LITERATURA BRYTYJSKA

Piotr Kaowski

1. Literatura Brytyjska dr Magorzata uczyska-Hodys

1. Anglo-Saxon Literature

The Middle Ages are divided into two periods: Old English and Middle English.
Old English is subdivided into:

Pre-Old English: 450-700

Early Old English: 700-900
Late Old English: 900-1100.

Old English was not a unified language. Four basic dialects have been identified:

Kentish
West Saxon
Mercian
Northumbrian (Mercian and Northumbrian, due to similarities, are sometimes labeled
as Anglian)

Although Christianity had a strong influence on culture and arts, it did not dominate it
entirely: many manuscripts were adorned with colorful figures and churches with basreliefs, linking the low culture of popular beliefs with the high culture of official religion.

410: the Roman legions withdraw from Britain.

450: the first Anglo-Saxon and Jutish invasions from north-west Germany begin.
597: St. Augustine's Christian mission at Canterbury is established.

Literature of the period was also shaped by Antique writings, translated and adapted to
Anglo-Saxon culture, which mixed with the legendary and historical material of the
Germanic peoples, as well as orally-transmitted stories.

Old English literature originates both in monasteries, hence the Christian themes, and in
courts, from which the pre-Christian heroic epic comes, christianized when put into writing.

The heroic epic came into being through numerous battles fought by the early Germanic
tribes, and the Viking invasions. A hero of the epic has to be governed by a certain code of
conduct becoming a great warrior. He has to be physically strong, showing extraordinary
courage and prowess, has to fight frequently with man and monster alike. He has to accept
his fate with dignity, it being usually to die in battle, as the warrior's code of honor dictates.
Moral obligations of revenge also directed his motives. Kinship liaisons were very important
in Anglo-Saxon society in which no solitary man could survive. The Germanic world as well
as later feudal states shared the archetype of a literary hero whose strength and valiance
saved those who depended on him. If they needed to be avenged, it was only to show the
superior qualities of the hero.

1. 1. Dream of the Rood

The Dream of the Rood is the finest of a rather large number of religious poems in Old
English. Neither its author nor its date of composition are known. It appears in a late tenthcentury manuscript located in Vercelli in northern Italy. The poem may antedate its
manuscript, because some passages from the Rood's speech were carved, with some
variations, in runes on a stone cross at some time after its construction early in the eighth
century; this is the famous Ruthwell Cross, which is preserved near Dumfries in southern
Scotland. The precise relation of the poem to the cross is, however, uncertain.
The experience of the Rood its humiliation at the hands of those who changed it from tree
to instrument of punishment for criminals, its humility when the young hero Christ mounts
it, and its pride as the restored three of glory - has a suggestive relevance to the conditions
of the sad, lonely, sin-stained Dreamer. His isolation and melancholy is typical of exile
figures in Old English poetry. For the Rood, however, glory has replaced torment, and at the
end, the Dreamer's description of Christ's triumphant entry into heaven with the souls He has
liberated from hell reflects the Dreamer's response to the hope that has been brought to him.
Christ and the Cross both act, paradoxically, in keeping with, and diametrically opposed to,
a code of heroic action: Christ is heroic and passive, while the Cross is loyal to its lord, yet
must participate in his death.

The Cross states that it cannot fall and it must stay strong to fulfill the will of God.
However, to fulfill this grace of God, the Cross has to be a critical component in Jesus'
death. This puts a whole new light on the actions of Jesus during the Crucifixion. Neither
Jesus nor the Cross is given the role of the helpless victim in the poem, but instead both
stand firm. The Cross says, Jesus is depicted as the strong conqueror and is made to appear a
"heroic German lord, one who dies to save his troops". Instead of accepting crucifixion, he
'embraces' the Cross and takes on all the sins of mankind.

The Dream of the Rood is "the central literary document for understanding [the] resolution
of competing cultures which was the presiding concern of the Christian Anglo-Saxons".
Within the single culture of the Anglo-Saxons is the conflicting Germanic heroic tradition
and the Christian doctrine of forgiveness and self-sacrifice, the influences of which are
readily seen in the poetry of the period. Thus, for instance, in The Dream of the Rood, Christ
is presented as a "heroic warrior, eagerly leaping on the Cross to do battle with death; the
Cross is a loyal retainer who is painfully and paradoxically forced to participate in his Lord's
execution". Christ can also be seen as "an Anglo-Saxon warrior lord, who is served by his
thanes, especially on the cross and who rewards them at the feast of glory in Heaven". Thus,
the crucifixion of Christ is a victory, because Christ could have fought His enemies, but
chose to die. John The poem "show[s] Christ's willingness, indeed His eagerness, to
embrace His fate, [and] it also reveals the physical details of what happens to a man, rather
than a god, on the Cross". This image of Christ as a 'heroic lord' or a 'heroic warrior' is seen
frequently in Anglo-Saxon (and Germanic) literature and follows in line with the theme of
understanding Christianity through pre-Christian Germanic tradition. In this way, "the poem
resolves not only the pagan-Christian tensions within Anglo-Saxon culture but also current
doctrinal discussions concerning the nature of Christ, who was both God and man.

The most overt pagan element is the worship the tree from which the cross was made is
given. The tree speaks, invoking pagan animism.

Old English poetry features:

Poetic language is created out of a special vocabulary that contains a multiciplity of terms
for lord, warrior, spear, shield, and so on. Synechdoche and metonymy are common figures
of speech as when iron is used for sword. A particularly striking effect is achieved by the
kenning, a compound of two words in place of another, as when sea becomes whale-road,
or body is called life-house. Kennings compounded verbs with nouns or nouns with nouns,
creating similes, or poetic interpretations, stressing the newly-created word's aspects,
concealing and revealing its qualities.
Because special vocabulary and compounds are among the chief poetic effects, the verse is
constructed in such a way as to show off such terms by creating a series of them in
apposition. Notice, how in Dream of the Rood, the same object is mentioned several times in
a row, using different words, like: The body grew cold, fair house of the spirit or the son was
victorious in this foray, mighty and successful.
Alliteration was the practice of using words that start with the same letter in a verse,
stressing its metrical scheme,to give it cadence and make it easier for oral poets to remember
it for example: shining shield and sharp spear. Consonants were alliterated, because the
repetition of initial vowels is less frequently possible and has less impact.
Alliteration was supported by the caesura, a visible space in the middle of the verse,
signaling two strong accents in two thus created half-lines. Old English poems were thus
divided into two columns on a page. Two basic patterns of caesura exist: end-stopped lines
when a line conveyed one thought, or one sentence, and run-on lines when a line did not end
but was carried over to the second one. Alliteration progressed across the caesura in a
variety of patterns, for example 2:1.
Old English was synthetic, having a free word order.

Old English poetry was spoken aloud. At the level of language, all the poetic tools
(kennings, alliteration) and pragmatic markers directed at the listeners facilitated this mode,
and at the structural level, an oral poem is composed from thematic episodes, like the hero's
description, his genealogy, social events, battles, details of armor and weapons, etc.

Dream... as meditative poetry:

Divided into three parts:

Memory (Recounting the dream)

Understanding (What happened in the dream)
Will (Spreading the gospel)

The Rood being adorned with gold makes it a symbol of faith, while it being drenched with
blood makes it a historical object.

Prosopopeia, or personification, is the poetic device of envoicing an inanimate object, in

this case, the Rood. Here, this personification is symbolic, rather than literal.

2. Middle English Literature

Middle English is divided into:

Early Middle English: 1100-1300

Late Middle English: 1300-1500

Middle English literature takes inspiration from French troubadour songs, Dante, Boccaccio.
French romances and allegories provided the basis for translations and adaptations. It also
used native sources like the Arthurian legends.

The ruling class of Normans spoke Norman French, while the Saxon people retained their
Anglo-Saxon dialects. Norman French was the language used at court. For a long time,
French was spoken by the Norman upper and middle classes and was used by Englishmen
when interacting with the Normans. English thus became an inferior language of the lower
class.

The Middle Ages inherited from Antiquity three types of literary style:

The High Style: presenting a variety of forms and syntactic structures. It has
nominal tendencies of amplification and emphatic modification. It has a very
dramatic way of presenting complex images, sometimes using the ancient device of
very precise description of some minute detail. It utilizes both aspects of language: to
interact, and to provide context.
The Low Style: with the narrative having primary status and the formality of diction
contrasting with the plainness of style. The verb phrase is far more frequent and
commonplace phrases are used.
The Middle Style: being something in between. It is detailed and conceptual, mainly
in the descriptions, and has an intricately worked-upon register.

At the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, social status of
Norman French was diminishing. It continued to be used for official documents and legal
matters long after it ceased to be spoken.
In the second half of the fourteenth century, a group of poems appeared, using alliteration
again. This phenomenon is called the alliterative revival. It was most likely a response to
French fashion. Moreover, alliteration continued in English poetry throughout the Middle
English period, and regained importance as French weakened.
Poetical works dealing with Christianity often used the allegory as its most powerful means
of expression. As a genre, allegory is a figurative narrative or description conveying veiled
moral meaning, sometimes functioning as an extended metaphor. Allegorical thinking
developed as a long-established tradition of interpreting the Bible through the codified set of
patterns, connected also with making parallels between The Old and the New Testaments.
As a mode of expression, allegory assumed four levels of non-literal meanings: literal,
allegorical, tropological or moral, and anagogical. These corresponded to the historical
account, the life of Christ and the Church Militant, the individual soul and moral virtue and
the divine schema and the Church Triumphant, respectively. To sum up:

The letter shows us what God and our fathers did,

The allegory shows us where our faith is hid.
The moral meaning gives us rules of daily life,
The anagogy shows us where we end our strife.

Another medieval genre was the dream vision. It opens up the possibility of incorporating
various elements of narrative, adventure, and allegorical characters. For the medieval
audience, dreams were internally motivated, and could be related to the divinity or demonic;
both types belonging to high or low culture. In dreams, we do not take responsibility for our
actions, and thus the writer is more open to write about otherwise forbidden topics.

English secular literature had the comic form of fabliau: a short tale in verse, almost
invariably in octosyllabic couplets, treating human faults and ordinary incidents with humor.
The plot of a fabliau is almost invariably about trickery and sex, and the viewpoint is rather
amoral as the immoral character wins, and the respectable suffers.

Heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative
poetry; it refers to poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming pairs of lines in iambic
pentameter.

2. 1. Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales

Chaucer was born into a newly-forming middle class in a turbulent period of the Middle
Ages where previously-established society of the three estates (Nobility, Church, people)
was transforming. His middle-class occupation of a civil servant brought him into contact
with overlapping bourgeois and aristocratic social words, without being anchored in either,
he was well-learned, traveled the world, heard many languages.
In 1372 he visited Italy on a diplomatic mission which brought him into direct contact with
the Italian Renaissance, and manuscripts of Dante, Petrarch and Boccacio, which influenced
him greatly.
The work was written in the 14th century.
The Norman invasion introduced rhyme and French culture, esp. Court culture topics of
works shifted to love, jousting tournaments, etc.
Women start appearing as characters.
The frame narrative of the Tales is that a group of pilgrims are traveling to Canterbury, and
they hold a contest for the best story on their way there, and during their return. It is within
that context that each character tells a self-contained story.
Chaucer could have decided for such a structure due to Boccaccio's influence (Decameron),
which contains stories analogous to Tales. However, these stories were well-known, and
there is no proof of Chaucer taking them from the Decameron.
The chief difference between Chaucer and Boccacio is that he presents stories told by people
representing various social classes and occupations.
The variety of tellers is matched by the diversity of their tales: tales are assigned to
appropriate narrators and juxtaposed to bring out contrasts in genre, style, tone, and values.
Thus, the Knight tells a courtly romance about two lovers vying for a lady, while the Miller
tells a fabliau a rude and vulgar tale of sexual exploitation.
Chaucer conducts two fictions simultaneously: that of the individual tale and the pilgrim
telling it. He develops the second fiction not only through the prologue, but also through the
pilgrims' interactions connecting the stories. For example, the Reeve is offended by the
Miller's tale, seeing it as an attack on himself, and tells a tale in which a figure similar to the
Miller is satirized. The pilgrims also comment on each other's stories. Thus, the frame
narrative and the individual stories interact.
The Prologue takes place during the Easter/spring, and describes it vividly: symbols of
rebirth, fertility, birth of Jesus. Historical background: reformation, weakening of
knighthood (The Knight's rusty armor).
The pilgrimage is a metaphor for journeying towards death (they go to see the relics of St.
Thomas Beckett.
The pilgrims are ordered from good to bad: from the noble Knight, to the treacherous,
possibly homosexual, Pardoner.
In Chaucer's times, it was thought that outward appearance signals character: eg. The Miller
is ribald and rude, and thus extremely ugly.

The Knight and the Squire:

The Monk and the Friar:

The Knight is idealized, but there are hints he might not be so good in reality: he
fought for the pagans as a mercenary.
The Squire is much more relaxed, well-dressed, doesn't fully conform himself to
knighthood. He is a courtier first and foremost, and fought not for faith, but to
impress a lady.

The Monk doesn't keep to his cloister: he spends all his days hunting. He is fat and
well-dressed, and lives the life of a freeloader.
The Friar also uses his Cloister and his subjects as means to live. He lacks piety and
modesty, resorting to begging instead.

The Clerk and the Franklin:

The Clerk, though a layman, is more pious than men of cloth. He is very diligent in
his study and lives in poverty, spending all his money on books to pursue an
education. Only a bit satirized for studying even during a pilgrimage, he is
nevertheless a positive character.
The Franklin is good, jubilant, and hospitable nobleman, but also rich and indulgent.
Loves to feast. Although he works as a sheriff and tax auditor, he is also well-liked
and his hospitably wins him favor. He is an overtly positive character.

The Sailor: skilled at seafaring, well-traveled, rugged and hardened by his craft, he's also a
bit ruthless, killing whoever he captures, stealing wine from taverns.

The Wife of Bath: has been married 5 times (she's deaf, probably because her husbands used
to box her ears), is described as sensual and attractive (has a gap in her front tooth, which
used to be a symbol of lust), she's a good weaver and runs a private business. Obviously
experienced in the art of love, she hopes to find a new husband during the pilgrimage.

The Parson: an ideal example of a priest, he lives by the Bible before teaching it to the
commoners. He is explicit about his need of being a good example to his flock. Most parish
priests at that time chose to take a benefice, a position far away from their parish where
duties were few. This allowed them to earn more, but at the cost of neglecting their spiritual
purpose. The Parson does not do this, he is willing to sacrifice his comfort for the good of
the people.

The Miller: violent, rude, ugly, a cheater and a swindler. He tells a fabliau: a vulgar, comical
story, to match his personality.

The Summoner and the Pardoner:

The Summoner is extremely ugly. He overindulges in drink. He is a briber and an

extortionist and greatly abuses his position. He has no faith, knowing that any
punishment can be evaded with a bribe. He probably also sexually abuses women he
is to summon before the court. The Pardoner is of doubtful sexual orientation. He
sells pardons (notes absolving sins), and makes a living by selling fake relics, which
he also tries to pawn off to the other pilgrims.

2. 2. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The language of the poem is much more different than Chaucer's London Middle English.
The poem was discovered by Sir Robert Cotton, the great antiquarian of Elizabethan times.
He has obtained it from a library in Yorkshire, thus placing The Gawain Poet somewhere in
the Midlands of England, probably near present-day Stafford. The Gawain Poet was
Chaucer's contemporary, but it is extremely unlikely that they have ever met.

Written in the West Midland dialect, mixing archaic alliterative verse with rhyme.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an Arthurian romance. The poem's plot combines
supernatural elements with romantic intrigue. Both its main outlines and the handling of its
descriptive details reflect the treatment the originally Celtic Arthurian legends had received
at the hands of medieval French poets.

Arthurian romance: a narrative, written in prose or verse, concerned with adventure,

courtly love, and chivalry. Stories of King Arthur and his court are a mixture of myth,
adventure, love, enchantment, and tragedy. They contain supernatural elements.

As a late fourteenth-century poem, Gawain is a product of the end of the Middle Ages. The
ideal of knightly conduct, which Gawain represents -the conduct of courage, loyalty, and
courtesy against which the poem's action is to be viewed was by then a long-established,
though still viable, ideal, which had become subject to superficial acceptance, and even
satirical treatment. A comparison might be made to the Boy Scout ideal, similarly viable and
similarly ridiculed.

The main story elements derive from folklore, but the poet probably encountered them in
French or Latin literary versions, and was the first to combine them:

The Beheading Game: in which an unknown challenger proposes that one of a group
of warriors volunteer to cut off his head, the stroke to be repaid in kind at some
future date. The hero accepts this challenge, and at the crucial moment of reprisal is
spared and praised for his courage.
The Temptation Story: in which an attractive woman attempts to seduce a man under
circumstances in which he is bound to resist her.
The Exchange of Winnings: in which two men agree to exchange what each has
acquired during a set period of time.

In Gawain, these elements are intertwined and resolved in the end, when Gawain is proved
fallible. His faulty act is cowardice, since it was brought about by fear of death,
covetousness, since it involved the desire to possess a valuable object, and treachery, since it
resulted in a breach of faith with the host to whom Gawain has sworn loyalty.

Gawain is full of juxtapositions: the magnificent castle where Gawain spends Christmas is
also a stop on his way to certain death. Christmas festivities are also overshadowed by fear
and anxiety.

Love and war ritualized: Courtly love the lady is higher on the social ladder. Love is
conceptualized in feudal terms. Due its scandalous nature it cannot be fulfilled.

Courtly love was a particular kind of love, involving service and veneration on the part of a
man and a nominal or actual domination on the part of a woman. Courtly love is secretive,
illegitimate, but ennobling, requiring a man's submission. In medieval literature, it
incorporates both idealistic and adulterous love. The only common feature of all
manifestations of courtly love is its specifically courtly character and its integration into the
framework of the poetic idea of courtly society.
The idea of courtly love developed in the feudal courts of southern France in the first half of
the twelfth century and spread from there. It was based on the social structure of the feudal
court, with the sovereign at the top and his servants at the bottom. A lady was the symbol of
all feminine virtues, unavailable and haughty, and married to someone else, frequently to
one's superior. Such relationships were modeled on the feudal dependence of the feudal
follower on his lord and were also treated as courtly etiquette and a literary game of
gallantry, which, in time, developed into a more serious code of social morality.
Courtly love emphasized nobility and chivalry. Originally created for the entertainment of
nobility, these ideas became more popular. Loving nobly was considered to be an
enriching practice.
The historic analysis of courtly love varies between different schools of historians. That sort
of history which views the early Middle Ages dominated by a prudish and patriarchal
theocracy, views courtly love as a "humanist" reaction to the puritanical views of the
Catholic Church. In the language of the scholars who endorse this view, courtly love is
cherished for its exaltation of femininity as an ennobling, spiritual, and moral force, in
contrast to the ironclad chauvinism of the first and second estates.
However, other scholars note that courtly love was certainly tied to the Church's effort to
civilize the crude Germanic feudal codes in the late 11th century. It has also been suggested
that the prevalence of arranged marriages required other outlets for the expression of more
personal occurrences of romantic love, and thus it was not in reaction to the prudery or
patriarchy of the Church but to the nuptial customs of the era that courtly love arose.
A point of ongoing controversy about courtly love is to what extent it was sexual. All courtly
love was erotic to some degree, and not purely platonicthe troubadours speak of the
physical beauty of their ladies and the feelings and desires the ladies arouse in them.
However, it is unclear what a poet should do: live a life of perpetual desire channeling his
energies to higher ends, or physically consummate.

Gawain accepts the immortality-granting girdle because he recognizes in it a way to avoid

his death. At the same time, his act may seem as a way of granting the lady a final favor
while evading her romantic advances. Its full meaning as cowardly, and hence covetous,
grasping at life, is revealed to him at the end.

The hunting scenes parallel the romance scenes: the lord hunts the animals, and so the lady
tries to seduce Gawain. The relation between the hunting of the fox and Gawain's ruse in
concealing the belt is also evident.

Gawain's cowardice is forgiven, because what he did was done not out of lust or greed, but
of love of life, which he wished to spare.
Gawain belongs to the so-called Alliterative Revival. After the Norman Conquest,
alliterative verse continued to be recited by oral poets. At the beginning, the Gawain Poet
pretends that this romance is an oral poem and asks the audience to listen to a story which
he heard.

The contemporary audience presumably appreciated alliteration, understood archaic Old

English poetic diction, and were well-acquainted with French Arthurian romances and the
latest fashion in armor, dress, and architecture, so heavily featuring in the poem.

Gawain is being measured against a moral and Christian ideal of chivalry.

Tryst: Gawain goes on a quest/trial.

The real quest is Gawain's stay in the castle, not taking the hit from the Green Knight.
The knightly values are challenged, impossible to be fulfilled: Gawain is expected to
commit adultery in the name of chivalry. Wisdom dictates to keep the girdle, loyalty to give
it back and die. Loyalty itself is also challenged: to whom exactly should Gawain be loyal?
Challenging the romantic ideal is implicated in the prologue, describing Troy conquered
through deceit and trickery.

Plot composed of cyclical elements:

Time: from one Christmas to another, with heavy emphasis on the cycle of seasons.
Location: Camelot > Gawain's quest > back to Camelot
Structure: Hundred and one stanzas, beginning and ending with mentions of history.

Gawain beings preparing for his quest in autumn, and rides out on All Saints' Day: symbolic
of death.

The Christmas celebration at the beginning is stripped of Christian context. The Green
Knight brings Christianity with himself.

Axe and holly: war and peace, life and death, paganism and Christianity.
Holly: Christ's crown of thorns. The essence of suffering and death followed by
resurrection.
The Green Knight's holly is a symbol of life in the dead of winter, as well as of
Christ's suffering: both of life and death. Life and death are thus impossible to
disconnect.
Green: associated with the holy Grail. However, the Devil was often portrayed as a
green-clad hunter, hunting innocent souls.
The Green Man was also a classical and pagan prototype bound with the neverending
cycle of death and rebirth.

The pentangle on Gawain's shield: a symbol of his purity, of the five virtues:

Chivalry
Charity
Chastity
Loyalty
Piety

If one part of the pentangle breaks, the entire structure will collapse: symbolic.

Ultimately, Gawain is unable to follow all five virtues: it is physically impossible.

In the end, the knights laugh at Gawain. They remain like last year, the cycle has repeated
itself. Only Gawain has been taught a lesson.

Bob and Wheel, or The Gawain Stanza

[Norton Anthology]: The poem is written

in stanzas containing a group of
alliterative lines, with the number of
lines in a stanza varying. The line is
longer and does not contain a fixed
number or pattern of stresses like the
classical alliterative measure of Old
English poetry. Each stanza closes with
five short lines, rhyming AB AB A. The
first of these rhyming lines contains just
one stress and is called the bob, the four
three-stress lines that follow are the
wheel.

Symbolism in Gawain, retyped from a midterm test:

As a whole, Gawain is very cyclical, which is visible not only in its matter, but also the
form. As such, the story spans one full year: from Christmas to Christmas, and the general
tone of the ending heavily implies that the cycle of knights going out for a quest and
returning will continue. All this is complemented by the fact that Gawain totals one hundred
and one stanzas, again, signaling a continuation of the cycle. Also, Gawain begins his quest
when the knights are merry, and they all laugh when he returns: they haven't changed.
Next, the titular Green Knight himself is a symbol on many different levels. He visits the
knights during Christmas/New Year's Eve. However, their celebration is vain, empty, devoid
of meaning given by Christianity. Thus, it can be inferred that the Green Knight symbolizes
religion. The things he carries with him are also symbolic, for he arrives with both an axe
and a twig of holly. The former is an obvious symbol of war, hostility, while the latter is a
universal sign of peace. This is further strengthened by the fact that the Green Knight comes
before Arthur and his court barefoot and unarmed. Here emerges also the pattern of the
Green Knight's duality: brandishing a great weapon I one hand and an offering of peace in
the other, being aggressive, intimidating and condescending while clearly signaling his
unreadiness and unwillingness to fight. He's both vengeful and peaceful.
Elaborating further on the symbolism of items in Gawain, it is worth mentioning Gawain's
shield. It bears both a pentangle: a five-pointed star, each point representing one of five
virtues: chivalry, chastity, charity, loyalty, and piety, which collapses entirely if one point is
broken, and a painting of the Virgin Mary to guard him in his quest.
One sequence of events which bears a heavy symbolic meaning is the three-day stay in the
lord's castle, during which Gawain resists the lord's wife's advances and the lord hunts.
There is a direct parallel between Gawain's tactics and the animals the lord hunts. As such,
on the first day the lord hunts a deer, which tries to simply run away, and Gawain also tries
to evade the lady and her affections. Next, the lord kills a boar, which puts up a fight, and so
Gawain stands his ground and voices his mind to the lady. Lastly, the lord kills a fox, which
tries to lose its pursuers in a more elaborate way, as Gawain tries to repel the lady with
clever rhetoric.

The poem exhibits certain thematic traits found in the rest of the Arthurian works. The hero
of noble origin must obey the chivalric code. Such a code obligates one to submit one's life
to the requirements of honor and knightly duty of defending one's superior and helping the
weak. Gawain has to accept the challenge of the Green Knight, proving his masculinity and
a rightful place in the courtly community. He has to fight both physical and psychological
weaknesses, striving for spiritual perfection. He retains some of the heoric characteristics of
Old English heroes.

3. Elizabethan drama

Medieval heritage of Elizabethan drama:

For the early Catholic Church, late Antiquity was the time of degeneration and consequently,
with the advent of Christianity, the Church had tried to rule ancient theatre out of the minds
of people.
During a mass, any departure from the text was basically forbidden, but as they were
conducted in Latin, more intrusions were introduced so that ordinary people could relate
more directly to the ritual itself. The development of medieval drama, especially the plays of
Scriptural genesis, is related to the evolution of the ritual of the Church during the later Old
English period an evolution based upon the fact that this ritual is colorful, emotionally
impressive, and dramatic.
Christmas and Easter contributed to the elaboration of liturgy. The mass, otherwise highly
formalized, offered more interpretative possibilities. The first such development was a
paraphrase of a dialogue between the angel and the three Marys at the tomb of Christ from
the Gospel of St. Matthew. With time, this simple act of worship further illustrated by inchurch performances was moved outside. Since the purpose was to instruct average
spectators, the ritual used commonly-understood language. The feast of Corpus Christi,
established in 1264, saw a whole day devoted to staging the entire cycle from the day of
Creation to the Final Judgment, combining procession with performance.

The cycle plays are often referred to as miracle or mystery plays. Sometimes, the term
mystery is used for plays dealing with a Gospel event only, and miracle for plays dealing
with the legends of the saints.

The cycle plays were plays written and performed with the aim of teaching and illustrating
the bible. Thematic cycles had the narrative structure, starting from the Act of Creation and
continuing on to the Final Judgment, presenting dramatized versions of Biblical stories.
They were composed of several one-act plays. The cycle plays based on the Bible are called
biblical plays.

In mystery plays, the actors were guild representatives, wishing to fulfill their religious
duties, as well as to showcase their skills and their guilds. Actors were male due to the
clerical banishment of female speech. Preparation and enactment of the performances was a
communal activity, performed by particular members of craft-guilds, eg. shipwrights
performed The Building of the Ark and fishermen performed The Flood.

The plays were presented as pageants, on big carts constituing a stage for one particular
play. The theatre was not only didactic and moral, but contained a great deal of
entertainment in the presentation of characters, and in robust language. Pagan rituals and
folk festivals were also incorporated, full of dancing and make-believe. At first, actors were
not dressed, but later, such performances become more sophisticated.

Since medieval theatre has little in common with Ancient drama, it did not preserve the
difference between tragedy and comedy. Drama operated with comic elements, however of
different type than those in classical plays. Comedy was not based on the structural
distinctions and social functions of characters, but on the low type of verbal humor
(Shipwrights enacting the story of Noah). Although originally a more somber, didactic
drama, morality plays contained such elements, commonly found in biblical plays.

By the fifteenth century drama became very popular, and stopped being tied exclusively to
the clergy. At that time it was also renounced as sinful.

Another type of medieval drama, beside the cycle/miracle/mystery plays, were the
moralities. They were a response to the late medieval necessity to educate laypeople in the
nature of sin. They also provided social norms of behavior. Moralities present a universal
human being as a vulnerable and weak person, subject to temptation, who had to be
constantly admonished and instructed in order to achieve salvation. They were based on the
psychomachia pattern: the opposition between vice and virtue.
Moralities presented allegorical figures personifying vices and virtues. Through
recognizable theatrical illusion they dramatized the everlasting fight between good and evil
in the human soul in the context of man's fall and redemption, and the ensuing temptations
on the part of man's three enemies: the World, the Devil, and the Flesh.
Moralities has prologues and epilogues, introducing and summarizing the main points of the
play, as well as outlining the doctrine of sin and repentance. These devices of immediate
communication with the audience corroborate the self-reflexive theatricality of the plays.

Renaissance:

With Henry VIII, England was already under the influences of humanist trends from Italy.
Humanism is a literary, philosophical and educational trend, attaching prime importance to
human beings, their affairs and values. Beginning in Italy in the late fourteenth century, its
origins can be traced to Petrarch.

Humanism propagated the individual quest for value and truth, hence the promotion of
learning and development. It adopted classical ideas concerning harmony and proportion
with regard to the human, as well as social, body. The classical world seemed to represent an
ideal civilization emphasizing man's position in the universe, human values, which
concentrated on the personal worth of each individual. Humanistic tendencies shifted the
stress from life after death to life on earth. This, aesthetic and intellectual ideas began to
replace moral and religious ones. Although Europe was still very much Christian and the
invention of the printing press only helped to spread the faith, Humanists viewed medieval
words as narrow-minded and bigoted, and the devotion in the search of the Absolute was
perceived as a lack of joy in life and escapism.

Apart from Humanism, the Renaissance in England was also an aftermath of the changed
political and religious situation after the Reformation, an intellectual and political
movement, began long before Henry VIII. Its precursors were the fourteenth century
theologians John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, and its greatest leaders were Martin Luther and John
Calvin.
The world of the late medieval Catholic Church was marked by corruption and lacked the
force of spiritual leadership. The papacy became deeply involved in the political life of
Western Europe, which resulted in intrigues and manipulations combined with the Church's
increasing power and wealth. Many theologians opposed the sale of indulgences, offices and
relics. In 1534, after having his wish for a divorce denied, Henry VIII declared England's
separation from Rome, establishing the Anglican Church, dissolving convents and
monasteries, and reforming the religion in England. Liturgy was prepared in English,
together with the Book of Common Prayers. In 1559, Elizabeth established the Church of
England, finally defeating Rome.

3. 1. Hamlet

In "Poetics," Artistole identified six elements that he considered integral for any tragedy:
characters, plot, song composition, thought, verbal expression and visual adornment. At the
center of these elements is the tragic hero, whose desire to achieve his goal becomes the
main conflict that drives the story. In Aristotle's vision, the hero need not die at the end to
redeem himself, but should undergo a reversal of fortune that, eventually, yields a greater
insight about his own shortcomings or the human condition.

Tragedy of character: In many instances, a tragic hero's downfall occurs through his
inability to accept or realize his personal flaws. Typically, this situation arises through pride,
which Aristotle labeled as "hamartia" in his "Poetics."

Revenge tragedy: an antique genre, started by the Roman playwright Seneca.

In revenge tragedies, the crime usually happens within a family, and in Hamlet it is no
different: the Danish King (also named Hamlet) is killed by his brother, Prince Hamlet's
uncle, who then remarries the King's wife, Gertrude, Prince Hamlet's mother.
The exposition of such plays does not display the hero taking a fatal step, but the hero
confronted with appalling facts. The essence of any revenge tragedy is that its hero has not
created the situation in which he finds himself and out of which the tragedy arises.

Genre conventions: a bloody study of passion, madness, incest. Commonly, a ghost

appears. - All those present in Hamlet.
At those times, revenge killing was a common practice apparently.
The notion that it was morally wrong for a son to avenge his father's murder especially a
murder conceived under such circumstances as represented in the play was not entertained
in Hamlet's time. We must be careful not to import into the play modern conceptions of
ethics. To the people of his own time, and even to the audience of the Elizabethan age,
Hamlet was called upon to perform a sacred duty.

In Senecan times, puppets were used to play ghosts. Here, in Elizabethan times, a human
plays the ghost. This is a sign of a problem.

Soliloquy: (from Latin solo "to oneself" + loquor "I talk") is a device often used in drama
when a character speaks to himself or herself, relating thoughts and feelings, thereby also
sharing them with the audience, giving off the illusion of being a series of unspoken
reflections.
The term soliloquy is distinct from a monologue or an aside: a monologue is a speech where
one character addresses other characters; an aside is a (usually short) comment by one
character towards the audience, though during the play it may seem like the character is
addressing him or herself.
Hamlet's soliloquies are common, because he feels he is in a hostile environment. He has
nobody to speak to.

The state of the court reflects the state of the nation. As scheming and sin abound in the
court, so Denmark is shaken (Laertes leads a rebellion, Fortinbras, a Norwegian prince,
seizes the throne in the end).

Hamlet delays his act of revenge because of his moral qualms.

He is unsure whether the ghost is real, or honest. He first stages a play to check if the ghost
speaks the truth. The play mirrors the King's assassination. Claudius, the king's brother, his
killer, is present. Hamlet decides that if seeing the play makes Claudius uncomfortable, then
he is indeed guilty, and the ghost was right. Eventually, Hamlet finds a chance to revenge his
father, stumbling upon Claudius alone. However, Claudius is praying, and Hamlet does not
want to kill him then: if he were to do so, Claudius would go to heaven with all his sins
forgiven. Hamlet also remembers that Claudius killed King Hamlet while he was sleeping,
giving him no time for prayer/confession, and thus sent him to hell with all his earthly
matters unresolved.
Possibly, Hamlet is just too weak to kill a man. He is a scholar, educated in philosophy, so
he overthinks the act of claiming a life. Yet, all the while he is conscious of his cowardice
and ridicules himself for it. When he sees Fortinbras' soldiers marching by to battle for an
insignificant piece of ground, he realizes that these men have no qualms about dying for a
pointless cause, and Fortinbras has no qualms about sending them to their deaths, while he
himself muses endlessly about one killing.

Freudian analysis: Claudius is the person Hamlet wants to be (Claudius kills Hamlet's father
and now sleeps with his mother his actions embody the Oedipus complex). This is why
Hamlet does not want to kill him, he respects/admires him secretly.
Hamlet's story is two narratives in one:

In the first, he serves to fulfill the demands of the dead. The ghost is the play's
spiritus movens, Hamlet fashions himself the hand of fate, doesn't hesitate to kill
Polonius hiding behind the tapestry.
The second, beginning with Hamlet in the graveyard, has Hamlet rid of his delusion,
aware of human mortality. He becomes the modern, introspective hero.

Meta-theatre: Hamlet stages a play-within-a-play, the language of the play is full of

theatre-verbs, Hamlet at one point addresses the audience.

Elizabethan theatre:

At the start of his career, Shakespeare sought to measure people's tastes. He started
with writing historical plays to feed on the nationalist sentiments of the time.
Shakespeare's plays are to be heard, not seen. Wider context of the situation is
derived from conversations, eg. the location and time is derived from the guards'
conversations in Hamlet.
Theatre was meant as entertainment for everyone.
However, due its status as a low form of entertainment and legal matters prohibiting
it, theatres were built on the other side of the Thames river.
Companies of players traveled throughout England, generally performing in London
in the winter and spring, and navigating notoriously neglected roads throughout the
English countryside during the summers when plague ravaged the city. Professional
companies were also retained for the private entertainment of English aristocracy.

Puritan leaders and officers of the Church of England considered actors to be of

questionable character, and they criticized playwrights for using the stage to
disseminate their irreverent opinions. They also feared the overcrowded theater
spaces might lead to the spread of disease. At times throughout the sixteenth century,
Parliament censored plays for profanity, heresy, or politics. But Queen Elizabeth and
later King James offered protections that ultimately allowed the theater to survive. To
appease Puritan concerns, the Queen established rules prohibiting the construction of
theaters and theatrical performances within the London city limits. The rules were
loosely enforced, however, and playhouses such as the Curtain, the Globe, the Rose,
and the Swan were constructed just outside of London, within easy reach of the
theater-going public. These public playhouses paved the way for the eventual
emergence of professional companies as stable business organizations.
The most famous were: The Globe, The Rose, The Blackfriars.

Acting was not considered an appropriate profession for women in the Elizabethan
era, and even into the seventeenth century acting companies consisted of men with
young boys playing the female roles. Instead of clothing reflecting the station of their
characters, Elizabethan actors wore lavish costumes consistent with upperclass dress.
In contrast, stage scenery was minimal, perhaps consisting solely of painted panels
placed upstage.

The Globe's stage is vital to understanding the plays.

Until near the middle of Elizabeth's reign there were no special theater buildings, but the
players, in London or elsewhere, acted wherever they could find an available place--in open
squares, large halls, or, especially, in the quadrangular open inner yards of inns. As the
profession became better organized and as the plays gained in quality, such makeshift
accommodations became more and more unsatisfactory; but there were special difficulties in
the way of securing better ones in London. For the population and magistrates of London
were prevailingly Puritan, and the great body of the Puritans, then as always, were strongly

opposed to the theater as a frivolous and irreligious thing--an attitude for which the lives of
the players and the character of many plays afforded, then as almost always, only too much
reason. The city was very jealous of its prerogatives; so that in spite of Queen Elizabeth's
strong patronage of the drama, throughout her whole reign no public theater buildings were
allowed within the limits of the city corporation. But these limits were narrow, and in 1576
James Burbage inaugurated a new era by erecting 'The Theater' just to the north of the 'city,'
only a few minutes' walk from the center of population. His example was soon followed by
other managers, though the favorite place for the theaters soon came to be the 'Bankside,' the
region in Southwark just across the Thames from the 'city' where Chaucer's Tabard Inn had
stood and where pits for bear-baiting and cock-fighting had long flourished.
The structure of the Elizabethan theater was naturally imitated from its chief predecessor,
the inn-yard. There, under the open sky, opposite the street entrance, the players had been
accustomed to set up their stage. About it, on three sides, the ordinary part of the audience
had stood during the performance, while the inn-guests and persons able to pay a fixed price
had sat in the open galleries which lined the building and ran all around the yard. In the
theaters, therefore, at first generally square-built or octagonal, the stage projected from the
rear wall well toward the center of an unroofed pit (the present-day 'orchestra'), where, still
on three sides of the stage, the common people, admitted for sixpence or less, stood and
jostled each other, either going home when it rained or staying and getting wet as the degree
of their interest in the play might determine. The enveloping building proper was occupied
with tiers of galleries, generally two or three in number, provided with seats; and here, of
course, sat the people of means, the women avoiding embarrassment and annoyance only by
being always masked. Behind the unprotected front part of the stage the middle part was
covered by a lean-to roof sloping down from the rear wall of the building and supported by
two pillars standing on the stage. This roof concealed a loft, from which gods and goddesses
or any appropriate properties could be let down by mechanical devices. Still farther back,
under the galleries, was the 'rear-stage,' which could be used to represent inner rooms; and
that part of the lower gallery immediately above it was generally appropriated as a part of
the stage, representing such places as city walls or the second stories of houses. The
musicians' place was also just beside in the gallery.
The stage, therefore, was a 'platform stage,' seen by the audience from almost all sides, not,
as in our own time, a 'picture-stage,' with its scenes viewed through a single large frame.
This arrangement made impossible any front curtain, though a curtain was generally hung
before the rear stage, from the floor of the gallery. Hence the changes between scenes must
generally be made in full view of the audience, and instead of ending the scenes with
striking situations the dramatists must arrange for a withdrawal of the actors, only avoiding
if possible the effect of a mere anti-climax. Dead bodies must either get up and walk away in
plain sight or be carried off, either by stage hands, or, as part of the action, by other
characters in the play. This latter device was sometimes adopted at considerable violence to
probability, as when Shakespeare makes Falstaff bear away Hotspur, and Hamlet, Polonius.
Likewise, while the medieval habit of elaborate costuming was continued, there was every
reason for adhering to the medieval simplicity of scenery.
A single potted tree might symbolize a forest, and houses and caverns, with a great deal else,
might be left to the imagination of the audience. In no respect, indeed, was realism of setting
an important concern of either dramatist or audience; in many cases, evidently, neither of
them cared to think of a scene as located in any precise spot; hence the anxious effort of
Shakespeare's editors on this point is beside the mark. This nonchalance made for easy
transition from one place to another, and the whole simplicity of staging had the important
advantage of allowing the audience to center their attention on the play rather than on the
accompaniments. On the rear-stage, however, behind the curtain, more elaborate scenery
might be placed, and Elizabethan plays, like those of our own day, seem sometimes to have

'alternation scenes,' intended to be acted in front, while the next background was being
prepared behind the balcony curtain. The lack of elaborate settings also facilitated rapidity
of action, and the plays, beginning at three in the afternoon, were ordinarily over by the
dinner-hour of five. Less satisfactory was the entire absence of women-actors, who did not
appear on the public stage until after the Restoration of 1660. The inadequacy of the boys
who took the part of the women-characters is alluded to by Shakespeare and must have been
a source of frequent irritation to any dramatist who was attempting to present a subtle or
complex heroine.
3. 2. As You Like It

Title is ambiguous: can be understood as a question to the audience, or the author's remark
(This play is written as you like it. = people liked comedies about love with happy
endings).

The direct and immediate source of As You Like It is Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, Euphues
Golden Legacie, first published in 1590. Lodge's story is based upon The Tale of Gamelyn,
wrongly attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer and sometimes printed among his Canterbury Tales.
Although it was first printed in 1721,"Gamelyin" must have existed in manuscript form in
Shakespeare's time. It is doubtful that Shakespeare had read it, but Lodge must have built his
pastoral romance on the foundation of "Gamelyin", giving it a pastoral setting and the
artificial sentimental vein, much in fashion at the time. The tale provided the intertwined
plots, and suggested all the characters except Touchstone and Jaques.

Pastoral literature is class of literature that presents the society of shepherds as free from
the complexity and corruption of city life. Many of the idylls written in its name are far
remote from the realities of any life, rustic or urban.
The play belongs to the literary tradition known as pastoral: which has its roots in the
literature of ancient Greece, and continued as a vital literary mode through Shakespeares
time and long after. Typically, a pastoral story involves exiles from urban or court life who
flee to the refuge of the countryside, where they often disguise themselves as shepherds in
order to converse with other shepherds on a range of established topics, from the relative
merits of life at court versus life in the country to the relationship between nature and art.
The most fundamental concern of the pastoral mode is comparing the worth of the natural
world, represented by relatively untouched countryside, to the world built by humans, which
contains the joys of art and the city as well as the injustices of rigid social hierarchies.
The pastoral presents a conventionalized picture of rural life, the naturalness and innocence
of which is seen in contrast to the corruption and artificiality of city and court. Although
pastoral works are written from the point of view of shepherds or rustics, they are always
penned by highly sophisticated, urban poets. Some major, related concerns in pastoral works
are the tensions between nature and art, the real and the ideal, and the actual and the
mythical. English Renaissance pastoral has classical roots, but contains distinctly
contemporary English elements, including humanism, sentimentality, depictions of courtly
reality, a concern with real life, and the use of satire and comedy.
In general, Shakespeares As You Like It develops many of the traditional features and
concerns of the pastoral genre. This comedy examines the cruelties and corruption of court
life and gleefully pokes holes in one of humankinds greatest artifices: the conventions of
romantic love. The plays investment in pastoral traditions leads to an indulgence in rather
simple rivalries: court versus country, realism versus romance, reason versus mindlessness,

nature versus fortune, young versus old, and those who are born into nobility versus those
who acquire their social standing. But rather than settle these scores by coming down on one
side or the other, As You Like It offers up a world of myriad choices and endless possibilities.
In the world of this play, no one thing need cancel out another. In this way, the play manages
to offer both social critique and social affirmation. It is a play that at all times stresses the
complexity of things, the simultaneous pleasures and pains of being human.

The main theme of pastoral comedy is love in all its guises in a rustic setting, the genuine
love embodied by Rosalind contrasted with the sentimentalized affectations of Orlando, and
the improbable happenings that set the urban courtiers wandering to find exile, solace or
freedom in a woodland setting are no more unrealistic than the string of chance encounters
in the forest, provoking witty banter, which require no subtleties of plotting and character
development. The main action of the first act is no more than a wrestling match, and the
action throughout is often interrupted by a song. At the end, Hymen himself arrives to bless
the wedding festivities.
William Shakespeares play As You Like It clearly falls into the Pastoral Romance genre; but
Shakespeare does not merely use the genre, he develops it. Shakespeare also used the
Pastoral genre in As You Like It to cast a critical eye on social practices that produce
injustice and unhappiness, and to make fun of anti-social, foolish and self-destructive
behaviour, most obviously through the theme of love, culminating in a rejection of the
notion of the traditional Petrarchan lovers.
The stock characters in conventional situations were familiar material for Shakespeare and
his audience; it is the light repartee and the breadth of the subjects that provide texts for wit
that put a fresh stamp on the proceedings. At the centre the optimism of Rosalind is
contrasted with the misogynistic melancholy of Jaques

The forest in As You Like It can be seen as a place of pastoral idealization, where life is
simpler and purer, and its inhabitants live more closely to each other, nature and God than
their urban counterparts. However, Shakespeare plays with the bounds of pastoral
idealization. Throughout the play, Shakespeare employs various characters to illustrate
pastoralism. His protagonists Rosalind and Orlando metaphorically depict the importance of
the coexistence of realism and idealism, or urban and rural life. While Orlando is absorbed
in the ideal, Rosalind serves as a mediator, bringing Orlando back down to reality and
embracing the simplicity of pastoral love. She is the only character throughout the play who
embraces and appreciates both the real and idealized life and manages to make the two ideas
coexist. Therefore, Shakespeare explores city and country life as being appreciated through
the coexistence of the two.

The humor stems chiefly from the fact that we know more than the actors do.
The play mocks love, romance, court lifestyle.
In Elizabethan times, women were played by boys in costume. Thus, Rosalind dressed as
Ganymede was a boy dresses a woman, who, in the course of the play, dressed up as man.
The name Ganymede suggests homoerotic overtones, especially paired with the stage
conventions described above (The myth of Ganymede was a model for the Greek social
custom of paiderasta, the socially acceptable erotic relationship between a man and a
youth.)
Additionally, when Rosalind becomes Ganymede, she suddenly gains power and agency:
commentary on gender roles?

Although a comedy, the play contains many elements precarious in meaning: threats of
death, injury, banishment, usurpation...

The characters of Touchstone and Audery parody the main plot: they are crude, base, and
focused on the legal aspect of marrying.
Orlando writing extremely bad love poetry is also a parody.
Thus, courtly love is revealed as fake, impossible to realize, and made-up.
Duke Senior parodies the pastoral infatuation with nature. People already living in the forest
accuse them of being intruders. Corin exposes the artifice of pastoral convention.

Most of the play is a celebration of life in the country. The inhabitants of Duke Frederick's
court suffer the perils of arbitrary injustice and even threats of death; the courtiers who
followed the old duke into forced exile in the "desert city" of the forest are, by contrast,
experiencing liberty but at the expense of some easily borne discomfort. (Act II, scene 1). A
passage between Touchstone, the court jester, and shepherd Corin establishes the
contentment to be found in country life, compared with the perfumed, mannered life at
court. (Act III, scene 2). At the end of the play the usurping duke and the exiled courtier
Jacques both elect to remain within the forest.

For Rosalind, love is a game.

For Orlando and Silvius, love is a madness which can cause harm.

The theme of cuckoldry is present in the play: the horns, visible to everyone but the person
wearing them.

4. 17th century poetry

Puritanism was a reformatory movement in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century,
whose goals were to purify the Church of England from Roman Catholic elements. In
Puritan doctrine, one can observe a shift from the happy and joyful Renaissance view of the
world to a more stern and solemn perspective. Puritanism advocated moral reform and
religious earnestness. They strove for a change of lifestyle for the people, and religion
became a subject of deliberation in the House of Commons. Their efforts led to civil war, as
they sided with the Parliament in the criticism of Charles I.

The Restoration of English monarchy began in 1660, under Charles II. It brought into favor
French ideas on religion, politics, manners, and taste. Morality at court tended to be low and
vile. Under the reign on Charles II courtly poetry flourished as he himself set the tone for the
Court Wits. The Court Wits were not professional poets but amateur writers who wrote for
their own amusement. Their witty, sometimes even satiric, often erotic verse represented the
courtly literary fashion of the time, influencing not only poetry but also drama and comedy
in the first place. They frequently mocked country people and their manners and morality
propagating urban culture and double moral standards. The theatre was revived with great
splendor, but its position was never as high as in Elizabethan times.

Metaphysical poetry denotes poetry from the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Metaphysics is taken from Aristotle, meaning the sphere of learning of what came after
physics. Metaphysics professed to deal with the world as a whole. Hence, the allencompassing preoccupation with worldly as well as spiritual matters. T.S. Eliot argued that
their work fuses reason with passion, shows a unification of thought and feeling. Thus, it is
said that metaphysical poets spoke about religion as if it was love, and about love as if it was
religion. The relationship between meaning and feeling is fixed in each instance of writing,
while a rhetorical approach to poetry helps us to understand the expressive nature of
language. The poets' learning provides the background and shows continuity between
classical rhetoric and its Renaissance rendition. For example, John Donne still retained the
Renaissance love of science.

Dissociation of sensibility is phrase used by T.S. Eliot in the essay The Metaphysical
Poets (1921) to explain the change that occurred in English poetry after the heyday of the
Metaphysical poets.
According to Eliot, the dissociation of sensibility was a result of the natural development of
poetry after the Metaphysical poets, who had felt their thought as immediately as the odour
of a rose; this phenomenonthe direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or the fusion
of thought and feelingwhich Eliot called a mechanism of sensibility, was lost by later
poets. Eliot gave evidence of the dissociation of sensibility in the more elevated language
and cruder emotions of later poets.

Eliot's theory of the 'dissociation of sensibility' may be said to be an attempt to find some
kind of historical explanation to the dissolution of the tradition of unified sensibility which
found its perfection in the writings of Dante and Shakespeare. The unified sensibility was a
sensibility which was the product of a true synthesis of the individual with the traditional, of
feeling with thought and of the temporal with the eternal.

It was not only representative of the mind of Europe but also of the traditions of European
thought and culture. But unfortunately, according to Eliot, the traditions of unified
sensibility were suddenly disrupted in the seventeenth century as a result of a split in the
creative personality of the artist, for which he formulated his famous theory of the
'dissociation of sensibility.'
Eliot assigns primacy to the poetic sensibility which for him is the basis for writing poetry.
By 'sensibility' Eliot does not merely mean feeling or the capacity to receive sense
impression. He means much more than that. By 'sensibility' he means a synthetic faculty, a
faculty which can amalgamate and unite thought and feeling, which can fuse into a single
whole the varied and disparate, often opposite and contradictory experiences, the sensuous
and the intellectual.
The great Elizabethans and early Jacobeans had developed a unified sensibility. That is why
they were widely read, and their thinking and learning modified their mode of feeling. Such
a fusion of thought and feeling is to be found in the poetry of Donne as well as in much of
modern poetry, but it is lacking in the poetry of Tennyson. The fact is that after Donne and
Herbert a change came over the mind of England. The poets lost the capacity of unifying
thought and feeling. The 'unification of sensibility' was lost, and a 'dissociation of
sensibility' set in. After that the poet can either think or they can feel; there are either
intellectual poets who can only think, or there are poets who can only feel. The poets of the
18th century were intellectuals, they thought but did not feel; the romantics of the 19th
century felt but did not think. Tennyson and Browning can merely reflect or ruminate but
cannot express their experience poetically.
Eliot writes : "Tennyson and Browning are poets and they think; but tl y do not feel their
thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it
modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is
constantly amalgamating desparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic,
irregular, fragmentary. The latter fails in love, or reads Spinoza and these two experiences
have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of
cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes." (The
Metaphysical Poets).The Metaphysical poets like the Elizabethans have a unified sensibility.
They were the successors of the Elizabethan dramatists. Like them, the Metaphysicals, too,
could be simple, artificial, difficult or fantastic. Then came Milton and Dryden and their
influence was most unhealthy, because as a result of their influence there set in a
'dissociation of sensibility' from which English poetry has recovered only in the modern age.
Both Milton and Dryden were great poets and they rendered important service to the cause
of poetry. Under their influence, the English language became more pure and refined. But at
the same time, the feeling became more crude. The Metaphysical poets certainly had their
faults. But they had one great virtue. They tried, and often succeeded in expressing their
states of mind and feeling in appropriate words and imagery. They had 'unified sensibility'
and they could find verbal equivalents for it. They were, therefore, more mature and better
than later poets.
Metaphysical poetry investigates the world by rational discussion of its phenomena rather
than by intuition or mysticism. The poetical I is often greatly detached from the context.
Sometimes, the form commands the content, and the poem focuses more on the how
rather than what.

Metaphysical poetry relied on a number of genres, such as sonnet, epigram, as well as

pastoral and georgic a kind of ancient Roman pastoral.

The metaphysical conceit was a focal point of the poem. Not necessarily only a metaphor, it
involved the author arguing likeness between two things, rather than just juxtaposing
them. Conceits were an expression of wit/intelligence.
Conceits were based on the principle of discordia concons, a combination of dissimilar
images, or the discovery of occult correspondences between things otherwise unrelated.
Conceits were also instruments of definition in an argument or of persuasion. The poets
employed a wide range of themes from theological to scientific, and their witty and effective
figures produced a peculiar blend of thought and passion, the colloquial and the ingenious.

4. 1. John Milton Paradise Lost

An epic is a long narrative poem presenting characters of high position in a series of

adventures which form an organic whole through their relation to a central figure of heroic
proportions and through their development of episodes important to the history of a nation
or a race.

Primary epic is poetry "which stems from heroic deeds and which is composed in the first
instance, in order that such deeds may not be forgotten." It is practical in purporting to
record historical events and deals with the real world, "however much glamour may be
added in the process."

Secondary epic is poetry which may deal with heroic legend or with more abstract themes
than the type available to primary epic, and which is composed, not as an historical record of
the past, but as the poet's artistic interpretation or recreation of legend or theme. The
combination of the poet's 'seeing eye' and his personal style together create something which
is not based on reality, but has a life of its own to be transmitted to the mind of the reader."

Book I: The first book proposes, first in brief, the whole subject, mans disobedience, and
the loss thereupon of Paradise wherein he was placed; then touches the prime cause of his
fall, the serpent, or rather Satan in the serpent; who revolting from God, and drawing to his
side many legions of angels, was by the command of God driven out of heaven with all his
crew into the great deep. Which action passed over, the poem hastes into the midst of things,
presenting Satan with his angels now fallen into hell, described here, not in the centre (for
heaven and earth may be supposed as yet not made, certainly not yet accursed) but in a place
of utter darkness, fitliest called Chaos: here Satan with his angels lying on the burning lake,
thunderstruck and astonished, after a certain space recovers, as from confusion, calls up him
who next in order and dignity lay by him; they confer of their miserable fall. Satan awakens
all his legions, who lay till then in the same manner confounded; they rise, their numbers,
array of battle, their chief leaders named, according to the idols known afterwards in Canaan
and the countries adjoining. To these Satan directs his speech, comforts them with hope yet
of regaining heaven, but tells them lastly of a new world and new kind of creature to be
created, according to an ancient prophecy or report in heaven; for that angels were long
before this visible creation, was the opinion of many ancient Fathers. To find out the truth of
this prophecy, and what to determine thereon he refers to a full council. What his associates
thence attempt. Pandaemonium the palace of Satan rises, suddenly built out of the deep: the
infernal peers there sit in council.

Invocation: the poet asks epic questions: they set the theme, and are resolved throughout
the story.
All epics begin with an epic invocation, involving an announcement in the first person of
the subject (or argument) of the work and an extremely brief description of the main action
of the work, in the course of which the speaker calls upon a muse to inspire the speaker and
give him strength to carry out his weighty undertaking and to answer an epic question about
the causes of the main action. Classical epic begins in medias res (in the middle of things),
at a critical point in the action, rather than at the beginning of the story.

Epic simile, also called Homeric simile, an extended simile often running to several lines,
used typically in epic poetry to intensify the heroic stature of the subject and to serve as
decoration. Example from Paradise Lost:

I now must change

Those notes to tragic[...]
sad task, yet argument
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused,
Or Neptunes ire or Junos, that so long
Perplexed the Greek and Cythereas son;

During the invocation, the poet asks his muse for help in relaying the story.
His muse is Urania, although described in different, biblical, rather than mythological terms.
Throughout the work, Milton makes constant allusions both to ancient mythology and
Christian canon, yet shows the latter as superior.
Milton states that his intention is to justify God's ways to man.
He claims that, although this work is much superior to everything that has ever been written
before, it came to him effortlessly, in his sleep.

Satan is proud, competitive, and jealous.

He feels excluded, rejected. Deludes himself into thinking himself a victim.
Satan is a kind of a proto-romantic hero. He is also the epic hero of the work.

Book IX: Satan having compassed the earth, with meditated guile returns as a mist by night
into Paradise, enters into the serpent sleeping. Adam and Eve in the morning go forth to their
labours, which Eve proposes to divide in several places, each labouring apart: Adam
consents not, alleging the danger, lest that enemy, of whom they were forewarned, should
attempt her found alone: Eve loath to be thought not circumspect or firm enough, urges her
going apart, the rather desirous to make trial of her strength; Adam at last yields: the serpent
finds her alone; his subtle approach, first gazing, then speaking, with much flattery extolling
Eve above all other creatures. Eve wondering to hear the serpent speak, asks how he attained
to human speech and such understanding not till now; the serpent answers, that by tasting of
a certain tree in the garden he attained both to speech and reason, till then void of both: Eve
requires him to bring her to that tree, and finds it to be the tree of knowledge forbidden: the
serpent now grown bolder, with many wiles and arguments induces her at length to eat; she
pleased with the taste deliberates awhile whether to impart thereof to Adam or not, at last
brings him of the fruit, relates what persuaded her to eat thereof: Adam at first amazed, but
perceiving her lost, resolves through vehemence of love to perish with her; and extenuating
the trespass eats also of the fruit: the effects thereof in them both; they seek to cover their
nakedness; then fall to variance and accusation of one another.

Adam and Eve are portrayed as a married couple. They love each other, but are not equal:
Eve was created from Adam's rib, and thus he wants her to be subservient.

Eve wants to divide their tasks to prove her worth to Adam.

Satan tempts Eve because he considers her weaker. He appeals to her vanity and pride, tells
her that the forbidden fruit will make her more powerful, assuring her that God won't punish
her for it, because wanting to be better is not a sin. He claims that God wants to subjugate
Adam and Eve.

Eating the fruit unleashes sinful human impulses, kept in check by God.

Eve shares the fruit with Adam not because she wants him to gain greatness equal to hers,
but because she doesn't want to be replaced or rejected. She does contemplate not giving
him the fruit and becoming superior, however. In persuading him, Eve mirrors Satan's
arguments. Adam eats the fruit because he does not want to leave Eve.
First, they become overcome with lust. Then, with shame.

4. 2. John Donne The Flea

The poem's conceit centers around using the image of a flea as a simile for premarital sex.
The poem's speaker is trying to convince a woman to sleep with him. By pointing out that,
through biting both the speaker and the woman, the flea has already joined their bodies, and
yet no harm or loss of dignity has come to them, the speaker tries to calm the woman's
doubts and apprehensions. He says that even though the flea's bite seems insignificant, in a
way it has already accomplished what the speaker tries to:
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou knowst that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.

In the second stanza the woman tries to kill the flea, presumably to silence the speaker and
end his argument, yet he stops her, saying that within this flea, they are already bodily
intermingled and almost married. He furthers the comparison of the flea mixing their blood
within itself to them having sex, and by taking it to an extreme, underlines the
ridiculousness of the woman's prudishness.
Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our mariage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that, self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

In the third stanza, the woman finally kills the flea. Eager to destroy the speaker's carefullybuilt conceit, she says that nothing as terrible as was prophesied in the previous stanza
happened to her, her honor remains unblemished. By bragging like this, she only proves the
speaker's point, who says that indeed, nothing would have happened as well if she were to
just sleep with him:
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumphst, and say'st that thou
Findst not thy self, nor me the weaker now;
Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:
Just so much honor, when thou yieldst to me,
Will waste, as this fleas death took life from thee

5. Romantic age

Most notable representatives:

William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
George Gordon Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
William Blake

THE FOLLOWING SECTION IS TAKEN FROM THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY. IT ALSO

SERVES AS NOTES FOR WILLIAM WORDSWORTH'S PREFACE TO LYRICAL
BALLADS

Romanticism encompasses the span between 1785 and 1830 a turbulent period, during
which England underwent a change from a primarily agricultural society, with wealth and
power concentrated in landholding aristocracy, to a modern industrial nation. The French
Revolution and America gaining independence, revolutionary ideologies threatening the
social order, cycles of inflation and depression provided the context for that change.
Initially supportive of the French, British writers soon distanced themselves from the
Jacobins' doings. Public meetings were prohibited, various repressions began to be
exercised, abolitionism was thwarted, and the destructive practice of enclosure facilitated by

a growing need to feed an increasing population, further adding to the period's instability.
Society became fragmented, based on wealth.
Many writers felt that there was something distinctive about their timenot a shared
doctrine or literary quality, but a pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate, which some
of them called "the spirit of the age." They had the sense that (as Keats wrote) "Great spirits
now on earth are sojourning," and that there was evidence of the experimental boldness that
marks a literary renaissance.

The imagination of many Romantic-period writers was preoccupied with revolution, and
from that fact and idea they derived the framework that enabled them to think of themselves
as inhabiting a distinctive period in history. The deep familiarity that many late-eighteenthcentury Englishmen and -women had with the prophetic writings of the Bible contributed
from the start to their readiness to attribute a tremendous significance to the political
transformations set in motion in 1789. Religious belief predisposed many to view these
convulsions as something more than local historical events and to cast them instead as
harbingers of a new age in the history of all human beings.
Another method that writers of this period took when they sought to salvage the millennial
hopes that had, for many, been dashed by the bloodshed of the Terror involved granting a
crucial role to the creative imagination. Some writers rethought apocalyptic transformation
so that it no longer depended on the political action of collective humanity but depended
instead (in a shift from the external to the internal) on the individual consciousness. The new
heaven and earth promised in the prophecies could, in this account, be gained by the
individual who had achieved a new, spiritualized, and visionary way of seeing.

Wordsworth, whose formulations of this notion of a revolution in imagination would prove

immensely influential, wrote in The Prelude the classic description of the spirit of the early
1790s. "Europe at that time was thrilled with joy, / France standing on top of the golden
hours, / And human nature seeming born again". "Not favored spots alone, but the whole
earth, / The beauty wore of promise". His sense of the emancipatory opportunities brought in
by the new historical moment carried over to the year 1797, when, working in tandem, he
and Coleridge revolutionized the theory and practice of poetry. The product of their
exuberant daily discussions was the Lyrical Ballads of 1798.
Wordsworth undertook to justify those poems by means of a critical manifesto, or statement
of poetic principles. In it he set himself in opposition to the literary ancien regime, those
writers of the eighteenth century who, in his view, had imposed on poetry artificial
conventions that distorted its free and natural expression. Many of Wordsworth's later
critical writings were attempts to clarify, buttress, or qualify points made in this first
declaration. Wordsworth's Preface deserves its reputation as a turning point in literary
history, for Wordsworth gathered up isolated ideas, organized them into a coherent theory,
and made them the rationale for his own achievements

Seeking a stable foundation on which social institutions might be constructed, eighteenthcentury British philosophers had devoted much energy to demonstrating that human nature
must be everywhere the same, because it everywhere derived from individuals' shared
sensory experience of an external world that could be objectively represented. As the
century went on philosophers began emphasizingand poets began developing a new
language forindividual variations in perception and the capacity the receptive
consciousness has to filter and to re-create reality. This was the shift Wordsworth registered
when in the Preface he located the source of a poem not in outer nature but in the

psychology of the individual poet, and specified that the essential materials of a poem were
not the external people and events it represented but the inner feelings of the author, or
external objects only after these have been transformed by the author's feelings. Wordsworth
in 1802 described all good poetry as, at the moment of composition, "the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings." In keeping with the view that poetry expresses the poet's
feelings, the lyric poem written in the first person, which for much of literary history was
regarded as a minor kind, became a major Romantic form and was often described as the
most essentially poetic of all the genres. And in most Romantic lyrics the "I" is no longer a
conventionally typical lyric speaker, such as the Petrarchan lover or Cavalier gallant of
Elizabethan and seventeenth-century love poems, but one who shares recognizable traits
with the poet. The experiences and states of mind expressed by the lyric speaker often
accord closely with the known facts of the poet's life and the personal confessions in the
poet's letters and journals.

The Prelude exemplifies two other important tendencies. Like Blake, Coleridge in early
poems, and later on Shelley, Wordsworth presents himself as, in his words, "a chosen son"
or "Bard." That is, he assumes the persona of a poet-prophet, a composite figure modeled on
Milton, the biblical prophets, and figures of a national music, the harp-playing patriots,
Celtic or Anglo- Saxon, whom eighteenth-century poets and antiquarians had located in a
legendary Dark Ages Britain. Adopting this bardic guise, Wordsworth puts himself forward
as a spokesman for civilization at a time of crisis. The Prelude is also an instance of a central
literary form of English, as of European, Romanticisma long work about the crisis and
renewal of the self, recounted as the story of an interior journey taken in quest of one's true
identity and destined spiritual home and vocation.

Wordsworth defined good poetry not merely as the overflow but as the "spontaneous
overflow" of feelings. In traditional poetics, poetry had been regarded as supremely an art
an art that in modern times is practiced by poets who have assimilated classical precedents,
are aware of the "rules" governing the kind of poem they are writing, and deliberately
employ tested means to achieve premeditated effects on an audience. But to Wordsworth,
although the composition of a poem originates from "emotion recollected in tranquillity"
and may be preceded and followed by reflection, the immediate act of composition must be
spontaneousarising from impulse and free from rules. Keats listed as an "axiom" a similar
propositionthat "if poetry comes not as naturally as he leaves to a tree it had better not
come at all."
The emphasis in this period on the spontaneous activity of the imagination is linked to a
belief (which links the Romantics' literary productions to the poetry and fiction of sensibility
written earlier in the eighteenth century) in the essential role of passion, whether in the
province of art, philosophy, or morality. The intuitive feelings of "the heart" had to
supplement the judgments of the purely logical faculty, "the head."

Wordsworth identified Lyrical Ballads as his effort to counteract the degradation in taste that
had resulted from "the increasing accumulation of men in cities": the revolution in style he
proposed in the Preface was meant in part to undo the harmful effects of urbanization.
Because he and many fellow writers kept their distance from city life, and because natural
scenes so often provide the occasions for their writing, Romantic poetry for present-day
readers has become almost synonymous with "nature poetry." In the Essay that supplements
his Preface, Wordsworth portrays himself as remedying the failings of predecessors who, he
argues, were unable truthfully to depict natural phenomena such as a moonlit sky.

Neither Romantic theory nor practice, however, justifies the opinion that Romantic poets
valued description for its own sake, though many poems of the period are almost unmatched
in their ability to capture the sensuous nuances of the natural scene, and the writers
participated enthusiastically in the touring of picturesque scenery that was a new leisure
activity of their age. The longer Romantic "nature poems" are in fact usually meditative,
using the presented scene to suggest a personal crisis; the organizing principle of the poem
involves that crisis's development and resolution.
In addition, Romantic poems habitually endow the landscape with human life, passion, and
expressiveness. Many poets respond to the outer universe as a vital entity that participates in
the feelings of the observer.

The aim of Lyrical Ballads was "to choose incidents and situations from common life" and
to use a "language really spoken by men": for Wordsworth's polemical purposes, it is in
"humble and rustic life" that this language is found. Wordsworth underwrote his poetic
practice with a theory that inverted the traditional hierarchy of poetic genres, subjects, and
styles: it elevated humble life and the plain style, which in earlier theory were appropriate
only for the pastoral, the genre at the bottom of the traditional hierarchy, into the principal
subject and medium for poetry in general. Yet Wordsworth's project was not simply to
represent the world as it is but, as he announced in his Preface, to throw over "situations
from common life . . . a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be
presented to the mind in an unusual aspect." No one can read his poems without noticing the
reverence with which he invests words that for earlier writers had been derogatorywords
such as "common," "ordinary," "everyday," "humble." Wordsworth's aim was to shatter the
lethargy of custom so as to refresh our sense of wonder in the everyday, the trivial, and the
lowly. For many Romantics, to arouse in the sophisticated mind that sense of wonder
presumed to be felt by the ignorant and the innocentto renew the universe, Percy Shelley
wrote, "after it has been blunted by reiteration"was a major function of poetry.
Commenting on the special imaginative quality of Wordsworth's early verse, Coleridge
remarked: "To combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which
every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar . . . this is the character and privilege
of genius."

In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christahel, and "Kubla Khan," Coleridge opened up to
modern poetry a realm of mystery and magic. Stories of bewitchings, hauntings, and
possession-shaped by antiquated treatises on demonology, folklore, and Gothic novels
supplied him with the means of impressing upon readers a sense of occult powers and
unknown modes of being. Materials like these were often grouped together under the rubric
"romance," a term that would some time after the fact give the "Romantic" period its name.

The "addition of strangeness to beauty" that Walter Pater near the end of the nineteenth
century would identify as a key Romantic tendency is seen not only in this concern with the
exotic and archaic landscapes of romance, but also in the Romantic interest in the mysteries
of mental life and determination to investigate psychological extremes. Wordsworth
explored visionary states of consciousness that are common among children but violate the
categories of adult judgment. Coleridge and De Quincey shared an interest in dreams and
nightmares and in the altered consciousness they experienced under their addiction to
opium. In his odes as in the quasi-medieval "ballad" "La Belle Dame sans Merci" Keats
recorded strange mixtures of pleasure and pain with extraordinary sensitivity, pondering the
destructive aspects of sexuality and the erotic quality of the longing for death. And Byron
made repeated use of the fascination of the forbidden and the appeal of the terrifying yet
seductive Satanic hero.

Wordsworth declared in The Prelude that the individual mind "Doth, like an Agent of the
one great Mind, / Create, creator and receiver both." The Romantic period, the epoch of free
enterprise, imperial expansion, and boundless revolutionary hope, was also an epoch of
individualism in which philosophers and poets alike put an extraordinarily high estimate on
human potentialities and powers.
In representing this expanded scope for individual initiative, much poetry of the period
redefined heroism and made a ceaseless striving for the unattainable its crucial element.
Viewed by moralists of previous ages as sin or lamentable error, longings that can never be
satisfiedin Percy Shelley's phrase, "the desire of the moth for a star"came to be
revalued as the glory of human nature. "Less than everything," Blake announced, "cannot
satisfy man." In this context many writers' choice to portray poetry as a product of solitude
and poets as loners might be understood as a means of reinforcing the individuality of their
vision. And the pervasiveness of nature poetry in the period can be attributed to a
determination to idealize the natural scene as a site where the individual could find freedom
from social laws, an idealization that was easier to sustain when nature was, as often in the
era, represented not as cultivated fields but as uninhabitable wild wastes, unploughed
uplands, caves, and chasms.

5. 1. William Wordsworth - Daffodils

The poem's structure directly mimics Wordsworth's 3-stage poetic creation process: emotion
recollected in tranquility.
Nature is described in a fictional, unrealistic, idealized way.
The lyrical I's emotions change throughout the poem, and the surrounding nature reflects his
moods.
All of nature, and the lyrical I's soul, are united in dance.
Pantheism: divinity expressed by nature.
The poem begins with the lyrical I being in solitude among nature: a common romantic
theme, as outlined above. Typical for Wordsworth, something catches the I's attention and
starts the process of poetic creation:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Here we see the idealized vision of nature. It is also in total composure and unity.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The sight of the daffodils waving in the breeze fills the poet with joy. He experiences the
emotion, and nature reflects his high spirits the daffodils are dancing:

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazedand gazedbut little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

The last stanza describes the above-experienced emotion, recollected in a moment of

tranquility:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

5. 2. The Giaour

The Byronic hero is a variant of the Romantic hero as a type of character, named after the
English Romantic poet Lord Byron. Both Byron's life and writings have been considered in
different ways to exemplify the type. The Byronic hero first appears in Byron's semiautobiographical epic narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (18121818), and was
described by the historian and critic Lord Macaulay as "a man proud, moody, cynical, with
defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge,
yet capable of deep and strong affection".

The idea of Orientalism as it was conceived by Lord Byron in the early 1800's refers to a
kind of fascination with and depiction of the customs, practices, and mores of Eastern
cultures. The idea of a "romanticized" and "exotic" land that existed outside of the political
struggles of Europe, replete with its own heritage and set of values, served a similar purpose
for the second generation of Romantics as the so-called "sublime" did for Wordsworth and
other notable earlier figures. While Byron's Orientalism by no means lionized or privileged
these values, it did seem to suggest that reflecting upon the differences between the
Occident and the Orient could provide the poet with inspiration much like what his
predecessors found in vast, uncontrollable nature.
Although Byron's initial intent of "Orientalism" carried a positive and reflective connotation,
the use of the term itself was radically altered by the work of noted literary critic, Edward
Said. His 1978 volume, Orientalism, reappropriates the word to signify a fictional construct
of the East by Western minds. This definition of "Orientalism" suggests that the literate,
capitalist society of Europe utilized the vast differences between itself and the "Orient" to
reinforce its own idea of superiority and justify many heinous practices enacted by empire
towards the cultures of the East.
Said's interpretation of Orientalism is important to many ideas at play in current thought
about how British culture and imperialism developed. Byron, by contrast, interpreted
Orientalism as a fertile ground in which important ideas about British identity could
germinate. The two connotations of the term seem to be opposite sides of the same coin,
only separated by the fact that Byron's Orientalism looks to the hopeful future, and Said's
Orientalism looks to a tragic past.

6. The Victorian Era. The Development of English Novel

Corresponds roughly to the reign of Queen Victoria, beginning in 1837 and ending in 1901.
By 1840, ideas of radicalism and democracy have passed away, together with most of the
romantic poets. Victoria restored the power and authority of the monarchy, despite her
influence on governing the country being slight. The period is also associated with a
growing repression of sexuality and increasing pressure on the moral behavior of
individuals. Secular and religious authorities propagated the ideas of chastity and strict
moral codes, which resulted in a raise in the number of brothels, considered acceptable as
long as they didn't damage the boundaries of marriage.

Literacy increased significantly during the Victorian period, although precise figures are
difficult to calculate. In 1837 about half of the adult male population could read and write to
some extent; by the end of the century, basic literacy was almost universal, the product in
part of compulsory national education, required by 1880 to the age of ten. There was also an
explosion of things to read. Because of technological changes in printingpresses powered
by steam, paper made from wood pulp rather than rags, and, toward the end of the century,
typesetting machinespublishers could bring out more printed material more cheaply than
ever before. The number of newspapers, periodicals, and books increased exponentially
during the Victorian period. Books remained fairly expensive, and most readers borrowed
them from commercial lending libraries. (There were few public libraries until the final
decades of the century.) After the repeal of the stamp tax and duties on advertisements just
after midcentury, an extensive popular press developed. The most significant development in
publishing from the point of view of literary culture was the growth of the periodical. In the
first thirty years of the Victorian period, 170 new periodicals were started in London alone.
There were magazines for every taste: cheap and popular magazines that published
sensational tales; religious monthlies; weekly newspapers; satiric periodicals noted for their
political cartoons (the most famous of these was Punch); women's magazines; monthly
miscellanies publishing fiction, poetry, and articles on current affairs; and reviews and
quarterlies, ostensibly reviewing new books but using the reviews, which were always
unsigned, as occasions for essays on the subjects in question. The chief reviews and monthly
magazines had a great deal of power and influence; they defined issues in public affairs, and
they made and broke literary reputations. They also published the major writers of the
period
The thematic scope of the Victorian novel rarely went beyond social criticism. Victorians
were concerned with the discrepancies of capitalist society, urbanization, and the disparity
between city and country, and it is through such a perspective that their observation of
morality is filtered. Industrial revolution was reflected in the literature, with landscape
changing from idyllic to industrial, ugly. Charist riots, bloodshed over trade union rights
were also motifs in many works. The Victorian artist became an observer of everyday life.
He worked among the members of the society, rather than posing as a solitary prophet, like
the Romantics. The Victorian poet replaced inspiration with the craft of observation, while
the Victorian novelist contrived didacticism and social satire.

The circumstances of periodical publication exerted a shaping force on literature. Novels

and long works of nonfiction prose were published in serial form. Although serial
publication of works began in the late eighteenth century, it was the publication of Dickens's
Pickwick Papers (183637) in individual numbers that established its popularity. All of
Dickens's novels and many of those of his contemporaries were published in serial form.
Readers therefore read these works in relatively short, discrete installments over a period
that could extend more than a year, with time for reflection and interpretation in between.

Serial publication encouraged a certain kind of plotting and pacing and allowed writers to
take account of their readers' reactions as they constructed subsequent installments. Writers
created a continuing world, punctuated by the ends of installments, which served to
stimulate the curiosity that would keep readers buying subsequent issues. Serial publication
also created a distinctive sense of a community of readers, a sense encouraged by the
practice of reading aloud in family gatherings.
In 1829, after emancipating Catholics, Evangelicalism (Low/Broad Church) gained
popularity, as a reaction against the contemporary spiritual barrenness. It preached a doctrine
that salvation was the goal of all earthly action. Therefore, people should live morally,
according to Utilitarian precepts of work ethic as a primary means of fulfilling one's goal on
earth. Evangelicalism proposed strict notions of sexual behavior, as the well-being of
individuals was reflected in the well-being of society. Additionally, Darwin's ideas of natural
selection and survival of the fittest provided a context for understanding the changes in the
political situation in Europe after the Treaty of Vienna.
Utilitarianism was proposed by Jeremy Bentham. Utility was to be a criterion of the
goodness of a law, the measure in which it provides the happiness to which every individual
is equally entitled. The motive of an act might be always self-interest, but it is the business
of education and law to induce the individual to subordinate their own happiness to that of
the community. John Stuart Mill added the idea that the achievements of a single human
could be treated as a great contribution for the whole of the organism. Happiness and profit
were highest achievements, and happiness meant success. Utilitarianism was hedonistic in
nature and had little to do with traditional Christian morality. Herbert Spencer applied
Darwin's laws to the general society.

The English novel before the Victorian Age: the novel was a genre of the dynamically
growing bourgeois class, which was bored with the high class drama of aristocracy and
wanted relatable literature.

Adventure stories: adventures, shipwrecks, islands, travels...

Sporting novels: stories about hunting, racing, fishing, eating...
The Silver-fork School novels: fashionable life, inclusion of scenes from lower
classes to produce social satire, social critique...
Newgate fiction: stories written around real-life criminal cases from The Newgate
Calendar.

The novel of manners is a literary genre that deals with aspects of behavior, language,
customs and values characteristic of a particular class of people in a specific historical
context. The genre emerged during the final decades of the 18th century. The novel of
manners often shows a conflict between individual aspirations or desires and the accepted
social codes of behaviour. There is a vital relationship between manners, social behaviour
and character. Physical appearances are overall less emphasised while manners and social
behaviour remain the particular interests in the novel. The idea of manners assumes not only
a social significance, as it is applied today, but a moral one as well, which preceded the
social context in which it was used. What connects the two is the idea of "pleasing".
Characters in the novels are not always morally and socially obliging to each other,
however, but there is differentiation between the upstanding hero or heroine and the socially
less acceptable characters. The different degrees of how the characters uphold the standard
level of social etiquette is what usually dominates the plot of the novel.

Inspired both by Darwinism and its naturalistic and positivist ideology, the novel was
transformed into a unique art of literary observation of society and the individual. The novel
was born out of the needs of contemporary people. Didacticism, social satire, political
novels, all try to deal with the social and political ailments of the times.
Realism was a dominant trend in Victorian novels. Used first in 1850 in France, it described
works concerned with representing the world as it is rather than as it ought to be. The
Victorian novelists were therefore concerned with description rather than invention. They
aimed at presenting authentic details and were keen observers of the function of the
environment in shaping the character. Victorian realism observes and documents
contemporary life and everyday scenes as objectively as possible in a lucid, non-rhetorical
style. Such prose was meant to produce the effect of real life, and its language was
transparent and referential. The novels have either first or third person omniscient narration.
The novelists presented a variety of characters from all social classes, the structure of
society is frequently scrutinized, hence, the inclusion of cruelty and suffering.
The early Victorian novel was still under great influence of its predecessors, the Gothic
novels.

The novel was the dominant form in Victorian literature. Initially published, for the most
part, in serial form, novels subsequently appeared in three-volume editions, or "threedeckers." "Large loose baggy monsters," Henry James called them, reflecting his
dissatisfaction with their sprawling panoramic expanse. As their size suggests, Victorian
novels seek to represent a large and comprehensive social world, with the variety of classes
and social settings that constitute a community. They contain a multitude of characters and a
number of plots, setting in motion the kinds of patterns that reveal the author's vision of the
deep structures of the social worldhow, in George Eliot's words, "the mysterious mixture
behaves under the varying experiments of Time." They present themselves as realistic, that
is, as representing a social world that shares the features of the one we inhabit. The French
novelist Stendhal (17831842) called the novel "a mirror wandering down a road," but the
metaphor of the mirror is somewhat deceptive, since it implies that writers exert no shaping
force on their material. It would be more accurate to speak not of realism but of realisms,
since each novelist presents a specific vision of reality whose representational force he or
she seeks to persuade us to acknowledge through a variety of techniques and conventions.
The worlds of Dickens, of Trollope, of Eliot, of the Brontes hardly seem continuous with
each other, but their authors share the attempt to convince us that the characters and events
they imagine resemble those we experience in actual life. The experience that Victorian
novelists most frequently depict is the set of social relationships in the middle-class society
developing around them. It is a society where the material conditions of life indicate social
position, where money defines opportunity, where social class enforces a powerful sense of
stratification, yet where chances for class mobility exist. Pip can aspire to the great
expectations that provide the title for Dickens's novel; Jane Eyre can marry her employer, a
landed gentleman. Most Victorian novels focus on a protagonist whose effort to define his or
her place in society is the main concern of the plot. The novel thus constructs a tension
between surrounding social conditions and the aspiration of the hero or heroine, whether it
be for love, social position, or a life adequate to his or her imagination. This tension makes
the novel the natural form to use in portraying woman's struggle for self-realization in the
context of the constraints imposed upon her. For both men and women writers, the heroine is
often, therefore, the representative protagonist whose search for fulfillment emblematizes
the human condition.

Whether written by women or men, the Victorian novel was extraordinarily various. It
encompassed a wealth of styles and genres from the extravagant comedy of Dickens to the
Gothic romances of the Bronte sisters, from the satire of Thackeray to the probing
psychological fiction of Eliot, from the social and political realism of Trollope to the
sensation novels of Wilkie Collins. Later in the century a number of popular genres
developedcrime, mystery, and horror novels, as well as science fiction and detective
stories. For the Victorians the novel was both a principal form of entertainment and a spur to
social sympathy. There was not a social topic that the novel did not address. Dickens,
Gaskell, and many lesser novelists tried to stimulate efforts for social reform through their
depiction of social problems. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Joseph
Conrad defined the novel in a way that could speak for the Victorians: "What is a novel if
not a conviction of our fellowmen's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of
imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes
puts to shame the pride of documentary history?"

6. 1. Charles Dickens Great Expectations

Written on the premise of a Bildungsroman, the novel is the story of Pip, who helps a
runaway prisoner and is then rewarded by an unkown contributor who finances his
education. As he is employed by the elderly Miss Havishan to be the companion to young
Estella, he thinks it is Miss Havisham who finances his upbringing. Pip is in love with
Estella, an upper class woman, who does not reciprocate his love. The book is thus a study
of society in the grip of a cash nexus. Pip believes that money can make him a gentleman,
Miss Havisham seeks revenge through it, and Estella wants a secure life. None of them,
however, understand that it is not having, but giving and sharing that brings true happiness.
The accumulation of descriptive detail gives the story much of its technical mastery both in
the character presentation and the development of action. Great Expectations is a story of
redemption as Pip has to reformulate his stance on the world when his fortune dwindles.
Written as a first-person narration, the book is confessional in nature; it is Pip's recounting
of his faults. Young Pip believes that achievement and status can be conferred upon him, but
as he matures he learns that what he is is what he makes of himself and not what money can
help him become.

Bildungsroman, novel of formation, novel of education or coming-of-age story, is a literary

genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to
adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is extremely important.
The novel starts with Pip gaining self-consciousness in the marshes, recognizing his senses

in a metaphorical birth without a mother. He is an orphan, estranged in the world, with his
first memory being of crying.

Great Expectations as a realistic novel:

Shows the darker side of life

Detailed description
Middle-to-low class protagonist, strongly characterized
General society presented through his perspective
Plausible, probable events
Mimesis: reflection of reality

Characterization relies heavily on mentioning realistic details small, memorable aspects

mentioned offhand.

Pip is unhappy because of the discrepancy between his upbringing and his expectations:
he feels inferior. He is removed from his social sphere, but unable to fully join the higher
one. Later, after learning the truth about his expectations, feels hollow and uprepared
psychological realism.
Dickens fascinated with determinism, environment influencing character, self-realization,
memory, and past (numerous mentions of people leaving marks on items: hats, walls...)
Commentary on child laws, capitalism, Darwinist ideas.

Adult Pip narrates his youth chief source of humor.

Sentimentalism mixed with humor.

Gothic elements:

Miss Havisham: her looks, behavior, surroundings

Graveyard in the marshes
Descriptions of London

6. 2. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness

Modernism reflects the disenchantment with the Victorian belief in progress, at the same
time showing the developing impact of psychoanalysis on literature, with writers becoming
increasingly conscious of the influence of the unconscious on literary works. Much
modernist writing is also permeated by cultural relativism and demonstrates an awareness of
the elements of irrationality in the workings of the unconscious mind. The period is marked
by its love of experiment in literary techniques, borrowing methods from other art forms.
Modernism is the term for an international tendency in the arts brought about by a creative
renaissance during the last decade of the nineteenth century and lasting into the post-war
years. It embraces a wide range of artistic movements (symbolism, impressionism, postimpressionism, imagism, etc.) and cannot be characterized by a uniform style.
Technically, modernism was distinguished by its opposition to traditional forms, particularly
realism. It was persistently experimental. A common quality was the highly self-conscious
manipulation of form, together with an awareness of pioneering studies which were
conteporaneous in other disciplines. These included psychology, physics and anthropology.
Modernist writers strive to break up, or recreate, the experience of reading. Stream of

consciousness, the use of myth as a structural principle, and the primary status given to the
poetic image, all challenged traditional representation. Narration in modernist texts is
experimental, language becomes extremely important: focus is on the individual mind and
individual perceptions, self-consciousness, symbolism.

Symbolism was a movement in poetry in the latter part of the nineteenth century, aimed at
suggestion rather than direct commentary, through evoking subjective moods via symbols.

Influenced by the work of William James and Henri Bergson, novelists developed the
stream of consciousness technique. Imitating internal thoughts was intended to give the
reader a direct insight into the character's mind. Stream of consciousness is usually
presented through the device of interior monologue. Rejecting the traditional convention of
presenting a character's thoughts in a rational and orderly manner, writers began to use
disorganized, unfinished sentences to reflect the chaotic state of the human psyche.
The writers' search for a new set of values needed a new literary format to convey the
complexity of their experience. The flow of thoughts, illogical and based on free
associations mirrored the chaotic nature of the existence of the modern man.

Heart of Darkness is the story of Marlow's journey up the Congo to find a man named
Kurtz, who has become the ruler of a tribe. As the journey progresses, Marlow's sense of the
futility of his mission grows. Terrifying and Ruthless, Kurtz stands for the colonizers. In
fact, all of Europe has contributed to the making of Kurtz as he embraces the rhetoric of
superiority. By the time Marlow reaches his goal, Kurtz is too ill and too mad to explain, and
all that is left for Marlow is the realization that the price of understanding is sharing in that
madness. Marlow ultimately recoils from the terror of the depths of Kurtz's self-knowledge,
the symbolic heart of darkness, by suppressing the inner anarchy, which he dares not even
imagine.

Main concerns of the novel:

Imperialism and colonial expansion

Reflections of the domestic ideology (Women)
Individual experience and its rendering through experimental narration
The use of symbolism, the dream narrative

Colonialism: Marlow's story in Heart of Darkness takes place in the Belgian Congo, the
most notorious European colony in Africa for its greed and brutalization of the native
people. In its depiction of the monstrous wastefulness and casual cruelty of the colonial
agents toward the African natives, Heart of Darkness reveals the utter hypocrisy of the entire
colonial effort. In Europe, colonization of Africa was justified on the grounds that not only
would it bring wealth to Europe, it would also civilize and educate the "savage" African
natives. Heart of Darkness shows that in practice the European colonizers used the high
ideals of colonization as a cover to allow them to viciously rip whatever wealth they could
from Africa. Unlike most novels that focus on the evils of colonialism, Heart of Darkness
pays more attention to the damage that colonization does to the souls of white colonizers
than it does to the physical death and devastation unleashed on the black natives. Though
this focus on the white colonizers makes the novella somewhat unbalanced, it does allow
Heart of Darkness to extend its criticism of colonialism all the way back to its corrupt
source, the "civilization" of Europe.

The hollowness of civilization: Heart of Darkness portrays a European civilization that is

hopelessly and blindly corrupt. The novella depicts European society as hollow at the core:
Marlow describes the white men he meets in Africa, from the General Manager to Kurtz, as
empty, and refers to the unnamed European city as the "sepulchral city" (a sepulcher is a
hollow tomb). Throughout the novella, Marlow argues that what Europeans call
"civilization" is superficial, a mask created by fear of the law and public shame that hides a
dark heart, just as a beautiful white sepulcher hides the decaying dead inside. Marlow, and
Heart of Darkness, argue that in the African jungle"utter solitude without a policeman"
the civilized man is plunged into a world without superficial restrictions, and the mad desire
for power comes to dominate him. Inner strength could allow a man to push off the
temptation to dominate, but civilization actually saps this inner strength by making men
think it's unnecessary. The civilized man believes he's civilized through and through. So
when a man like Kurtz suddenly finds himself in the solitude of the jungle and hears the
whisperings of his dark impulses, he is unable to combat them and becomes a monster.

The lack of truth: Heart of Darkness plays with the genre of quest literature. In a quest, a
hero passes through a series of difficult tests to find an object or person of importance, and
in the process comes to a realization about the true nature of the world or human soul.
Marlow seems to be on just such a quest, making his way past absurd and horrendous
"stations" on his way up the Congo to find Kurtz, the shining beacon of European
civilization and morality in the midst of the dark jungle and the "flabby rapacious folly" of
the other Belgian Company agents. But Marlow's quest is a failure: Kurtz turns out to be the
biggest monster of all. And with that failure Marlow learns that at the heart of everything
there lies only darkness. In other words, you can't know other people, and you can't even
really know yourself. There is no fundamental truth.

Conrad exploits black and white imagery. Darkness is the impenetrable unknown, the
primitive and evil. White is the ivory, the luxury of the civilized man, yet at the same time
the root of all evil in the darkness, the obsession of the white men, until they come to
resemble that evil. The whites constantly perish, fall sick, scheme and plot because of their
greed for ivory. Conrad begins and ends Marlow's journey into the heart of darkness on the
Thames and throughout the text we are constantly exposed to the comparison between the
Thames and the Congo river, reminded that although the white man stands for civilization,
his own civilized nature can also turn monstrous and dark.

Symbols in Heart of Darnkess:

The White Worstead: Marlow remarks on a slave wearing a collar of white material
around his neck, seemingly unnecessarily slavery.
The Ivory mentioned above. A white element standing for evil.
The map with colored markers Africa being conquered
Kurtz's painting of a blindfolded woman carrying a torch: Europeans blindly forcing
their ideas of civilization onto Africa.

Women: Marlow believes that women exist in a world of beautiful illusions that have
nothing to do with truth or the real world. In this way, women come to symbolize
civilization's ability to hide its hypocrisy and darkness behind pretty ideas.

The sepulchral city: symbolizes all of European civilization. The beautiful white outside
evokes the lofty ideas used to justify colonization, the hidden hollow inside the sepulcher
hides hypocrisy and desire for power and wealth.

Dark and white: Conrad exploits black and white imagery. Darkness is the impenetrable
unknown, the primitive and evil. White is the ivory, the luxury of the civilized man, yet at
the same time the root of all evil in the darkness, the obsession of the white men, until they
come to resemble that evil. The whites constantly perish, fall sick, scheme and plot because
of their greed for ivory. Conrad begins and ends Marlow's journey into the heart of darkness
on the Thames and throughout the text we are constantly exposed to the comparison
between the Thames and the Congo river, reminded that although the white man stands for
civilization, his own civilized nature can also turn monstrous and dark.
Darkness is everywhere in Heart of Darkness. But the novella tweaks the conventional idea
of white as good and dark as evil. Evil and good don't really apply to Heart of Darkness,
because everyone in the novella is somehow complicit in the atrocities taking place in
Africa. Rather, whiteness, especially in the form of the white fog that surrounds the
steamship, symbolizes blindness. The dark is symbolized by the huge and inscrutable
African jungle, and is associated with the unknowable and primitive heart of all men.
Heart of Darkness attacks colonialism as a deeply flawed enterprise run by corrupt and
hollow white men who perpetrate mass destruction on the native population of Africa, and
the novel seems to equate darkness with truth and whiteness with hollow trickery and lies.
So Heart of Darkness argues that the Africans are less corrupt and in that sense superior to
white people, but it's argument for the superiority of Africans is based on a foundation of
racism. Marlow, and Heart of Darkness, take the rather patronizing view that the black
natives are primitive and therefore innocent while the white colonizers are sophisticated and
therefore corrupt. This take on colonization is certainly not politically correct," and can be
legitimately called racist because it treats the natives like objects rather than as thinking
people.

Edward Said: begins his critique by stating that we must not blame the Europeans for the
misfortunes of the present. We should instead look at the events of imperialism as a
network of interdependent histories that would be inaccurate and senseless to repress, useful
and interesting to understand. We live in a global environment and racial hatred can read to
destruction. Said mentions further how the imperial attitude is captured in Heart of
Darkness. It is impossible to convey the life-senstaion of any given epoch of one's
existence that which makes its truth, its meaning, its subtle and penetrating essence... We
live, as we dream alone. Said explains how Marlow wants us to understand that Kurtz's
looting adventure, Marlow's journey and the narrative are linked and how they all work as a
demonstration of the Europeans acts of imperial mastery in Africa.
To Said Conrad's narrative is bound to a certain time and place. Conrad does not see an
alternative to imperialism and the natives he wrote about seemed to be incapable of
independence. He could not foresee what would happen when imperialism came to an end.
Conrad allows readers today to see Africa that is not made up of dozens of European
colonies, even if he himself might have had a very limited idea of what Africa was like. This
is a particularly important point, Said sees the novel more as an important time-document
which displays a vision that was seen as normal and correct at the time. Kurtz's speech is
also full with discrepancies, which gives the reader a sense that everything presented
between the orthodox and his own views of empire is to keep drawing attention to how ideas
and values are constructed, and deconstructed, through dislocations in the narrator's
language. Marlow, for example, is never straightforward. He alternates between garrulity
and stunning eloquence.

7. The Novel in the 20th Century

7. 1 Ian McEwan Atonement

Metafiction is fiction that constantly reminds the reader that it is fiction, and also
addresses the problems of storytelling and narrative.
Metafiction is a literary device used to self-consciously and systematically draw attention to
a work's status as an artifact. It poses questions about the relationship between fiction and
reality, usually using irony and self-reflection.
Common metafictive devices, present in Atonement, are:
A story about a writer who creates a story
A story containing another work of fiction within itself
A story addressing the specific conventions of story, such as title, character
conventions, paragraphing or plots
A novel where the narrator intentionally exposes him or herself as the author of the
story

Postmodernism is a term applied to a variety of cultural trends. It was coined in the sixties
to denote disconnected styles, experimentation and the mixing of high and low culture
promted by Jean Baudrillard as post-modernity.
Postmodern epistemology began with questioning the transparency of realism, the
collapse of the subject matter or character and thus the logical foundations of narrative
principles. Neither the social, nor historical settings were important. Postmodern authors do
not hide the fact that they are only interested in the semblance of truth.

Characterized by mutliple points of view, unreliable or overtly controlling narrators,

unresolved contradictions in plot or theme, acknowledged uncertainty, and an emphasis on
their own nature as fiction, contemporary novels exemplify tje findamental inaccessibility of
the past.
Four main features of English new literary fiction of 1980s and 90s:

Fascination with history and historical processes

Interest in setting abroad, or in characters and incidents from outside the British Isles
Considerable prominence of genre mixture
Metafictional interests

In McEwan, spectacular hybridity is avoided, and literature in its relation to reality is a

theme rather than a structural device. Other traits of McEwan's fiction include:
Presentation of women, role of the feminist concern: In Atonement, the author makes
himself indistinguishable from Briony, who writes a male narrative;
Concern with science and rationalism: the role of the irrational impulses,
obsessions
Moral perspective: judgment left to he reader, moral relativism.
Fragmentariness: episodes around which narrative clusters are organized, plots seemingly
incomplete
Part one: a specific blend of conventional realism and modernism - manipulating the
point of view.
Part two: Robbie's retreat from Dunkirk documentary realism, questioning the miracle
of Dunkirk.
Part three: Briony as a nurse, treating the wounded from Dunkirk documentary realism,
to the point of accusations of plagiarism of No Time For Romance, memoirs of one Lucilla
Andrews.
Part four: change of narrator first person, extradiagetic and homodiagetic.
The most essential theme of Atonement is the way an individuals perspective inevitably
shapes his or her reality. At various points throughout the novel, McEwan filters the
narrative through a particular characters point of view. By juxtaposing the distinct, and
frequently conflicting, ways his characters understand the world, the author illustrates that
each individuals reality is as much a product of their own biases, assumptions, and limited
knowledge as it is a reflection of an objective, external truth. The most powerful and
consequential example of perspective influencing reality is Brionys inaccurate
incrimination of Robbie. A long chain of self-centered reasoning leads the young girl to
believe that Robbie is responsible for raping Lola. First, her resentment at being excluded
from Robbie and Cecilias mutual love predisposes her to view Robbie negatively. Later on,
her childish imagination leads her to fabricate a sinister backstory to explain why she saw
Robbie and Cecilia cavorting semi-clothed in the fountain together. These biases in turn
drive her to surreptitiously read the lewd letter Robbie accidentally sends to Cecilia and
conclude that the young man is a depraved maniac. Together, these hasty conclusions and
unnoticed biases make Briony convince herself that she saw Robbie assault Lola, and attest
this misconception to the police. At this point, Brionys flawed perspective combines with
the incomplete perspectives and biases held by authority figures like the police and Mrs.

Tallis, and this is all it takes to fabricate a reality in which Robbie is guiltyeven though
that reality has no basis in actual fact. However, even though Brionys biased reality
certainly causes the furthest reaching repercussions, McEwan shows that no character is
capable of seeing the world in a truly objective, balanced way. For example, despite being so
deeply harmed by others hasty judgments, Robbie and Cecilia themselves (snobbishly)
assume that the servant Danny Hardman was Lolas true rapist, even though the facts
indicate otherwise. Through this and other shifts in perspective, McEwan illustrates the
crucial, yet capricious, role that narrative plays in our individual understandings of truth.
As the books title suggests, guilt is a primary theme of Atonement. After she realizes the
damage that her callous testimony has wrought, Briony spends a lifetime burdened by her
guilt and attempting to atone for her misdeeds. Instead of going to college, she becomes a
nurse, perhaps sensing a duty to help soldiers like Robbie. She worries endlessly about
whether Robbie will be harmed in the line of duty, understanding that any injuries he suffers
will be in some way her fault. Moreover, she is haunted by the pain she has caused her sister
by slandering her beloved and forcing the two lovers apart. Whats more, as the books
conclusion reveals, Briony has written the entire novel in an attempt to exonerate Robbie
and atone for her lies. Since McEwan casts guilt as such a powerful and universal human
sentiment, it is worth noting that Robbies wartime experience often forces him to forego
feelings of guilt in the interest of self-preservation. In this way, the author shows that Robbie
has been somewhat dehumanized as a consequence of Brionys childish misconduct.
Because Robbies own fate has been determined largely by factors outside of his control, a
portion of his capacity for guilt seems to have been transferred to the person who
precipitated his misfortune: Briony. Similarly, Lola actually ends up marrying her rapist,
Paul Marshall, and the implication is that in doing so these two characters are both able to
hide or escape their guilt in allowing Robbie to be falsely accused, and that Paul is able to
further hide his own rape of Lola in exchange for making Lola, the daughter of a divorcee,
wealthy by marrying her.
The most important plot developments in the work stem from actions or experiences that can
never be erased or counteracted. Once Briony testifies against Robbie, she takes on a
responsibility for Robbies fate that she will never be able to shed, and she loses an
innocence that she will never be able to regain. No matter what she does to atone for her
misdeed, she will not be able to replace the futurelove with Cecilia, being a doctorthat
she has stolen from Robbies life. Not surprisingly, Brionys accusation leaves an indelible
mark on Robbie, too. As a consequence of his imprisonment, he is unable to continue his
prestigious education and must instead enlist in the military. The violence and suffering that
Robbie witnesses in the war traumatize him and permanently alter his temperament.
Similarly, after Briony works her first shift in the hospital caring for seriously wounded
soldiers, she feels as though she has crossed into a new stage of maturity and worldliness
from which she can never return. This theme of irretrievability meshes interestingly with the
novels theme of individual perspective. In many ways, the most irrevocable changes in the
novel come when characters lose the ability to perceive their realities in a certain way. For
example, as an aging Briony reflects on her past, she no longer sees the world with the
tragically narcissistic perspective she held as a childand in this way, her new perspective
irretrievably reshapes the reality of her life.
The tension that drives the books early plot is the scandalous love affair between the
wealthy, well bred Cecilia Tallis and the low-class Robbie Turner, the son of one of her
familys servants. Although Robbie has been largely incorporated into the Tallis family, both
by growing up alongside the Tallis children and by enjoying a stellar education sponsored by
the family, he is nevertheless an outsider. Robbies future depends on the charity of the

Tallises. His outsider status undeniably contributes to the swift and uncompromising
isolation he experiences after Briony accuses him of raping Lola. McEwan emphasizes that
an individuals social status has little correlation with his or her moral and intellectual worth.
The chocolate heir Paul Marshalls high social status likely allows him to escape suspicion
for the crime he committed, and he never acknowledges his misdeed, and in fact even
buys his way out of trouble by marrying, and thereby making rich, the girl he raped.
Meanwhile, low-born Robbie is one of the brightest and kindest characters in the novel.
However, while he may be morally and intellectually exceptional, Robbies low class does
inhibit him from exercising the power to choose his own fate that other, higher-status
characters do throughout the novel. Instead, he is left at the mercy of a biased system while
other, more morally reprehensible characters go unpunished largely because of their greater
social clout. And, further, Robbie is also not immune to class prejudice, as he assumes the
even lower class Danny Hardman raped Lola, never imagining that it might have been Paul
Marshall who did it.