Shakespearen Sonnet:

• 3 quatrains and a couplet

• Many cases: beginning of third quatrain marks the line in which the poet expresses revelation

• Rhyme schemes:

  • Quatrains: ABAB CDCD EFEF

  • Couplet: GG

• Meter: most sonnets are written in iambic pentameters with ten syllables in each line

• Two main motifs in his poems:

  • Unstoppable lust for married woman of dark complexion (“dark lady”); sonnets 127 to 154

  • Conflicted love for young man (“fair youth”)

  • Provokes speakers desire for fame (“rival poet”); sonnets 78 to 86

• English sonnets differ from the Petrarchan sonnets by thematizing friendship, passionate love, sexuality

Work and Thoughts:

• Anglican, Juvenalian satire

• sees human beings as rational animals, is frustrated with the human race

• believes that mankind is not rational, but capable of reason

• believes that nature is inherently corrupt

• believes pride is the original sin andd the reason for prejudice and misunderstandings -> WE NEED RELIGION

• His satire is droven by disillusionment, anger and sexation

  • art of satire: he criticizes vice, immoral behavior but does not insult a person in particular

Life:

• fled to England during th ecivil war

• grew up in an Anglo-Irish Protestant community -> witness of the Glorious Revolution uin Ireland (supporters of catholic James against the Anglican William of orange)

• became a personal secretary to Sir William Temple

• moved back and forth between Ireland and England (1704-1714)

• returns to Ireland for good in 1714 as Dean of St Patrick´s Cathedral, Dublin

• his own views of Ireland are somewhat ambivalent, "obscure exile in most obscure enslaved country"

• after his death, he left all his money to Ireland

other information:

• Distinctively Irish writer, described as first Irish nationalist, voice of liberty supporting the patriarchic cause in Ireland

• Smith blames Irish poverty on English colonial restrictions, trade, failure of Ireland to protect its own economy

further works:

• The Lady´s Dressing Room (1732)

• A modest proposal

The novel commences in the artist Basil Hallward's studio. He discusses his most recent painting with his witty friend Lord Henry Wotton. Henry insists that the painting should be displayed. However, Basil is worried that his obsession with the subject is too apparent. The portrait is of Dorian Gray, a young man with extraordinary beauty. He arrives later and joins the conversation.

Dorian becomes fascinated with Lord Henry's hedonistic and amoral beliefs, especially when discussing youth and beauty's fleeting nature. Dorian subsequently wishes on his soul that the portrait should become old and ugly in his place. Basil then gives him the portrait.

In the following weeks, Dorian indulges in Lord Henry's "new hedonism," wherein he pledges to live his life fully in the pursuit of pleasure. He tells of a young actress he has fallen in love with, Sybil Vane, because of her incredible acting talent and convinces Basil and Henry to go to the seedy theatre to watch her perform in Romeo and Juliet. However, overcome by her love for Dorian, Sybil performs poorly.

Embarrassed by this, Dorian cruelly breaks off their engagement and returns home to see the portrait changed: it now possesses a cruel expression. After seeing this change in the portrait, Dorian resolves to seek Sybil's forgiveness the next day. However, Lord Henry arrives with news of her suicide. Lord Henry convinces Dorian that he should not feel guilty. Sybil's death was a tragedy comparable to the various Shakespearean heroines she played on stage; Dorian eventually agrees. He then hides the portrait in the attic of his house so that no one can witness its transformation.

Henry sends Dorian a book about the hedonistic exploits of a young Frenchman. Dorian soon becomes obsessed with it. Under its influence for the next 18 years, Dorian devotes his life to the pursuit of excess and corruption with no acknowledgement of the consequences of his actions. He soon becomes more drawn to evil, which is reflected in the portrait: it shows all evil deeds as well as Dorian’s actual age. However, Dorian himself remains young and beautiful. Rumours about his exploits spread in London society, and Dorian's reputation suffers greatly.

Dorian runs into Basil one night, who confronts him about these rumours. Dorian refuses to accept blame and takes Basil to his attic to show him the portrait, which has become hideous. Basil is horrified and begs Dorian to repent; however, Dorian soon becomes enraged and holding basil responsible for the portrait, he stabs him in a fit of anger. The following day, Dorian blackmails a former friend, a doctor, to dispose of the body.

The night after Basil's murder, Dorian goes to an opium den where a vengeful James Vane, Sybil's brother, attempts to take Doran's life, but he manages to escape. Dorian is wracked with fear and retreats to his country home, where he hosts a hunting party for various guests, including Lord Henry.

James Vane follows him there but is accidently killed by the hunting party. Feeling safe again, Dorian decides to repent for his life of sin. He returns to his home in London to see if there is any change in the portrait, but it remains horrifying and has now acquired a look of cunning. In a rage, Dorian stabs the painting. His servants hear a scream and run to the attic, where they see Dorian, now a disfigured old man, dead on the floor and the painting restored to its former beauty hanging on the wall.

Literary Background: Victorian Literature

• highly diverse novels of that time e.g.: Charles Dickens, Hard Times – For These Times (April-August 1854) Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1891) Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)

--> all show interest in transformation (of the self)

--> social responsibility

• criticise romanticists for being too self-centred and focussed on emotions – are rather rational

• aim to cover national problems while also keeping close to individuals

• interest in identity formation

• novels: R.L. Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

  
  

Fine de Siècle Literature

Great British Empire started to crumble, many anxieties, related to gender, sexuality, general decline, turn of the millennial (end of the world?), degeneration, social decline…

Key anxiety: a great prosperous time will come to an end

The Spirit of the Fin de Siècle:

• departures of Victorian traditions

• degeneration

• anxieties about the end of the Empire

• decadence aestheticism

Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)

• Irish playwright and novelist

• Put on trial for gross indecency in 1895 à convicted on May 24, 1895

• “Desire of Oscar Wilde” --> Euphemism for homosexuality

• Wilde hid homosexuality through a marriage and 2 kids

Wilde’s trial and fiction & aphorisms as evidence against him

• homosexuality was feared, shunned from Victorian society

• exposing homosexuality was a big deal

• Wilde loses the trial

• his works were cited to support the ‘corruption of the young’

• his fiction seen as evidence against him

• judges deemed his books to be immoral through his statement

• “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

Wilde poking fun at society

• extremely witty & funny

• Wilde worked with satire

• satire in order to expose Victorian hypocrisy/society

• wrote lots of comedies, e.g., An Ideal Husband; The Importance of being Earnest

• expose the upper-classes hypocrisies Oscar Wilde, The Importance of being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People

• Comedy of manners --> ridicules the upper-class, their behavior, manners, hypocritic behavior --> they’re according to Wilde: greedy and self-indulgent

• Wilde liked to use puns

• questions how much control men have over their invented boundaries

• humorous reflection on the technological progress

• full of paradoxes to expose the artificiality of manners, social conventions, pleasures

Aestheticism (John Keats, Oscar Wilde, E.A. Poe, P.B. Shelley)

• L’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake, not art for morality’s sake)

• Emphasis on aesthetic values and pleasure

• Literature and art should focus on sensual pleasure, not morality/moral agenda

• "The Victorians believed that art could be used as a tool for social education and moral enlightenment, as illustrated in works by writers such as Charles Dickens and George Gissing. The aestheticism movement, of which Wilde was a major proponent, sought to free art from this responsibility. The aestheticists were motivated as much by a contempt for bourgeois morality—a sensibility embodied in Dorian Gray by Lord Henry, whose every word seems designed to shock the ethical certainties of the burgeoning middle class—as they were by the belief that art need not possess any other purpose than being beautiful."

Criticism: indicating decline, decadence, degeneration of (Victorian) values, morals, human behavior, e.g., Nordau, Degeneration (1893)

Reversed gender roles and Oscar Wilde, a dandy

• feasting on the aesthetic and beauty

• reversed gender roles, attributing ‘typical’ to the other gender

• aestheticism represented by Oscar Wilde - dressed quite fashionable

• he became a work of art, a dandy

• represented idleness, decadence, irresponsibility

The Picture of Dorian Grey - Themes

·       self-absorption

·       connection between art and life

·       beauty and the fulfilment of life

·       The Supremacy of Youth and Beauty

·       superficial nature of society

·       negative consequence of influence

The autonomy of art & the fusion of the human and the artefact

• pursuit of pleasure

• refelcts upon autonomy of art --> art doesn’t have a moral purpose, no normative characteristic, art for the sake of art

• tries to break free from art by destroying the painting

• killing the portrait --> kills himself; soul cannot be separated from the work of art

• born 1940 in Cape Town

• since 2006: Australian citize

• 2003: Nobel Prize

• Foe (1986)--> focused primarily on themes of language and power

summary:

• „The story starts of when Susan Barton arrives on a tropic island after suffering from a shipwreck. She is immediately rescued by a black slave (Friday) and brought to the house of his owner, Mr. Cruso. In the following scenes we see Susan arguing with Cruso because she wants to leave the island. In the end, Susan, Friday and Cruso succeed in escaping the island when a ship sails past. However, on course for England, Cruso dies of a fever and Susan is left behind with the African, who is not even able to speak. In the following section, Susan talks of publishing her 'island story'. To that end, she is continually writing letters to an author called Foe. Moreover, she decides to stay at Foe's house until he returns from his duty. When he finally returns they start quarreling over Friday's identity and the fact that he cannot speak. Furthermore, Susan and Foe discuss how they will succeed in lifting the spell of muteness which dooms over Friday. In the end, the perspective changes and the reader is witness to a scene on the shipwreck, in which Susan, Friday and Cruso lie buried.“

• in short: tells the story of Susan Barton, a woman stranded, then rescued, from a desert island and taken back to England where she attempts to contact Danie Foe, a writer, and have her story documented for the world to read

Postmodernist elements:

• playfulness with self-reflexive language, metaphoricity and allegorizing potential

• intertextuality and metafictionality

• response to Robinson Crusoe: rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe

  • Raising questions of authorship (who writes?); authenticity (is s/he reliable?); and authority (whose story is it?) --> It is a powerful and philosophical tale about how stories are told, and who has the privilege of telling them

    • Susan Barton: silencing of the female perspective; repressed female history  Foe is obsessed with manufacturing a happy ending

    • Friday = representation of (black; enslaved) people who were not heard and whose stories remained untold

    • Unnamed narrator in the end: walks in in a dreamlike state  finds a manuscript and begins to read --> he is transported to the island and goes below the waves to the sunken ship --> finds Friday in the corner --> he screams --> symbolic meaning: animation for readers to help surpressed people tell their stories and help them regain their voice

title:

• De Foe

• Foe, a fragment (i.e. pointing to something that is no more or something that does not yet exist) --> the remains of Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) (what is left after re-writing his work)

• friend or foe?

telling the story:

• multiple narrative layers: a story within a story: “I have set down the history of our time on the island as well as I can, and enclose it herewith. It is a sorry, limping affair (the history, not the time itself) – but you will know how to set it right.” (Foe, 47)

  • How to preserve hi/stories

  • question of selection, authenticity and authorial control

  • Susan Barton, an unsuccessful (?) author

most important topics/themes:

• feminist aspect: female experience

• storytelling

• language (+ power of language)

• slavery

• fantasies of colonialism --> marginalization and powershifts

• symbol of the tongue: power of speech, truth and narrative

• Superficially: praises beauty of lover

• Unlike summer’s wild temperature, the beloved is always mild

• Summer personified as “eye of heaven” with its “gold complexion”

• Nearly every line is self-contained clause

• Central theme: poem defies time and eternity

• Mocks the predominant love poetry of Petrarchan sonnets

• 1^st quatrain: one line on each comparison between mistress and something else (sun, coral, snow, wires)

• 2^nd / 3^rd quatrain: expands description to two lines --> develops arguments

• Couplet: love does not need to be perfect and neither need people to be loved

• Literary movement during baroque in 17^th century; opposite to cavalier poetry

• Connection of two contradictory aspects of reality in a surprising and metaphorical way

• Aspects: magic & alchemy; logic & mathematics; theology & metaphysics

• Stylistic & thematical characteristics:

  • Strict line to Elizabethan & Petrarchan poetry

  • Focus on darkness & suspicions

  • Love and religion central topics; dealt with in conversation with love affair, god or allegorical figures like death

  • Puns, oxymora, paradoxa, exaggerated metaphors

  • Metrical irregularities

Summary & Analysis:

• Speaker is frustrated since mistress denies physical relationship

• Speaker compares being bit by the same flea to having sex

• Argues that the flea bite is neither “sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead” à targets culture of English Renaissance, in which female virginity was social prestige

• Religious undertone: union of speaker and mistress in flea = holy trinity

• William Shakespeare

  • "Sonnet 18" (1609)

  • "Sonnet 130" (1609)

  • "Othello" (1604)

  • "The Tempest" (1611)

    
    

Metaphysical Peotry (Early 17th century)

• John Donne

  • "The Flea (1633)

    
    

Enlightment

• Jonathan Swift

  • "Gulliver’s Travels" (1726)

    
    

Romanticism

• William Wordsworth

  • "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" (1798)

• John Keats

  • "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1820)

• Mary Shelley

  • "Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus" (1818)

Victorian Era

• Charlotte Brontë

  • "Jane Eyre" (1847)

• Alfred Tennyson

  • "The Lady of Shalott" (1832)

• Arthur Conan Doyle

  • "The Speckled Band" (1892)

• Oscar Wilde

  • "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1890)

Modernism

• Joseph Conrad

  • "Heart of Darkness" (1899)

• James Joyce

  • "The Dead" (1914)

• Katherine Mansfield

  • "The Garden Party" (1922)

• Virginia Woolf

  • "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925)

• T.S. Eliot

  • "The Waste Land" (1922)

• H.G. Wells

  • "The Country of the Blind" (1904)

Pos-Modernism and Contemporary

• Seamus Heaney

  • "Digging" (1966)

• Samuel Beckett

  • "Waiting for Godot" (1953)

• J. M. Coetzee

  • "Foe" (1986)

• Alice Munro

  • "Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You" (1974)

• David Malouf

  • "The Only Speaker of His Tongue" (1985)

• Anne Bradstreet

  • "In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet"

Romanticism (ca. 1800-1865)

• Nathanial Hawthorne

  • "The Scarlet Letter"

• Edgar Allan Poe

  • "The Fall of the House of Usher"

• Herman Melville

  • "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

Realism and Naturalism (ca. 1865-1914)

• Mark Twain

  • "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"

• Kate Chopin

  • "Story of an Hour"

• Claude McKay

  • "If we must die"

Modernism (ca. 1914-1945)

• Walt Whitman

  • "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

• William Carlos Williams

  • "The Red Wheelbarrow"

• Eugene O'Neill

  • "The Emperor Jones"

• Tennessee Williams

  • "A Streetcar Named Desire"

• Arthur Miller

  • "Death of a Salesman"

• Ernest Hemingway

  • "Hills Like White Elephants"

Contemporary Literature (ca. since 1945)

• Allen Ginsberg

  • "Howl"

• Sylvia Plath

  • "Lady Lazarus"

• Toni Morrison

  • "Beloved"

• Paul Auster

  • "City of Glass"

• Don DeLillo

  • "Falling Man"

• Sandra Cisneros

  • "Woman Hollering Creek"

• Leslie Marmon Silko

  • "Lullaby"

- after WWI -> isolationism and conservatism (unsettlich of America)

- writers go against these trends in their work and/or live in Europe for a while ("expatrates" like Gertude Stein)

- 3 phases: early, high and late modernism

Modernist Poetry

The Intellectual Climate

Max Weber (1905) The Protestand Work Wthic and The Rise of Capitalism: value of work in American society

Sigmund Freud (1913): THe Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Totem and Taboo: unconscious, dreams, desires, suppression

George Frazer (1890): The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion: from magic to religion to scientific knowledge

Key Characteristics:

uncertainty, pessimism, shifting perspectives, relativism (no privileging of any one culture, civilization, or way of understanding, fragmentation, symbolism (e.g. T.S. Eliot's "waste land")

Experiments in art: Picasso, Marcel Duchamp

Authors:

T.S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

- Born in American Midwest, studied in Oxford, became British citizen

- Friendship with Ezra Pound (american poet, mentor)

The Waste Land (1922)

- satire, rhetorical strategy, counterpoint, mythical and associative method, "Fisher Kind": archetypal quest narrative

- Five parts: The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by the Water, What the Thunder Said

John Dos Passos (1896-1970)

- enlisted in the ambulence service during WWl

- abandonded socialist political leanings after visit to Soviet Union

- remained critical of American capitalism, favored humane and cooperative economy

- Manhattan Transfer (1925) city novel

- U.S.A. , trilogy published between 1930 abd 196, consisting of The 42nd, Parallel, 1919, The Big Money

- modernist narrative form influenced by the fragmentation of painting and the shifts in perspective as well as by the montage technique of cinema (literary collage)

- narrative technqiues in Manhatten Transfer: neutral camera eye, epitaph, montage, collage, leitmotifs

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940)

- published about 180 short stories

- major novels: The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Niht (1934)

- captured the zeitgeist of the Roaring Twenties

- His life and career very much reflected national developments: born in St. Paul, MN, F. came of age when his country established itself as a world power; F. published his frst novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), when his country was also on the upswing; married Zelda Sayer

- The Great Gatsby (1925) presents the "waste land" of the rich and corrupted

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

- after a career as a journalist he enters World War l as an ambulance driver

- aficionado of the bull ring, expert boxer, fervent fisher, impassioned hunter

-The Sun Also Rises (1926), the disillusioned account of the aimless wanderings of a group of three Americans after WWl

- depiction of a "lost generation"

- symbolic realism

- language of understatement

- "iceberg technique" --> siehe hills like white elephants

- plot: liminal situations (of life and death)

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

- use of symbolism and stream of consciousness

- a writer of American South

- Souther concerns: code of honor, chivalric, treatment of women, class consciousness, trauma of a lost Civil War, nostalgia for the antebellum past, haunted by the sins of the past like slavery and miscegenation

- literary subject: the decline of the South

- fictional microcosm: Yoknapatawpha County (modeled on Hamilton County, Mississippi)

- The Sound and the Fury (1929): multiple point-of-view technqiue, shifts in time reflect characters confusion, cut-up technique blurs past and present, four chapter all tell the same story of a familyÄs decline

- As I lay Dying (1930); Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

• From rural, agrarian republic to urbanized, industrialized nation

• National legacy of racism

• 1890: closing of the "Frontier" (settlements by people of European descent all the way to the Pacific Ocean)

• Continuing Division between North and South after Civil War

• Technological innovations: rise of industry and urbanization (Industrial Revolution England)

• Transcontinental Railroad (from NYC to SF) in 1869

• Spanish-American War (U.S. expansionism under doctrine of "Manifest Destiny")

• Growing division between rich and poor; immigration

• more national and varied literature

Central authors:

• Mark Twain: local color writing (Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi)

• William Dean Howells: main theorist of American realism

• Henry James: international theme & psychological realism "Daisy Miller: A Study"; "the" American or "the Italian" are socially constructed categories that cannot and should not be trusted (Hemingway?); Center of Consciousness: all we are told is filtered throug the consciousness of one character; limited third-person point of view; unreliable narrator

• Romanticism & Transcendentalism (another word: American Renaissance) ca. 1800 - 1865

• Romanticism: "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility" (William Wordsworth)

• Transcendentalism (1): philosophical idealism, a special kind of Romanticism; (belief in the power of imagination; importance of self-expression, self-determination, individualism, self-reliance, human dignity, equality of races and sexes, interdependence of natural wirld and its human inhabitants; nature is benevolent

• Transcendentalism (2): becoming "one" with the world; belief that Nature is (also) symbolic (nature as a living mystery); knowing yourself and studying nature is the same activity; individual virtue and happiness depend upon self-realization

Cultural and Historical Context:

• "Hudson River School" romanticizes and celebrates American landscapes as sublime

• Contintental westward expansion of the U.S.A. -> Manifest Destiny (urbanization in the East)

• National Identity: period followed the War of 1812 and early stages of the Industrial Revolution, US was establishing itself as distinct cultural and national identity, seperate from Europe

• Reform Movements: significant social reform movements, abolitionism, women's rights, transcendentalism

• Heavily influenced by romantic movement, emphasized emotion, nature, and individualism

• Settlement dates back 28,000 years ago

• Significant population (millions) and cultural diversity before European contact

• Key cultural practices: power of dreams, dualism, syncretic religion and the goal of harmony

  
  

Pre-Columbian Native American Literature:

• Included genres: song-poems, speeches, stories, ritual drama, and formulas for dances or performances

• Stylistic characteristics: oral quality, repetition, symmetry, personification, direct audience addresses

  
  

Spanish Exploration of America:

• Economic, political, and religious reasons for Spain's motivation for exploration

• America as a Contact Zone: first interactions between different cultures, involving coercion, inequality, and conflict

• Columbus's Journal: shows his eurocentric view of the New World and its inhabitants. He depicts Natives as "Noble Savages" and "Brutal Savages". Writing was used to justify conquest and colonization

• Conquest of Mexiko: Hernán Cortés, role of disease, psychology, mixed-race mestizos in colonial rule, and involvement of Catholic Curch

  
  

• Published in 1894, in Vogue magazine under the title "The Dream of an Hour"

• Literary period: Realism and Naturalism

• About Louise Mallard, young woman with heart trouble who learns that her husband Brently Mallard died in railroad accicent

• Her reaction: shock and grief, retreating to her room to be alone

• Looking outside her window: she experiences relief and freedom, liberation, joy...

• When she embraces her new sense of independence, her husband returns home, alive and well

• Story ends with Louise collapsing and dying of a heart attact

• Doctors conclude that she died of "joy that kills" (implicating that she was so excited about her husband being alive, when in fact it was the opposite)

Themes:

• Explores themes of female autonomy, freedom, independence, identity, complexity of marriage from woman's perspective

• Autobiographical input?

• Irony and Emotional Complexitiy

• Role of Woman: discussion of feminist literature: New Woman and Suffragette

• Death: ultimate freedom through death? There is no going back from freedom

Symbolism:

• Open window: possibilities of new found freedom; sees blooming nature; spring: new beginning, new life, bright view

• Heart Trouble: ambivalence toward marriage: is in love but lacks freedom; cannot be completely happy; heart comes to life when experiencing the possibility of being free and then breaks when independence is denied

• Literary period: Modernism

• Set at a train station in Spain, where a man ("the American) and a woman ("Jig" or "The girl") are having a tense conversation while waiting for their train to Madrid

• Dialogue is subtle and indirect, but they are discussing whether or not Jig should have an abortion.

• The man tries ti persuade her that the procedure is simple and will allow them to continue their carefree lifestlye, while Jig is more hesitant and conflicted, hinting at deeper emotional complexities

Themes:

• Autobiographical?

• Lost Generation: Spain as setting

• Iceberg Principle: dialogue dynamics through sarcasm, repetition, omission...

• Abortion and power dynamics in relationships

Four Movements Toward Self-Realization by Stanley Renner:

• 1) Jig is passiv but still communicates her feelings through sarcasm and silence

• 2) Realizes her own mind more and more, interrupts him more

• 3) With his increasing pressure, she asserts herself increasingly too: repetition, climax, sarcasm...

• 4) Result of her development toward self-realization, she gets her way

Setting and Symbolism:

• Dry, country, no trees (side of the American, abortion) vs. water, fertility (Jig's side, pregnancy)

• The girl rejoins the American on his side, but her mind remains on her side (what is her decision?)

• Railway symbolism: represents the decision the couple has to make; one way or the other

• Madrid - Madre (Mother/Motherhood?)

• White Elephant: valuable, sacred vs. undesirable, burdensome gift (pregnancy)

Examples for Iceberg Principle:

• The word "abortion" is never mentioned, only "an operation"

• The American "reduces" the importance of the topic ("it's perfectly simple")

• Subtlety around the topic emphasizes the controversy of the topic

• Readers need to actively engage with the text: what are they talking about? What are the dynamics? What do they want?

Thoughts:

• Why Spain? A catholic country? Weather? Their relationsip is heated; Spain as a hot country is a useful setting to represent the heated and tense dynamics of the relationship

• Names representing uneven power dynamics: "The American" as American men in general and "Jig" in contrast to the more general "American man" (Jig has sexual implications; Jig also African American "slur" --> unequal power dynamics)

• Age representing uneven power dynamics: "The girl" and "The man" implication that he is older than her

• Motivation for Migration: economic needs and religious motivations

• Puritan Beliefs: was rooted in Calvinist doctrines, emphasizing original sin, predestination, strong work ethic

• Mayflower and Plymouth Colony: 1620, Mayflower Compact was a foundational document for self-governance

• William Bradford and John Winthrop: Bradfords "Of Plymouth Plantation" emphasizes collective effort to live by God's laws, while Winthrop's "A Modell of Christian Charitiy" envisioned society with inherent inequality but bound by collective responsibility to each other, symbolized as "city upon a hill"

• Puritan Legacy: The Puritans viewed America as a "new Israel", chosen nation under God's providence

• Groundwork for concept of "American Exceptionalism"

• More optimistic view of human nature

• Benevolent God allows human beings to employ their power of reason instead of concept of sin

• Human suffering is not a result of God's wrath

• Rise of science

  
  

Colonial Politics and Benjamin Franklin

• Benjamin Franklin 1709-1790

• Emergence of fundamental American beliefs and practices: representative government, economic independence for most whites

• Taxes imposed on local levels

• Public goods & self reliance

• British legislation: Sugar Act (1764) and Stamp Act (1765) "No taxation without representation"

• Tea Act (1773)

• Prohibitory Act (1775)

The 18th Century:

• Diminished importance of Puritanism

• Influence of European Enlightenment philosophy

• Age of Reason, age of self-reliance, age of self-determination

• New subjects in American literature and culture: American settings & characters

Names:

• Thomas Paine: (Common Sense 1776) he published ideas of American Revolution and argued pro representative democratic republican government

• Joel Barlow: satirical and patriotic poet, patriotic,

• Royall Tyler: first (born) American dramatist

• Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur: "Letters from an American Farmer"; life on the frontier

• Phillis Wheatley: first known African-American woman poet

• early nineteenth-century American readers prefer British books

• early American novels: sentimental, picaresque, gothic, nostalgic, didactic

• First American novel: William Hill Brown " The Power of Sympathy" (romance novel of seduction"

• First American short story writer: Washington Irving "Rip van Winkle" (1819)

• James Fenimore Cooper: dramatizes conflict between "civilization" and "wilderness"

• William Cullen Bryant: first genuinely American Romantic poet (believes that nature teaches us lessons)

• Ralph Waldo Emerson: a leading transcendentalist emphasizing self-reliance, nature, individual's connection to the divine in worls like "Nature" and "Self Reliance"

• Henry David Thoreau: centrality of individualism, works on naturalism and civil disobedience like "Walden" and "Civil Disobedience" (nonviolent resistent to unjust laws)

• Nathaniel Hawthorne: explored sin, guilt, morality, often set in Puritan New England like "Scarlett Letter (1850)

• Herman Melville: author of "Moby Dick" (1851), a complex novel exploring themes of obsession, revenge, human condition, darker aspects of human nature

• Edgar Allan Poe: gothic tales and poems, explored madness and death in works like "The Tell-Tale Heart"(1843), "The Raven" and "The Fall of the House Usher" (1839)

• Walt Whitman: revolutionized American poetry with his free verse style and themes in "Leaves of Grass" (1855) celebrating democracy, the individual, and the human body

Key Themes:

• Individualism and Self-Reliance

• Nature and the Sublime

• Exploration of American Identity

• Dark Romanticism

• Birth of American literature distinct from European influences

• "Social Darwinism"

• Naturalism is a "pessimistic materialistic determinism" (George Becker)

• Naturalist fiction concentrates on common characteristics in a commonplace contemporary world: life is a struggle, conditioned by environment, instinct or chance, humanist qualities, social and natural constraints do not allow to exercise free will without impediments

Key Themes:

• survival, determinism, violence, taboo

• universe/nature/urban setting is amoral, indifferent, hostile

  
  

Classics:

• Stephen Crane: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) or "The Open Boat"

• Frank Norris: McTeague (1899)

• Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie (1900)

• Upton Sinclair: The Jungle (1906)

Robert Walton tells how he has met Victor Frankenstein in the Arctic after earlier having seen a “gigantic figure” crossing the ice. Victor tells of his childhood and his caring family, particularly of his love for his foster sister Elizabeth. While he’s at university, Victor becomes obsessed with science and uses dead bodies to experiment on and creates a monster made of body parts. He’s immediately disgusted by the thing he has created and abandons it. Victor falls ill and is visited and comforted by his childhood friend Henry Clerval. he’s then called home because his brother William was murdered and Justine (a family servant) is executed for it, although Victor believes that the creature had killed him. The creature and Victor meet on a glacier and the monster tells him how it survived, became educated, and asks Victor to build a female companion because he is shunned by humans. Victor agrees and begins to construct a female creature but, as he realizes the consequences, tears it into pieces. The creature is enraged and kills Victor’s best friend (Henry Clerval). Victor and Elizabeth marry but is killed by the creature in the wedding night. Victor vows to hunt the creature down. In Walton’s last letter, back in the Arctic, Frankenstein dies and the creature, still miserable, heads off, probably to its own death.

Inspiration and Context

Science in the Romantic era

• Term “scientist” coined in 1834 (by William Whewell)

• Foundation of several scientific societies, e.g., Astronomical Society

• Many scientific discoveries, e.g., invention of battery, animal electricity (1781) Vitalism

• Theory of natural energy (Wordsworth: inherent in nature, can be unleashed by imagination); Coleridge questions source of said energy

  
  

Animal magnetism

• “the study of the reaction of living organisms to the

  •  (a): theories of magnetic fluids (physiological; animal magnetism)

  • theories of suggestion and imagination (psychological, mesmerism) Mesmerism

• Emerged from theories of animal magnetism

• Based on the belief in healing by touch or by the “touch” of one’s gaze

  • Luigi Galvani experimented with electricity on frog legs

• Result of animal magnetism

• Reanimation of dead/lifeless bodies à vitalist debate The vitalist debate

• Debate whether life was the product of some spiritual substance (Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam) or is life something inherent in nature (not infusible by an external agent or power)

--> Inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein

The Novel Frankenstein

• Composed as part of a writing contest at Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva

• Published anonymously in 1818; many people thought it was a male author

• Not concerned with supernatural events, but rooted in scientific discoveries of time

• early work of science fiction; different cultural, moral, psychological questions

• Gothic novel

• Revolutionary work (also inspired by works of William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, P.B. Shelley)

  
  

Narrative structure: Epistolary novel

• Letters by Robert Walton to sister Mrs Saville

• Incorporates Victor Frankenstein’s story and the creature’s story

• Style raises doubts about truthfulness/reliability of character’s accounts

• Includes aspects of taboo: bringing creature to life/creating life; reader is reading letters not addressed to us but to his sister à fascination of forbidden

  
  

Sublime

definition:

• Pleasurable pain that arises from the feeling of terror (expands the soul) (not horror!)

• “To excite the ideas of pain and danger … the sublime is the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”

• Primarily experienced in nature

Sublime in Frankenstein:

• Thunderbolt Victor sees when he’s 15

• 
  

• Victor seeing the creature in motion for first time

• Every time Victor is confronted with grandness of nature --> remote and beautiful, bigger than humans - a place to find peace BUT: place of retreat of creature

• creature itself is not the sublime! “beautiful”, but then “breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (no pleasurable terror, here just horror!)

  
  

Women in the novel

• Either killed or unimportant

• Role of women replaced by men

• Victor gives birth to creature

• Creature as an outsider connects to women at that time --> The Modern Prometheus and revolutionary energy

  
  

The Modern Prometheus

• Victor: victorious, winner who stole fire from gods, uses his knowledge to infuse spark of life into lifeless body

• Creature: revolts against his creator (Victor); “feelings of revenge and hatred”; “I am malicious because I am miserable”

• Driven into crime by the treatment of society” (Rousseau: society corrupts humans)

• Creature remains outsider even when it tries to connect to society --> leads to desire for revenge sparked by society --> connects to French Revolution (revolutionaries wanted to take revenge on those in power, creature on Victor)

  --> Reign of Terror

  • Creature spreads terror, kills people

• Shelley supports revolution and quest for freedom and equality; also displays dangers, esp. dangers of reign of terror

  
  

The Gothic Genre

Key features:

• connection to French revolution & reign of terror

• Wild remote places - isolation, haunting past/secrets, supernatural, transgression, display of uncertainties (power, law, society, family, sexuality)

• imagination and emotional effects --> sublime

• Ann Radcliff: terror – strongest emotion and state of awareness – finding fascination in terror (opposite of horror which petrifies)

  
  

Gothic transgression in Frankenstein

• Ability to respond to creature (in comparison to Frankenstein) --> effect of gothic transgression --> question of who is the monetser in the story?

• “Gothic terrors activate a sense of the unknown and project an uncontrollable and overwhelming power” … “transgression, by crossing the social and aesthetic limits, serves to reinforce or underline their value and necessity, restoring or defining limits”

! Shakespearean tragedy does not follow this form (classical tragedy) -> much more experimental

! Shakespeare challenges conventions and makes new ways for drama and poetry, tragedy

! every tragedy includes threads of comedy (‘comic relief’), and every comedy includes threads of tragedy

• Rejecting emphasis on reason

• Focus on individual experience and power of imagination

• Connecting to the notion of ‘sensibility’ -> innate moral sense

• Focus on memories of an earlier experience (eg. childhood -> innocence)

• No irony

• Rejecting notion of general truth -> favor of personal, subjective truths

• Deep appreciation of nature -> human experiences ´unity of being´ -> nature experienced by everyone individually

• Revolutionary and experimental (eg. French/ Industrial revolution)

History:

• New kind of mass production

• Discovery of steel and iron

• Thriving literary market -> 50% women / 60% men able to read -> Quarterly Review, First Iron printing press

• French Revolution:

  • Power struggle: clergy vs nobility

  • Revolution of the people

  • Storming of the Bastille 14 July 1789

  • 1792 September massacres

  • 21 January 1793 Execution Louis XVI

  • 1793 Reign of Terror -> France declared war on England

  • Sudden erupting violence

  • 1804 Napoleon first Emperor of France

  • England mixed feelings -> positive: desire for freedom, authorial regime

  -> negative: fearing revolutionary spirit, anxiety Napoleon conquering

• Industrial Revolution:

  • Expansion workforce (in factories)

  • Flourishing trade with colonies -> commercial Empire

  • Increase power-driven machinery for manufacturing of goods

  • Trend urbanization

  • Improvement transportation systems

  • Mass consumerism

  • New working class (industrial workers)

  • Problems: low wages, objectification human workers, lack of housing in cities

The sublime:

• Pleasurable pain that arises from terror -> expanding the soul (not horror -> freezing soul)

• Edmund Burke: excite ideas od pain and danger, strongest emotion which mind is capable of feeling

• Vastness, grandness of nature -> not able to catch with human mind

• Cannot be explained with rationality, only by imagination

• “It gives me pleasure to see nature in these great though terrible scenes. It fills the mind with grand ideas, and turns the soul in upon itself.”

Science:

• Foundation of several scientific societies: Astronomical Society, Zoological Society, British Association for the Advancement of Science

• Scientific discoveries included: invention of the battery, atomic theory, link between electricity and magnetism, animal electricity

Vitalism:

• Woodsworth believed in natural energy, vital force of nature that relates to theory of life, energy is inherent in nature, can be unleashed by imagination and inspires it

• Coleridge questions source of energy, God vs different source

• Animal magnetism, or biomagnetism: “The study of the reaction of living organisms to the earth’s magnetic fields and artificial fields”

  • Based on (a) theories of magnetic fluids (physiological; animal magnetism) -> scientific

  • and (b) theories of suggestion and imagination (psychological; Mesmerism)

-> pseudo-scientific

• the spark of life -> vitalist debate -> whether life is product of some spiritual substance/ life spark of God or if life can be infused into body/ inherent in nature / created by indv. organism

Mesmerism:

• Based on the belief in healing by touch or by the ‘touch’ of one’s gaze

• Anton Mesmer (1734-1815): mixture of cure and entertainment

• “[M]esmerism serves as the principal link connecting primitive rites of exorcism with modern psychoanalysis.”

• Mesmerism became almost equivalent to hypnosis -> used to cure certain illnesses/ pains and used for entering different sphere

Galvanism:

• Attempts to reanimate the dead, lifeless matter

• Experiments on prisoners

• eg. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or: The Modern Prometheus

Key representatives:

• 1st generation: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge -> experienced French rev. more deeply, more affected by aspects of political happenings and aftermath

• 2nd generation: Lord George Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats

• Women: Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Darby Robinson, Charlotte Turner Smith

The novel begins with Jane living at her aunt's, Mrs Reed. Mrs Reed and her children are very cruel towards Jane and one night Mrs Reed locks Jane into the 'Red Room', a supposedly haunted room in the family home.

Mrs Reed sends Jane to Lowood School where the headmaster, Mr Brocklehurst, is also cruel towards Jane. Conditions are very poor at the school and Jane's best friend, Helen Burns, dies of consumption. Jane later becomes a teacher at Lowood.

Jane applies for a governess position at Thornfield Hall and gets the post. She becomes governess for Adele. Jane begins to fall in love with her employer, Mr Rochester.

A fire breaks out at Thornfield, nearly killing Rochester as he sleeps. Jane saves him. Rochester claims it was Grace Poole - a servant - who started the fire, however Jane doesn't think it was.

Jane is shocked when Rochester confesses his love and desire to marry her. She thought he wanted to marry Blanche Ingram. On the day of their wedding, a man turns up at the church to declare that Rochester cannot marry as he is already married. Rochester reveals all about his marriage, claiming his wife Bertha, is mad and he still wants to be with Jane.

Jane cannot be with Rochester when he is still married so she runs away, becoming homeless and then sick. The Rivers family take her in and nurse her back to health.

Jane inherits her uncle's wealth and estate. She finds out that the family that took her in are actually her cousins. St John Rivers asks Jane to join him in his missionary work abroad and be his wife. She nearly accepts but when she hears Rochester calling her in a dream, she decides she cannot marry someone she doesn't love.

Jane returns to Thornfield. When she arrives, she discovers it has burnt down. Jane suspects the worst - that everyone in the household has died, including Rochester. She soon hears the truth, that Bertha burnt the Hall down and Rochester, in his attempt to save her, became blind and lost his hand.

Rochester is now living at Ferndean, his usual retreat, and is blind. Jane rushes to him and they marry. The novel concludes with Jane and Rochester married with children. Rochester also regains his sight in one eye.

for a more detailed summary see https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zw76g82/revision/1

• highly diverse novels of that time e.g.: Charles Dickens, Hard Times – For These Times (April-August 1854) Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1891) Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)

--> all show interest in transformation (of the self)

--> social responsibility

--> criticise romanticists for being too self-centred and focussed on emotions – are rather rational

--> aim to cover national problems while also keeping close to individuals

• novels: R.L. Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

--> interest in identity formation

--> include Gothic features

Historical Context: Mid-Nineteenth Century

Politics

• New monarch: Queen Victoria (coronation 1837 at age 18)

• Imperial expansion → 1815 – 1914: Britain’s ‘Imperial Century’

• Britain emerges as the world’s prime naval power → ‘Pax Britannica’

Economy

• End of mercantilism, beginning of free trade → Corn Laws repealed in 1846

• Britain as global motor of Industrialisation → First Industrial Revolution ~1760s-1840s

Society & Culture

• Precarious living conditions of the working class and the poor

• Urbanisation → poverty, crime, disease, overcrowding

• Social order and discipline → rigid gender roles and class distinctions, middle-class family values

• Interest in Individualism and the human mind, rational thought as a value

• Industrialisation and scientific discoveries destabilise status of the Church of England

The Bronte Sisters

• Charlotte (1816-1855), Currer Bell, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847)

• Emily (1818-1848): Ellis Bell, Wuthering Heights (1847)

• Anne (1829-1849): Acton Bell, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

à daughters of a clergyman from Yorkshire

à (self)educated, writing from an early age

à used synonyms to get published

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

• Published under the pseudonym Currer Bell --> critics however soon suspected that it was written by a woman --> Bronte didn´t like that as it drew away the attention from the actual novel

• Psychological realism --> first person narrative, focus on development and private consciousness

• Romance & realism

• Connected to the Gothic tradition (Gothic elements) e.g.: supernatural, enclosed places, …

• Features Byronic Hero --> male figure, that has a difficult character and a lot of issues, someone wandering in the hope of finding happiness, despite many problems, he still has charm and ends up with female protagonist

Genre

Realism

• “the portrayal of life with fidelity. It is thus not concerned with idealization, with rendering things as beautiful when they are not, or in any way presenting them in any guise as they are not; nor, as a rule, is realism concerned with presenting the supranormal or transcendental […]. On the whole one tends to think of realism in terms of the everyday, the normal, the pragmatic” (729)

→ Focus on detail: descriptions of financial conditions, family relations, living conditions, neighbourhoods, and – especially in realist fiction since the 19th century – visual appearances

• In the Victorian period frequently “concerned with contemporary social problems; for instance, the effects of the industrial revolution, the influence of the theory of evolution, movements of political and social reform” (970)

  
  

Psychological Realism

• “denotes fidelity to the truth in depicting the inner workings of the mind, the analysis of thought and feeling, the presentation of the nature of personality and character. (732)

• For example, stream of consciousness, inner monologues, character-bound focalization

  
  

Bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel)

• “a novel which is an account of the youthful development of a hero or heroine (usually the former). It describes the processes by which maturity is achieved through the various ups and downs of life” (82)

• Frequently mirrors Enlightenment ideals of individualism and the common good as well

• Influenced by increased interest in childhood, education, and human development since late-18th century

key features of a coming-of-age novel, based on Jane Eyre:

• Guides reader through the life of the main character: in Jane Eyre from

  • Childhood at her aunt´s, --> miserable and lonely childhood

  • to Lowood school, --> receives education but under poor conditions

  • to Thornfield Hall, --> saves Rochester´s life and falls in love with him

  • to marriage --> marries Rochester

• Written in perspective of Jane --> she has a strong voice, even as a child (unusual for the time – fist novel where the child has a voice)

  
  

Understanding of children at the time

• On of the most famous pedagogical treatises of the time: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Émile, ou De l’éducation (1762) Engl. transl. Emile, or On Education (1763)

  • Assumes an innate goodness of children / people in their ‘natural state’

  • Society can potentially corrupt this goodness → therefore an initial phase of isolation during the child’s formative years is beneficial for its education (first raise them as individuals, then integrate them into society and make them enter the ‘social contract’)

  • Advocates minimal involvement of the educator, who should only guide the child in making its own experiences

Gothic

• The heyday of the classic Gothic novel was between the 1760s and the 1820, but Gothic fiction in a broader sense has remained popular ever since

• traditional Gothic novels “contain e strong element of the supernatural and have all or most of the now familiar topography, sites, props, presences and happenings: wild and desolate landscapes, dark forests, ruined abbeys, feudal halls and medieval castles with dungeons, secret passages, winding stairways, oubliettes, sliding panels and torture chambers; monstrous apparitions and curses; a stupefying atmosphere of doom and gloom; heroes and heroines in the direst of imaginable straits, wicked tyrants, malevolent witches, demonic powers of unspeakably hideous aspect, and a proper complement of spooky effects and clanking spectres” (356)

• over the course of the nineteenth century: often combined with cultural anxieties about moral decay, physical degeneration, madness, licentious sexuality, and racial impurity

  
  

Traces of gender equality

• Jane expresses a strong demand for gender equality

• rebellious voice --> unimaginable for a woman to talk like that in that time

--> novel is radical and innovative

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: an Autobiography (1847)

• The role of the governess:

  • Mostly from middle-class, educated --> being a teacher is often the only alternative for working in a factory --> many middle-class women didn´t want that

  • Has an in-between position:

    • neither part of family, nor a regular servant --> isolated position

    • low wages, no savings --> only possibility to quit the job is marriage

    • family mostly doesn't want governess to marry into their family – they want her to not be “marriage material”

--> Charlotte Bronte has also worked as a governess and a teacher at a boarding school --> she could include some of her own experiences into the story

Bertha Mason

• Link to gothic --> described as a monster --> devolution

• Mental illness --> Rochester being unsympathetic mirrors general reaction to mental illness during the time

• Bertha is not European --> othering --> Rochester: colonizer, Bertha: colonized

• Parallels to Jane:

  • Connected to Rochester (wife, wife-to-be)

  • Imprisonment (Jane: as a child, is bound to Thornfield as governess, Bertha: locked in the attic)

  • Both are rebellious

  • Hint at doppelganger motive (gothic element) --> about the stranger in ourselves

  • Novel criticises imperialism and colonialism, BUT: Bertha doesn´t have a own voice

• 1443 fall of Constantinople

• 1445 Gutenberg: printing press 

• 1492 Columbus in America

• 1517 Luther reformation

--> Rebirth of antique philosophy and morals – rise of Humanism and Neoplatonism

--> Anthropocentric worldview instead of theocentric

--> Renewal of religious views

--> Newfound confidence of humanity

--> New scientific and artistic aspirations

Renaissance in GB

Early Tudor Period (1485-1558)

• 1485–1509 Henry VII: End of War of Roses and Inauguration of Tudor dynasty

• 1509–1547 reign of Henry VIII

• 1526 William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament

• 1534 Separation from Roman Catholicism: Henry VIII head of the Church of England

• 1547–1553 Edward VI

• 1553–1558 Mary I (return to Catholicism)

  
  

Elizabethan Period (1558-1603)

• 1558–1603 Elizabeth I (return to Protestantism)

• 1599 Opening of the Globe Theatre

  
  

Literature

• Great age of English literature

• Rich theatre culture, but also prose, dramatic, lyric, and narrative poetry

• In the period which saw the emergence of Humanistic education, emphatic notions of literary authorship and its first professionalization, men (and some women) were educated to be “rhetorical men” (cf. Lanham), human beings whose central competence was eloquence—a verbal and semantic versatility which as “self-fashioning” and performance in a multitude of ways informed the whole of life

• Important Writers: Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson

  
  

Jacobean Period (1603-1625)

• 1603–1625 James I: Inauguration of Stuart dynasty

• 1607 Establishment of the first English colony in the New World

  
  

Literature

• the time of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies and tragicomedies – still rich theatre culture

• two new developments of poetry: metaphysical and chevalier

• The Jacobean Age was a hugely influential and rich historical period in drama, prose, and poetry

• The literature of the Jacobean Age was often dark in tone and questioned social order

• The Jacobean Age was a time of great uncertainty, and many feared an impending civil war.

• Important texts: prose writings of Bacon, John Donne’s sermons, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and the King James translation of the Bible

• important authors: Donne, Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, Lady Mary Wroth, Sir Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, John Webster, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, Philip Massinger, and Elizabeth Cary

  
  

Caroline Age (1625-1649)

• 1625–1649 Charles I

• 1642–1649 Civil War; Charles I executed in 1649

• 1643 The Licensing Order (Censorship)

• Closing of theatres (moral and religious reasons but also to prevent public assemblies – fear of uprising)

  
  

Commonwealth Period / Puritan Interregnum (1649-1660)

• 1649–1660 Interregnum

• This period extends from the end of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II.

• England was ruled by Parliament under the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell – Commonwealth of England

• Cromwell’s his death in 1658 marked the dissolution of the Commonwealth – his son was not seen fit to rule

  
  

Literature 1625 - 1660

• Cavalier poets: writers of witty and polished lyrics of courtship and gallantry

• English Civil War was fought between the supporters of the king Charles  (“Cavaliers”) and the supporters of Parliament (“Roundheads” -  they wore their hair cut short)

• Religious poets, e.g. George Herbert

• Prose writers e.g. Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne.

• John Milton – political writing

• 1660 Charles II returns from exile – restoration of monarchy à political stabilization

• 1660 Restoration of Charles II; Foundation of Royal Society;

• Reopening of theatres

• 1665-66 great plaque of London – quarter of population killed

• 1666 great fire of London

• 1685–1688 James II

• 1688–1689 Glorious Revolution; Accession of William of Orange

  
  

Literature

• John Milton (Paradise Lost)

• Often: political focus; some writers welcomed Charles II with open arms, while others lamented his return

  
  

• Return of theatre after 18 year ban – was highly popular

• Restoration comedies would frequently comment on marriage and class (hypocrisy of upper class) and include sexual content that would have been far too explicit for stage only years earlier à Comedy of Manners/Restoration Comedy à also called Comedy of Wit due to smart and funny dialogues

• Women were allowed to act on stage

• Writers were free to experiment with content, structure and form.

• Rise of Sentimental Drama/Comedy à replacing restoration wit with sentiment and sensibility, focus on domestic, moral trials, private woes, aimed at middle class spectators, aimed at improving audience’s sensitivity and morality

• Important writers: William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, William Congreve, Richard Steele, Edward Moore, William Whitehead…

The Augustan Age/Neoclassicism (ca. 1700 - 1745)

• 1707 Act of Union: the Kingdoms of England and Scotland are united to form the Kingdom of Great Britain

• Exploration and discovery: William Damper, Woodes Rodgers, James Cook

• Colonialization (Jamestown, Virginia, Plymouth, later: colonies in West Africa, new South Wales (Australia), Cape of Hope (South Africa)

• 1714 George I

• Technological innovations lead to the industrialization of ca. 1750  - production, improvements in infrastructure, and widespread urbanization

  
  

Literature

Neoclassicism

• Return to classical forms

• Focus on reason and rationality

• Imitation of classical forms and genres

• Stylized language

• E.g. political essays, satire

Eighteenth Century Satire

• associated with enlightenment: ideals of rationality, order, knowledge but also wit

• Satire: tool to expose and critique social injustice, politics and people in power but also to educate public (Horatian and Juvenalian satire)

• Writers: Alexander Pope (Rape pf the Lock), Jonathan Swift (A modest Proposal)

  
  

Rise of the novel

• More people read than in former centuries

• Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) 1719

• Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) 1726

• Other writers: Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Aphra Behn, Eliza Heywood

• Popular: voyage narratives – fascination with exotic (but: from colonizer view - often problematic)

• Realism and enlightenment: highlighting the authenticity and usefulness of the story

Establishment of the English periodical, news magazines

• E.g. Daniel Defoe (The Review), Richard Steele (The Tatler)

The Age of Sentiment (1745 -1780)

• 1755 Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language published

• 1775–1783 American War of Independence: Britain defeated

• 1789 French Revolution: an important inspiration for British Romanticism

• 1803–1815 Napoleonic Wars fought across Europe; Britain is Napoleon’s staunchest enemy

  
  

Literature

• More and more literature in everyday life

• Culture of literacy: everyone is writing letters

• Expansion of publishing, libraries and postal services

• Commercial print marketplace – literature becomes more accessible and cheap

  
  

Age of Sentiment

• Reaction against rationalism and idealization of reason

• Emphasis on human benevolence

• Focus on emotion and sensibility

• Search for new poetic forms

• Simple, seemingly natural language

  
  

The Novel

• Feminization of the novel – rise of female writers

• Aim to entertain and instruct

• Epistolary novel: product of its time

  • Novel consisting of letters, private correspondence

  • Means to delve into protagonist’s mind

  • Idea of “writing in the moment” à important for modernism later in time

  • Theory of mind: Idea to put oneself into others shoes

  • Question of reliability

• Writers: Samuel Richardson (Pamela),  Henry Fielding (Shamela), Frances Burney (Evelina)

Bildungsroman

depicts the intellectual, emotional, moral and spiritual development of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood, often showing a conflict between the individual and society’s norms and values.

Romance

1. A historical genre, like medieval romance, characterised by:

• A quest, usually undertaken by a knight, to win the favours of a ‘lady’

• Chivalric values and courtly love in an idealised setting

• Supernatural occurrences, such as spells and magic

2. A literary mode that includes motifs such as love and conflict; a quest; idealised or magical setting

Gothic

Promotes a “mood of decay, suspense and terror” (Murfin and Ray 205); arises in England in the 1760s, especially with Horace Walpole’s The Castle Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764).

Characteristics include:

• mystery and horror;

• supernatural events and occurrences, ghosts;

• “wild and desolate landscapes” (Cuddon 309);

• Archetypes: characters who are quintessentially good or evil

• a constant threat to sanity and chastity.

The importance of setting and spatiality

• The setting becomes a map to reading the character’s psyche.

• It is a site of dynamic interaction.

• Enables us to gauge a character’s state of mind and social positioning.

• The most dynamic sites of spatiality:

  • In-between or threshold spaces

  • Liminal spaces

  • Movement, mobility, transition between spaces

further information content wise:

Wide Sargasso Sea -> book which gives Bertha Mason a voice (her story of growing up and being married to Rochester)

Summary:

• Hester is one of the first European settlers in Masachussets, she arrives withour her husband Roger Chillingworth (who still has business in Amsterdam)

• She finds herself confronted with new challenges, a live without her husband, an independence she never had before

• Story takes place after she has her daughter Pearl from an affair.

• She faces severe judgement and ostracism from her Puritan community: prison sentence, publicly shamed and wearing of Scarlet letter "A"

• Despite that, she remains strong and dignified supporting herself and her daughter as a seamstress

• Father: respected Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, he is tomermented by guilt but remains silent.

• Roger Chillingworth, Hester's estranged husband, arrives in town under a false identity and dedicates himself to finding and tormenting Hester's lover

• Over the course: Dimmesdale's guilt consumes him, leading to physical and mental deterioration

• Chillingworth, obsessed with revenge, becomes more malevolent as he tortures Dimmesdale psychologically.

• Dimmesdale publicly confesses his sin during a sermon, revealing a self-inflicted scarlet letter on his chest and dies in Hester's arms.

• Chillingworth loses his purpose for revenge and dies shortly after

• Hester and Pearl leave the town, but years later, Hester returns alone and continues to wear the scarlet letter by choice until her death

Historical Context:

• Puritan Society: The novel is set in a Purtial community: strict religious group that settled in New Englang in the 1600s.

• When John Winthrop first settled to New England in 163,, colonists who camw with him were Puritans. They boycotted the English church, because they couldn't compromise the loss of Roman Catholicism with the Elizabethan Reformation.

• They were Seperatists that didn't tolerate other views and beliefs of society, wnated to establish a new life and their own social and political system

• They believed in predestination, moral purity, strict adherence to religious doctrine

• Known for intolerance of dissent, severe punishment of sins, particulary those related to sexual immorality

• Themes of Sin and Redemption: explores sin, guilt, and reflects on Puritanical obsession with moral righteousness

• critiques harshness and hypocrisy of Puritan society, showing how rigid moral code can lead to cruelty and oppression

• Hawthorne's Ancestory: He descended from Puritan settlers, one of his ancestors was a judge during the Salem witch trials

• Romanticism: emphasizzed emotion, individualism, deep appreciation for nature. Hawthorne uses symbolism, such as scarlet letter itseld and the natural world to reflect Romantic ideals. Novel often contrasts natural, unrestrained world with the artificial constraints of society.

• Example: Rose bush growing in front of the prison: stands for nature in contrast to society. In Hawthorne’s own words the rose bush “… may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom that … relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow” (48)

  
  

Key Points:

• Struggle between Individualism and Conformity

• Struggle to find a place in community that demands conformation

• Symbolism: Scarlet letter "A" standing for "Adulterer", the personification of sin. Red color = love/sexuality but also sin and shame

• Scarlet letter meaning shifts through the story: at the beginning it was her punishment, through the story the meaning shifts, it stands for all the good and meaningful things she contributed for society, her dignity and empowerement" - in the end she emroiders her scarlet letter byherself and embroideries become fashionable --> everybody sins

• Being a woman without a voice: Hester has no voice but refuses to talk and tell who the father is, she keeps the right to when to use her voice and does not obey and adapt to the system she is forced to

• Resistance: towards hierarchal system through dignity, being an outsider (living alone, working alone)

• Hester as an martyr: sacrifice she makes to live along her wishes: As a martyr, she is aware of her individual understanding of sin, acts accordingly, but also lives with the consequences

• She questions the justification of her punishment

• Hester (hebräisch und heißt versteckt/geheim sein/junge frau)

• narrated by lawyer who runs law office in Wall Street, New York Citiy. He employs a group of copyists, or scriveners, whose job is to hand-copy legal documents

• Bartleby is hired as a new scrivener, and at first, he seems to be efficient and hardworking. However, one day when asked to perform a routine task, Bartleby responds with the now-famous phrase, “I would prefer not to.” He continues to refuse more and more tasks, ultimately declining to do any work at all.

• The lawyer is baffled by Bartleby's passive resistance. Despite numerous attempts to help or reason with him, Bartleby eventually stops working entirely, even refusing to leave the office after it closes. The lawyer moves his office to avoid dealing with Bartleby, but Bartleby is eventually arrested for vagrancy.

• In the end, Bartleby dies in prison, having refused to eat or engage with anyone.

• The Lawyer cuts off his narration, saying that there is “little need for proceeding further,” as the reader can easily imagine Bartleby’s fate. Then, The Lawyer decides to “divulge one little item of rumor” he has heard since Bartleby’s death. He isn’t sure how true it is, but The Lawyer has heard that, before working for The Lawyer, Bartleby worked as a clerk in the “Dead Letter Office” in Washington, and had been abruptly fired in a change of administration. When The Lawyer ponders the rumor, he can’t help but become emotional, as dead letters sounds much “like dead men” to him. He notes that this business of burning dead letters, carrying with them “pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping” could turn any man into a hopeless one. “On errands of life,” The Lawyer notes, these letters sped to death. He ends the story, “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”

  
  

Themes:

• Isolation and Alienation: Bartleby is portrayed as a deeply isolated character, disconnected from society and his workplace. His refusal to engage or explain his actions reflects the alienation of the individual in the modern capitalist world.

• Free Will and Passive Resistance: Bartleby’s passive resistance — expressed through his repeated statement, “I would prefer not to” — raises questions about free will, choice, and agency. He is not defiant in an active way but chooses not to participate in the expectations of his environment.

• The Dehumanizing Nature of Work: The story explores the repetitive, soul-crushing nature of clerical work, especially in the context of 19th-century Wall Street. The scriveners, including Bartleby, are depicted as mechanical in their jobs, devoid of individuality and vitality.

Symbolism:

• Wall Street: The setting, Wall Street, symbolizes the heart of capitalism and business, with its focus on efficiency and profit over humanity. Bartleby’s office and later his imprisonment are metaphors for the confinement and restrictions placed on individuals in such a society.

• The Walls: Throughout the story, Bartleby is surrounded by walls—both literal and figurative. His workspace has walls, he stares at a wall from his desk, and he ends up behind prison walls. The walls symbolize barriers to communication, freedom, and personal connection.

Character of Bartleby:

• Bartleby remains enigmatic throughout the story. His backstory is revealed in fragments—he once worked in the Dead Letter Office (handling undeliverable mail), which serves as a powerful metaphor for hopelessness and disconnection.

• He is a symbol of passive defiance against societal norms and expectations. His refusal to explain himself leaves readers to speculate on his motivations and state of mind.

Narrator:

• The lawyer who narrates the story represents a conventional, pragmatic view of the world. He is sympathetic but also perplexed by Bartleby’s behavior. His attempts to help Bartleby reflect society's struggle to deal with individuals who do not conform to norms.

• The narrator's ultimate failure to understand or help Bartleby speaks to the limitations of conventional morality and compassion in a highly structured, impersonal world.

• It has been argued by critics that this story itself is a “Dead Letter” from The Lawyer to Bartleby—it is only after Bartleby’s death that The Lawyer is able to understand even a little bit about his former employee’s history and mentality. Also, The Lawyer shows by far the most emotion he has in the entire story in this final passage, empathizing with Bartleby more after his death than he ever could in life. The Lawyer feels for Bartleby having had to witness so many failures by words to connect people, but, further than that, he comes to see Bartleby as a proxy for all humanity, as we all have handicaps and weaknesses that separate us, so perhaps we should try to be more connected to—and more charitable towards—each other.

Reception and Legacy:

• Upon its initial publication, "Bartleby, the Scrivener" did not receive much attention, but it has since become one of Herman Melville’s most analyzed and discussed works.

• The story is seen as a precursor to existential literature, exploring themes of meaninglessness, individuality, and modern alienation. It has been interpreted in various ways, including as a critique of capitalism, an examination of depression, and a reflection on personal freedom.

• considered one of the greatest dramatists of

the 20th century

• other works: The Crucible (1953) and A View

from the Bridge (1955)

• He was considered a literary celebrity,

especially after marrying Marilyn Monroe

• considered himself a writer of social plays with

  a focus on morality and psychology

known for his criticism on the American Dream

Setting:

• forms backdrop of actions

• takes on a symbolic meaning

• creates atmosphere that underlines conflicts, relations etc.

Characters:

• Willy Loman: elderly salesman living in New York but traveling a lot for his job; increasing issues to remember things and mixing up present and past; suffering from depression and guilty conscience due to disrupted relation to his older son Biff and an extramarital affair

• Linda Loman: stereotypical housewife; taking care of the home and the two sons; always protecting Willy and playing down his suicidal thoughts

• Biff Loman: older son of Willy and Linda; really unsatisfied with his life; he is the only one knowing about Willy's affair and distastes his father for it

• Happy Loman: younger son; desperately waiting for his promotion and overestimating himself; womanizer driven by his sexuality

• Uncle Ben: Willy's older brother; made a fortune in Africa (it is not mentioned with what exactly); only appears in Willy's memory

Summary & Analysis:

Death of a Salesman, critically assesses the American Dream. As the Loman family struggles with what it means to be successful and happy in post-war America, its members serve as symbolic representations of the struggle to define that dream. The play ends with the death of one salesman’s Sisyphean hope for wealth and universal acclaim, yet it glimmers with hope for his son, who finally turns toward a life of meaningful work and self-realization.

• Failed travels

• Form of novel was satirized

• Adaptions mostly focus on limited parts of story, different in purpose

• Parody of Defoe´s adventure stories -> but for readers of time it was not clear -> not even clear that account is fictional

• Presented as travel logue, travel narrative rooted in realism, (“true story”) -> projected realism by supported maps and drawings -> Gulliver explores territories that were known to exist

• Voyage takes us to several islands/ countries -> Part 1: A voyage to Lilliput, Part 2: A voyage to Brobdingnag, Part 3: a voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdudrib, Luggnagg, and Japan, Part 4: A voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms

• Starts with shipwreck, Gulliver swims to shore and falls asleep on gras -> when he wakes up he finds himself tied down by an army of tiny people -> he roared so loud that they got scared and ran away -> they start communicating, first in sign language then in language of the Natives, the language he ultimately learns -> he translates documents for readers

• He does not colonize unlike Crusoe, but Gulliver adapts (but not in size)

• fascination with ‘exotic’ objects

  • Defamiliarize what seems familiar -> prompts readers to change perspective

  • Also concerned with little things, everyday items

  • Contains detailed descriptions, enhance realism in fantastical world and fascination with exotic things at time (esp. with objects from other countries)

• Political tension -> Lilliput threatened by another island which it has been at war with in the dispute on how to break an egg the correct way (refers to civil war between Catholics and protestants and war between France and England)

• Gulliver was asked to put end to war which he manages to do without any bloodshed, after a while he faces impeachment in Lilliput -> he has to flee to the other island and ends up in England, after two months he travels again because he is restless

• New Tempest, discovers new island, all are huge and animals -> eager to devour him -> lives with farmer family -> his master shows him around the country and people pay good money to observe the tiny man -> on this island he is belittled and bestialized, compared to weasel, spider, frog, insect

  • He tries to adapt -> testimony to his resilience

  • Queen buys Gulliver off from his master and he starts entertaining the king and court with his stories

  • Gulliver is pathetic, nothing he can do to impress the giants, only gets laughter from his audience

  • He tries to make himself, and the country he comes from grander and much more wonderful than it actually is

  • His perspective has changed, Gulliver is tiny and insignificant, the king on the other hand is noble and just -> Gulliver tries to show off and emphasizes how wonderful the English parliament system is, politics in general and how well law functions -> king listened but laughs

  • Gulliver is quite proud but on island he cannot put himself in proper perspective -> in the end he is on board of a ship that takes him back to England

• During third voyage ship is attacked by pirates that take him to a strange and magical island-> combination of fantasy and science, logic, creative, mystical

  • Two groups of people who never seem to talk with each other, they all live in their fantasy worlds, they practice astrology, astronomy and use magnetic forces to navigate island -> are extremely interested in mathematical and musical concept -> theoretical approach

  • Visit to academy of leader can be read as attack on philosophers (eg. experimental philosophy)

  • Knowledge in regard to science but no connection to real life -> idea here is: science is insignificant if it is restricted to human intellect and not conclude common sense -> intellectual alone not enough to solve problems of common people

• Final Journey on utopian island -> intelligent horses and uncivilized

  • As these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by Nature with a general Disposition to all Virtues, and have no Conceptions or Ideas of what is Evil in a Rational Creature, so their grand Maxim is, to cultivate Reason, and be wholly governed by it. […] Friendship and Benevolence are the two principal Virtues among the Houyhnhnms, and these not confined to particular Objects, but universal to the whole Race.”

  • Before meeting horses, he saw other creatures -> emphasizes their nakedness which distinguishes himself from the other´s because he wears clothes -> their body hair is offensive to him and also their animalistic behavior

  • Yahoos resemble image of natural man -> savage?

  • 18th century account on racial difference and description of indigenous people/ Natives -> what they emphasize is not so much racial difference but racial sameness

  • Animals here passes faculty of reason and Yahoos are bad animalistic creatures even though there are human

  • High colonial description -> Gulliver takes on similar perspective on Yahoos, eventually he ahs to realize that what is based on bodily appearance makes him, when he takes his clothes off, identical to the people he despises -> only realizes it when becoming attracted to young yahoo female

  • “For now I could no longer deny, that I was a real Yahoo, in every Limb and Feature”

  • On this final island yahoos are servants to the horses, Gulliver tries to stay as long as possible but they do not want him there and send him out into the ocean -> makes it back to England but the last journey had a lasting effect on him -> in England he realizes that he despises any kind of human contact

• The mechanics (and politics) of seeing -> needs spectacle and telescope to see properly -> key devices in novel -> had them in private pocket so Lacrutions did not find them when they searched him -> magnification, extension refinement of physical capacities -> shows limits to human senses -> they need something to extend their view with help of modern technology ( could also mean visual effect -> Gulliver’s inability as observer -> ultimately suggest that he is an unreliable narrator -> extending to: Englishmen/ readers inability to see true mechanisms of corrupted governance

• Satire of naïve imperialism -> Swift wants to induce more skeptical view in his readers

• history or his story? -> constantly reminded by narrator that the narrators account is based on facts (as in Crusoe)

• critique of imperial ambition -> Gulliver reports that he never told the king about his findings even though he is bound to do so -> either not worth claiming the land or it would not be possible/ difficult to do so

• “[T]hey go on Shore to rob and plunder; they see a harmless People, are entertained with Kindness, they give the Country a new Name, they take formal Possession of it for the King, they set up a rotten Plank or a Stone for a Memorial, they murder two or three Dozen of the Natives, bring away a Couple more by Force for a Sample, return home, and get their Pardon. Here commences a new Dominion acquired with a Title by Divine Right. Ships are sent with the first Opportunity; the Natives driven out or destroyed, their Princes tortured to discover their Gold; a free License given to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust; the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants: And this execrable Crew of Butchers employed in so pious an Expedition, is a modern Colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous People… BUT this Description, I confess, doth by no means affect the British Nation, who may be an Example to the whole World for their Wisdom, Care, and Justice in Planting Colonies…

  • Deeply ironic, colonial practice which indeed have Irishmen experienced themselves whose people were almost slaves

• Lucian, The True Story (2 AD) -> key inspiration for Gulliver’s travel -> contains imaginary countries written in style of history -> one of the first sci-fi narratives which include travel to outer space and encounter with alien life-form

  • Tempest take sailors to moon where they fight with kings from moon over sun colonization of morning star

• “[T]he chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it; and if I could compass that design, without hurting my own person or fortune, I would be the most indefatigable writer you have ever seen, without reading I have got materials toward a treatise proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale, and to show it would be only rationis capax. Upon this great foundation of misanthropy, though not in Timon’s manner, the whole building of my Travels is erected; and I never will have peace of mind until all honest men are of my opinion (Swift to Pope)

  • Harsh and sharp attack on colonial practices, society, institutions

Gulliver´s travel can be compared to Defoe:

• Both adventure stories

• Both sailors who travel off to places, distant islands

• Both disguised as authentic travel accounts

• Both written in first person

• Both regarded as children’s book

• Parody of Defoe´s adventure stories