain and all over the world.

This was partly because of the success of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. His great series of Waverley Novels, published between 1814 and 1832, became best-sellers all over the world. They created a fashion for the series novel, published in monthly parts. This fashion went on for most of the rest of the century. When the novels were later published in volume form, usually in three volumes, sometimes called triple-decker novels, readers borrowed them from libraries. Private commercial libraries became a very important influence on the reading public. They sometimes refused to lend a book, especially later in the century, because they did not like the subject matter. However, in the early years of the century the novels did not cause offence. They were often historical, in the tradition of Scott. Then, with the novels of Charles Dickens, a social concern with the problems of the society of the time enters the novel.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the great majority of pubic institutions in England – schools, courts, prisons, hospitals, and poor houses – ere in a deplorable conditions. The spirit of reform aroused by these abuses found its most able and effective champion in Charles Dickens.

The son of a government clerk who became bankrupt and was thrown into prison, Dickens received little education and was forced to work in a factory at an early age. Many of the unhappy experiences of his youth are related in the semi autobiographical David Copperfield( obra).

Charles Dickens wrote thirteen novels. They show the range of Dickens’s writing: from comedy to social criticism, and from history to journalism. His career is in many ways a mirror of the Victorian change of feeling from optimism, at the beginning of the Queen’s reign in 1837, to uncertainty and sadness thirty years later.

Dickens was a famous writer when he was alive and he is now one of the best-known and most widely read of English writers. People know his name as they know the name of Shakespeare.

Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë was immediately successful, and it is still one of the most famous novels about a woman. Jane starts as a poor child with no parents and goes through many suffering until she meets Mr. Rochester, who has locked his wife in a room because she is mad. The novel examines many sides of the

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circumstances of women, and Jane’s word’s at the end, ‘Readers, I married him’ show a new move towards freedom and equality. Jane controls her own life and, through all her difficulties and problems, becomes more independent. This is a great difference from the role given to women such as Pamela or Clarissa in the novels of Samuel Richardson a century before.

Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë is quite different – it is a novel of passion, an early psychological novel. The central characters, Cathy and Heathcliff, live out their passion in the windy, rough countryside of Yorkshire, and the landscape is as wild as their relationship. The novel is very original in the way it is written, moving backward and forward in time, and in and out of the minds of the characters. Again it presents a new view of women and their emotions.

The youngest Brontë sister, Anne, wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall [tenant = occupant] (1848) also with an unusual central female character and involving complex relationship and problems. All three Brontë sisters faced theses kinds of problems in the novel with unusual courage and directness, and together they changed the way the novel could present women characters: after the Brontës, female characters were more realistic, less idealized, and their struggles became the subject of a great many novels later in the nineteenth century.

The detective story was another genre of the novel which became popular. At first they were called Novels of Sensation. They take the old-fashioned Gothic novel on to a new level of mystery – and a solution is almost always found. The first such novel was The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, published in 1860. The Moonstone (1868), also by Collins, is the first real classic of the genre, with a complex plot about a stolen diamond. The most famous fictional detective is, of course, Sherlock Holmes. He was the main character in a long series of stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, starting with A Study in Scarlet [scarlet = red] in 1887.

As the century proceeded, there were many problems, in society, in religion, and in politics. The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 caused a great crisis of faith. This was reflected in many writings of the time. Perhaps Thomas Hardy is the novelist who best reflects the problems of the last years of the nineteenth century. Many of his novels caused offence, and they were even burned in public, and not bought by the private libraries.

The tone of Hardy’s novels is tragic. His novels show a part of the movement of the century: from the light comic tone of early Dickens, through the sadness and anger of his later novels; through the social concern to the tragic vision of Hardy’s own writings. His characters are often victims of destiny, who cannot save themselves from their tragic ends.

VICTORIAN POETRY

For more than fifty years, Tennyson was recognized among his contemporaries as the greatest poet of Victorian England. He was made poet laureate in 1850 when Wordsworth died, and as decade followed decade, Victorians readers looked to him for poetic pronouncements on the major issues affecting their lives.

Alfred Tennyson, later Lord Tennyson, began his careers in 1830, with the publication of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. It is interesting that the title uses the word lyrical, which was also used by Wordsworth and Coleridge in their Lyrical Ballads. But, despite this close connection, the tone of Tennyson’s poetry was quite different from the poetry of the Romantics. For Tennyson nature is not simple the object of beauty, he shows a

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more realistic vision of nature, stressing its cruelty more than its effect on the sense and the memory. When Queen Victoria became a widow on the death of her husband, In Memoriam became her favorite text, and Tennyson became the nation’s favorite poet.

The master of the dramatic monologue form in the Victorian age was the other major poet of the period, Robert Browning. He is thought of today as the most important Victorian poet after Tennyson. During much of his career, however, he was better appreciated by readers of a younger generations than by his contemporaries. ‘My Last Duchess’ [noble lady] is one of the most famous of all such poems. It appeared in 1842, in a volume called Dramatic Lyrics – repeating the use of lyric yet again. Many of Browning’s dramatic monologues contain moments of violence, of hidden emotions under the surface. They show many of the sides of Victorian society and behavior which were normally not seen.

The Victorian age produced a number of fine women poets. Before she met Robert Browning and married him in 1846, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a better-known poet than he was and even the best-known female poet of the century. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) are love poems to her husband and after their marriage he insisted that they be published. Because of their private nature, they were given this title as if Elizabeth had translated the poems from that language. Her Aurora Leigh (1857) is a long poem on women’s themes, sometimes considered a Victorian feminist text.

Oscar Wilde is the most important writer in the final years of the nineteenth century. He became a figure of fashion, in the 1880s, long before he became famous as a writer of stories and plays. His first stories are fables written for children, but they show a concern with appearance and reality which is central to all his writings. The happy Prince and Other Stories (1888) was followed by Wilde’s only novel. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). The theme of appearance/reality here reaches its highest point. Dorian Gray’s picture grows older while he remains as young as ever, whatever he does. The novel leaves Dorian’s bad actions to the reader’s imagination, but the book still caused a great scandal.

In 1895 Wilde’s masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest was performed. It remains the high point of English comedy after the Restoration. It is a complex story of social behavior, and appearances: the main character, Jack (whose real name is Ernest), turns out to have been lost as a child, and then found in a handbag. All ends happily, of course, but the prejudice and manners of Victorian society are shown to be very strongly fixed. While The Importance of Being Earnest was being performed in London, Wilde was arrested and later charged with homosexual offences. Although he had the chance to escape he stayed in England and was sent to prison for two years.

OTHER FICTION

One of the books which has been popular with both children and adults is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Carroll, whose real name was Carles Lutwidge Dodgson, taught mathematics at Oxford University. He wrote the book for the daughter of a friend, the original Alice. Through the Looking Glass [mirror] (1871) continues the strange story of Alice’s adventures, Carroll plays with reality, language and logic in ways that are both comic and frightening.

This kind of writing was sometimes called fantasy. Many other kinds of fantasy writing are now popular, but in the nineteenth century what is now known as science fiction was just beginning.

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DRAMA

In the early years of the Victorian period, drama was not considered part of serious literature. Melodramas and farces were the main types of play produced until, in the 1850s, Tom Robertson began to write ‘cup and saucer’ dramas. These, as the name suggests, brought some realism into the presentation, the acting and the themes of the drama.

In Memorian By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Tennyson’s In Memoriam is one of the finest elegiac poems in English Literature. Like Lycidas, Milton’s elegy on the death of his Cambridge friend Edward King, and Adonais, Shelley’s elegy on the death of Keats, Tennyson’s work laments the death of a young man of great talent, cut off before he could fulfill the promise of his early years. Also like them, it relates the significance of this death to larger questions about the meaning of life and art. But unlike its two great predecessors, In Memorian is made up of poetic units which may be read and appreciated on their own.

The sudden death in 1833 of Arthur Henry Hallam, at the age of tenty-two, was a tremendous blow to Tennyson. Hallam’s death deprived Tennyson of his most intimate relationship and left him overwhelmed with doubts about the purpose of life. He began writing a kind of poetic diary to record his feelings and reflections during the years following Hallam’s death. Eventually the individual poetic meditations were grouped into one long sequence and published anonymously, in 1850.

7Dark house, by which once more I standHere in the long unlovely street,Doors, where My heart was used to beatSo quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasped no more –Behold me, for I cannot sleep,And like a guilty thing I creepAt earliest morning to the door

He is not here; but far awayThe noise of life begins again,And ghastly through the drizzling rainOn the bald street breaks the blank day.

130Thy voice is on the rolling air;I hear thee where the waters run;Thou standest in the rising sun,And in the setting thou art fair.

What art thou then? I cannot guess;But though I seem in star and flowerTo feel thee some diffusive power,I do not therefore love thee less.

My love involves the love before;My love is vaster passion now;Though mixed with God and Nature thou,I seem to love thee more and more.

Far off thou art, but ever night;I have thee still, and I rejoice;I prosper, circled with thy voice;I shall not lose thee though I die.

In Time of “The Breaking of Nations” by Thomas Hardy

This poem was written during World War I. The title is derived from a passage in the Bible: “Thou art my battle ax and weapons of war: for with thee will I break in pieces the nations” (Jeremiah 51:20)

Only a man harrowing clodsIn a slow silent walk

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With an old horse that stumbles and nodsHalf asleep as they walk.

Only thin smoke without flameFrom the heaps of couch-grass;ºYet this will go onward the sameThough Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wightºCome whispering by:War’s annals will fade into nightEre their story die.

Couch-grass: a type of grass with long creeping root-stalks. Wight: young man, fellow

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

This poem is perhaps the most popular of Browning’s dramatic monologues. The scene is the castle of Duke of Ferrara, the speaker in the poem, who is a powerful Italian nobleman of the Renaissance period. The Duke is showing a painting of his first wife to an envoy who has been sent to arrange the details of a second marriage.

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,Looking as if she were alive. I callThat piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’sº handsWorked busily a day, and there she stands.Will ‘t please you sit and look at her? I said“Frà Pandolf” by design, for never readStrangers like you that pictured countenance,The depth and passion of its earnest glance,But to myself they turned (since none puts by The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,How such a glance came there; so, not the firstAre you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ‘twas notHer husband’s presence only, called that spotOf joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhapsFrà Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle lapsOver my lady’s wrist too much”, or “PaintMust never hope to reproduce the faintHalf flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuffWas courtesy, she thought, and cause enoughFor calling up that spot of joy. She hadA heart – how shall I say? – too soon made glad,Too easily impressed; she liked whate’erShe looked on, and her looks went everywhere.Sir, ‘twas all one! My favor at her breast,The dropping of the daylight in the West,The bought of cherries some officious foolBroke in the orchard for her, the white muleShe rode with round the terrace – all and eachWould draw from her alike the approving speech,Or blush, at least. She thanked men – good! But thankedSomehow – I know not how –as if she rankedMy gift of a nine-hundred-years-old nameFrà Pandolf: an imaginary monk and painter of the Italian Renaissance period. “Frà” means “Brother”

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Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett BrowningXIV

If thou must love me, let it be for noughtExcept for love's sake only. Do not say'I love her for her smile – her look – her wayOf speaking gently, – for a trick of thoughtThat falls in well with mine, and certes broughtA sense of pleasant ease on such a day' –For these things in themselves, Beloved, mayBe changed, or change for thee, – and love, so wrought,May be unwrought so. Neither love me forThine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry, –A creature might forget to weep, who boreThy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby !But love me for love's sake, that evermoreThou mayst love on, through love's eternity.

XLIIIHow do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and heightMy soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.I love thee to the level of every day's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.I love thee with a love I seemed to loseWith my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,I shall but love thee better after death.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY TO 1939

In 1900 the economy of Britain had become mostly industrial and in 1911 nearly 70 per cent of the 25 million people in the country lived in cities. A village way of life had almost disappeared.

In 1900 the British Empire had grown to include many parts of the world. However, the Boer War in South Africa was not a successful war for the British. Colonies throughout the world began to rebel and British control of other countries began to disappear.

These were years of change. The First World War (1914-1918) changed for many people their view of the world. Millions of men, including very young soldiers, were killed. The loss of so many lives was a horror the country had not experienced before, and for many people there seemed to be no purpose to the war. Basic religious and political beliefs were questioned by more people. Communism grew in Russia, and facism grew, especially in Germany and Italy. The rise of facism in Germany happened at the same time as Germany became a very powerful nation and facists beliefs were a main cause of the Second World War (1939 – 1945). Also workers in large industries became more interested in socialism and joined trades unions. The British Labor party grew, women were allowed to vote for the first time in 1928.

In the arts, one clear change was that artists felt they had to express their ideas very differently in new forms, which were difficult for everyone to understand. On the other hand, some artists felt a duty to communicate simply and in popular forms to a wider and better educated audience.

THE NOVEL 1900-39

The novel of the Victorian period had social themes. The novel of the twentieth century has more personal, individual themes. But at the same time as the novel examines the problems of the individual, it also becomes an examination of the whole world. England is no longer the main scene –

many writers use the wider world., outside England, as their setting. Often England is seen in contrast with the other countries described.

Writers began to use different points of view, rather than seeing the world through only one character’s eyes. The many points of vies, the range of settings, and quick moves from scene to scene all became part of modern writing. This psychological approach meant going deeply into the thoughts of the characters. The stream of consciousness technique, became an important part of novelists’ techniques in the early twentieth century.

William James’s brother Henry James, though born in America, became a British citizen later in his life. His novels move from America to Europe in a search for fixed cultural and social values. Like most of James’s writing, the language and the plot are very complex and very subtle. In James there is always a move from innocence to experience or awareness.

Joseph Conrad, like James, was not born in England, but in the Ukraine, of Polish parents. He became a British subject in 1886. He traveled the world as a sailor, and this gave him ideas for many of his works.

One of Conrad’s most famous works is the short novel Heart of Darkness (1902), which goes deep into Africa to explore the mysteries of human behavior.

E. M. Foster, although an Englishman of the middle class, was also an outsider: as a homosexual his view of society could show some of the conflicts, especially class conflicts, which were part of England at the turn of the century. In A Passage to India (1924), the tensions are between the culture of East and West –the British colonial way of life and the local culture of India.

D H Lawrence was the first important writer to come from the working class after the Education Act of 1870 brought education to all. His early works are about his own background: a mining family in the East Midlands, with a strong mother and a father he hardly knew. Sons and Lovers (1913) is an autobiographical novel and is the best-known of his works with this setting, and is one of the most successful psychological novels of the century.

His novels The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920) caused some scandal as their subjects were men’s and women’s roles in sexual relationships. For many years, Lawrence’s reputation was as a writer on sexual themes, especially after Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), which was banned in Britain until 1960. However, his themes are much wider that that. He examines all aspects of human relationships, as well as the relationship between Man and nature, and between the spirit of Man and the spirit of industrialism which can deny the true nature of humanity.

James Joyce’s first published work was a volume of poems called Chamber Music (1907). In Dubliners (1914), he analyses Dublin as a city which cannot change, and whose people are dying. The same theme is found in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1914/1915. This is almost an autobiography, although the hero is called Stephen Dedalus. He wants to become a writer, like Joyce himself, and finally has to leave Ireland to find his true voice as an artist.

Virginia Woolf came from a literary family, and her home in Bloomsbury became the center of literary interest among the intellectual and artists of her time.

She wanted to leave realism, and move into a new kind of expression which would allow a more internal exploration of the events and emotions described. She continued this in her next novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To The Lighthouse (1927).

She uses stream of consciousness techniques, but she is also original in many other ways. She spoke out for women, particularly in A Room of One’s Own (1929). In her final works, she continues her experiments, and prove her to be one of the most important and original novelists of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941.

There were many kinds of popular novel: in the nineteenth century the adventure novel had become very successful. Writers like H. Rider Haggard and Anthony Hope took their readers to imaginary lands, either in the colonies, as in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1886) and She (1887), or in the invented country of Ruritania, as in Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894).

THEATRE AND DRAMA

The Irishman George Bernard Shaw was the leading figure in English Drama from the 1890s until his death in 1950. He was well known for his use of the theatre to discuss issues, from pacifism to Ireland, and from prostitution to language itself. His most famous work is Pygmalion (1913). It is particularly well known because a film and a musical play, My Fair Lady, have been based on the original story.

POETRY

Poets at the end of the Victorian age reflect the crisis of values of the time. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy are the two best examples. Both can be seen as Victorians in some ways, and as modern poets in other ways. Hopkins died in 1889, bus most of his poetry was not published until 1918. Hardy, well known as a novelist until the middle of the 1890s, stopped writing novels and spent the rest of his career writing poetry – for more than thirty years. He died in 1928.

They are poets of changing times. Their poems celebrate nature, but also show the great sadness and anxiety of society after Darwin.

For the poets of the early years of the century, the certainty they looked for was about to end. With the First World War, the old world ended, and things were never the same again.

The poets who wrote about the war from their own experience did not try to make the soldiers into heroes. They wrote mostly about the horrors and the uselessness of the war.

T. S. Eliot is considered by many critics to be the most important poet in English in the twentieth century. Like so many other writers he was an outsider. In 1922 T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land and, ever since, it has been considered the most important single poem of the century. It takes the ideas of time and extends them to all societies, all times and all cultures.

CONTEMPORARY WRITING

Since World War II various groups and tendencies have emerged in British writing. Samuel Beckett (1906 - ), who belonged to the French Resistance and was lucky to escape with his life, drew dark but comic conclusions about life in general in influential plays like Waiting for Godot (1952) and Endgame (1957). The parables of Orwell and William Golding (1911 - ) give form to the moral and political issues of the modern state. In novelists like Anthony Burgess (1917 - ) and Irish Murdoch (1919 - ), the genre of philosophical comedy has thrived.

Other genres in which British fiction has always been strong, like science fiction and the detective story, have invited adaptation to new and often more serious purposes. For example, Doris Lessing (1919- ) has found science fiction a congenial form in which to express the “alien” view of England she developed in Africa. Like the South African writer Nadine Gordimer (1923 - ) and the Canadian Margaret Atwood (1939 - ), Lessing uses the genre to blend political vision with psychological exploration, finding in it a voice for the perspective of women.

John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1957) helped give currency to the term “Angry Young Men”. The “Angry Young Men” of the 1950’s, including Alan Sillitoe (1928 - ), attacked the British class system from the point of view of newly educated working-class people who were denied an opportunity to rise in the world. The dramatist Harold Pinter (1930 - ) had his start in the same years and with some of the same feelings.

The so-called “Movement” poets, who also began writing in the mid-1950s, have avoided flamboyant, emotional statements. The poetry of Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn is representative of their controlled, simple language. To a century of disorder and conflict, to a modern world growing in complexity, the Movement poets have responded with order and clarity. Other poets, Ted Hughes (1930 - ) among them, have broken away from the direction of the Movement, choosing more urgent feelings as well as a wide range of popular and experimental poetic forms. American-influenced poets like Denise Levertov (1932 - ), Margaret Atwood, and Tom Raworth (1938 - ), have welcomed the twentieth century’s disorder into experimental poems that both reflect and master it.

Figures from the former colonies who have contributed to the richness and diversity of postwar literature include George Lamming (1927 - ) and Edward Brathwaite (1930 - ), both from the West Indian; Chinua Achebe (1930 - ), from Nigeria; and Salman Rushdie (1947 - ), from Pakistan. Writing about their countries and about themselves, writing in modes as different as lyrical autobiography, the neutral objectivity of realism, and history charged with humor and fantasy, these writers have shown that English is truly a world language. Like Picadilly Circus, where cultural exports from the United States, Australia, Germany, Sweden, and Italy are visible at first glance, British culture is now a crossroads where many paths converge.

Ignorance By Philip Larkin

Strange to know nothing, never to be sureOf what is true or right or real,But forced to qualify or so I feel,Or Well, it does seem so:Someone must know.

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:Their skill at finding what they need,Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,And willingness to change;Yes, it is strange,

Even to wear such knowledge - for our fleshSurrounds us with its own decisions -And yet spend all our life on imprecision,That when we start to dieHave no idea why.

Preludes by T. S Eliot I

The winter evening settles downWith smell of steaks in passageways.Six o’clockThe burnt-out ends of smoky days.And now a gusty shower wrapsThe grimy scrapsOf withered leaves about your feetAnd newspapers from vacant lots;The showers beatOn broken blinds and chimney-pots,And at the corner of the streetA lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

IIThe morning comes to consciousnessOf faint stale smells of beerFrom the sawdust-trampled streetWith all its muddy feet that pressTo early coffee-stands.

With the other masqueradesThat time resumes,One thinks of all the handsThat are raising dingy shadesIn a thousand furnished rooms.

Musée des Beaux Arts by W H Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,The Old Masters: how well they understoodIts human position; how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingFor the miraculous birth, there always must beChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skatingOn a pond at the edge of the wood:They never forgotThat even the dreadful martyrdom must run its courseAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horseScratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns awayQuite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the greenWater; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seenSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

SNAKEA snake came to my water-troughOn a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,To drink there.* * *In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob treeI came down the steps with my pitcherAnd must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.* * *He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloomAnd trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough*And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,He sipped with his straight mouth,Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,Silently.* * *Someone was before me at my water-trough,And I, like a second-comer, waiting.* * *He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,And stooped and drank a little more,Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earthOn the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.* * *The voice of my education said to meHe must be killed,For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.* * *And voices in me said, If you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.* * *But must I confess how I liked him,How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-troughAnd depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,Into the burning bowels of this earth?* * *Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?Was it humility, to feel so honoured?I felt so honoured.* * *And yet those voices:If you were not afraid, you would kill him!* * *And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,But even so, honored still moreThat he should seek my hospitalityFrom out the dark door of the secret earth.* * *He drank enoughAnd lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,Seeming to lick his lips,And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,And slowly turned his head,And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice a dream,Proceeded to draw his slow length curving roundAnd climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.* * *And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,Overcame me now his back was turned.* * *I looked round, I put down my pitcher,I picked up a clumsy logAnd threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.* * *I think it did not hit him,But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste,Writhed like lightning, and was goneInto the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.* * *And immediately I regretted it.I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.* * *And I thought of the albatross,And I wished he would come back, my snake.* * *For he seemed to me again like a king,Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,Now due to be crowned again.* * *And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.And I have something to expiate:A pettiness. (D. H. LAWRENCE)

HAWK ROOSTING by Ted Hughes

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.Inaction, no falsifying dreamBetween my hooked head and hooked feet:Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s rayAre of advantage to me;And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.It took the whole of CreationTo produce my foot, my each feather:Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –I kill where I please because it is all mine.There is no sophistry in my body:My manners are tearing off heads –

The allotment of death.For the one path of my flight is directThrough the bones of the living.No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.Nothing has changed since I began.My eye has permitted no change.I am going to keep things like this.