INTRODUCTION

TO
LITERARY
STUDIES

ILE (Ph.D, MA, Germany)

1
 Contents

Preface-------------------------------------------------------3

Acknowledgement-------------------------------------------7

1. Old English Period----------------------------------------8

1.1 Middle English Period----------------------------11

1.2 Renaissance and Reformation Period----------14
1.3 Revolution and Restoration Period-------------17
1.4 18th Century Period: Age of Enlightenment---27
1.5 Romantic Period---------------------------------36
1.6 High Victorian and Edwardian Period----------41
1.7 Late Victorian and Edwardian Period----------50
1.8 Modernism and Post-modernism--------------53

2. Literary Devices and their Meaning------------------59

3. Critical Methods----------------------------------------70

4. Literature and Praxis-----------------------------------81

5. Conclusion----------------------------------------------90

Bibliography------------------------------------------------92

Index--------------------------------------------------------89

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 Preface

One cannot talk about Literary Studies without first of all

knowing what Literature is. It is no longer appropriate to say
that literature has no definite definition, because literature can
actually be defined. When a writer writes, or a film producer
shoots a film, he or she writes to be read or shoots a film for it
to be watched. He or she hopes to relay a message born out of
life’s experience or from observing events. He or she may write
or shoot film to enlighten or even to entertain. Whichever the
reason is, fact is, the written material mirrors experience, just
as the film does. If this is so, then literature is a body of
writing containing relevant pieces of information that build up
to valid knowledge about the deeper beliefs of the nature of
human individuals and societies, problems of power, ethnicity
and sexuality, etc. It is pragmatic in that it affects the reader
in a certain way. However, it is our hope that literary studies
will raise our consciousness to a higher level, making it
possible for us to imbibe higher humanistic principles which will
make it possible for us to uphold true human values, defend
justice, fight oppression, and stand up for human rights. In
short, we hope to be better persons.
Therefore, since literature builds up to valid knowledge, it
is expected that it would be functional; in other words, what
we learn must be such that should make us useful to ourselves
and society.
Literature is divided into genres –the novel as a genre,
drama, poem and the short story. Some Universities in the
West have included film studies as a genre of literature while
some believe it is an independent field of study.

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 Literary Studies, as a course, is intended, therefore, to
introduce us to the fundamental issues in the history of ideas,
to critical approaches to issues, to develop our perception and
sense of judgement –in fact, to make us able to see things
from various perspectives without losing our sense of
judgement. It will also prepare us to face higher and deeper
critical theories like semiotics, pragmatism, phenomenology,
historicism, cultural studies, ethnic studies, gender studies,
feminism, deconstruction, structuralism, post-structuralism,
modernism and post-modernism as we go up the ladder of
academic pursuit in literary studies.
Aside from acquainting the new seeker after knowledge
with the history of ideas and critical theories, literary studies
also initiates the seeker to text appreciation. The seeker is
expected to know the principles required in literary
appreciation; he is expected to know how the various
components of the text interact logically: how the writer
functions also as reader; how the reader functions as writer in
reading; how the text embodies both objective and subjective
realities – a platform of the phenomena of the mind in its quest
to turn information into knowledge and channel the knowledge
to change.
When a writer is writing, s/he is also reading his/her work;
in other words, s/he responds to his writing in the process of
reading it –that is, a situation of discourse is created during the
process of writing and reading. The reader or critic, for his or
her part, is engaged in the process of rewriting while reading
the text created by a writer. He or she comes across ideas in
the text that he or she would write differently were he or she
to be the writer of the text. He or she even sees some other

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horizons missed by the writer in the process of writing. He or
she sometimes sees grammatical errors in the writer’s work.
The rewritten text exists in his or her subconscious however.
But the text itself becomes a meeting point between the writer
and the reader –it becomes a platform for both their objective
and subjective realities. This builds up to knowledge as the
reader responds to the writer in the text and appropriates
information which is turned into knowledge. It must not be
forgotten, however, that the act of reading itself could be
twofold –that is, it could be leisurely or pragmatic: The
untrained reader, who is reading a book, may acknowledge the
fact that s/he is reading or have just read a good work. S/he
may not be aware of the devices that lend literariness to a
work of art. However, a trained reader or critic reading the
work may get captivated by the writers’ use of language. The
beauty and force of the writer’s language may urge the reader
to read on. He or she follows the development of the text and
reads on patiently and assiduously. He or she gets immersed in
the world of the text. If he or she is reading the text for its
own sake and reading it closely, he or she may begin to be
conscious of the science of the text in the writer’s use of
imagery, satire, irony, metaphor, simile, paradox, oxymoron,
euphemism, personification, alliteration, assonance, pun,
metonym, rhetorical question, climax as well as the
syntactic/semantic/lexical structures of the text in trying to
create high literature. He/she studies how the plot of the work
is structured –that is, whether the story line is sequential or
disjointed. If he/she is using stylistic methods, he/she uses
either content format or linguistic format, which pays attention
to deictic words, that is, words whose functions are to point

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out or specify something –words like definite articles –the and
demonstrative pronouns –this, that, these, those. But if the
reader is desirous of making his/her knowledge functional, s/he
studies the text in its various contexts and locates his/her role
in social change through the texts –in other words, s/he is not
so interested in the linguistic approach to literary studies as
s/he is interested in the functional approach which involves the
application of Marxist critical theory, psychoanalysis and so
forth.
In all, the book will take the reader through the Old English
Period, which is the Chapter One, up to the Post-modern
Period, a sub-chapter of Chapter One.
In Chapter Two, it will treat the literary devices and their
meaning; chapter three will examine the critical theories, while
chapter four will make the reader aware of the practical
implication for literature.

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 Acknowledgment

I wish to thank The Nigerian Turkish Nile University for

providing the platform for the writing of this book.
I also want to thank my students for being the inspiration.

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 1

Old English Period in Literature (450 – 1066)

Before the old English Period, there was no England; there
was of course Britain. The inhabitants of Britain were the Celtic
tribes, which comprised the Picts, the Scots and the Welsh –
these were the original inhabitants of Britain.
Britain as at the time was still under the Roman Empire; in
other words, Roman Language or Latin, Culture and
Government hailed sway. These tribes of Britain were always
at war among themselves.
King Vortigern, one of the Celtic kings, most likely from the
tribe of the Scots, had invited the warriors of the Germanic
tribe to help him consolidate his rule by defeating his enemies.
These Germanic tribes comprised the Jutes, Frisians, Angles
and Saxons. The Jutes were most likely from the present day
Denmark; the Frisians, from the modern day Netherlands,
while the Angles and Saxon were most likely from the modern
day Sweden and Germany respectively.
The Germanic tribes were known to be warring tribes. In
fact they were so strong that they were called the Barbarians
by Romans, who felt the civilization was superior. They were
not only warriors, but they were also pirates. So when they
arrived at Britain, they fought and defeated the enemies of
King Vortigern. They saw that the land was good after all. They
began to settle in Britain. They even began to invite their kiths
and kin.
Upon settling down, they began to fight the Roman Army
until they drove them away from Britain. Having driven out the
Romans, they occupied Britain. Having occupied Britain and
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being a much stronger people in terms of warfare, they began
to rule Britain. Their languages began to mingle with the
already existing languages.
Before the arrival of the Germanic tribes to Britain, Celtic
Languages or Gaelics were spoken in the island of Britain.
The settling Germanic tribes spoke the Germanic
Languages –Deutsch, Dutch, Danish and Swedish. As they
settled and mingled with the natives and even ruled them,
Anglo-Saxon, which was what they called the language they
spoke, began to displace the native languages. The Anglo-
Saxon settlers called their country Anglecynn. Over time they
called their Language, Anglisc or Englisc. It was not until 1000
AD that they called their country England. Today, the language
spoken in Britain is called English; therefore, English is a
Germanic Language.
When the Romans left Britain for the Anglo-Saxons, they
also left their civilization behind. Latin was still spoken in
England, but mainly among the highly educated class. Ordinary
people still interacted in Old English. Being that the Roman
Empire was a Christian Empire, religious activities still
persisted but mostly among the religious class, that is, the
Monks and Priests.
Not everybody was literate at the time: literacy, in the real
sense of the word, meant ability to read and write in Latin. And
since Monks and Priests were mostly literate, writing and
reading of religious texts took place only among them.
However, ordinary people still learned through folklores and
tales.
There were, however, pagan texts or poems that existed
during this period. The educated class who were mainly monks

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and priests reissued those texts and implied that their themes
were Christian or reflected Christian views of the world and the
struggle over good and evil. Some of these Old English texts,
mostly epic poems have survived as volumes till date. They
are: the Beowulf Manuscript, Junius Manuscript, Vercelli Books
and Exerter Books.

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1.1 Middle English Period in Literature (1066-1510)
The Anglo-Saxon rule lasted till about 1066 AD, when the
Norman Army under the command of William the Bastard
invaded Britain, captured it and began to rule it. The Normans
were originally from Normandy in France. By conquering
Britain, Williams was later called the conqueror. Before the
invasions of Normans, English was the language of England.
Latin was spoken there too, but it remained the language with
which the clergy conducted worships and study. The feudal
system in place before the Norman invasion had a native
Aristocracy, which spoke English. The ordinary citizens spoke
English too. But the Clergy spoke Latin. In other words,
England was bilingual; but, Norman Conquest made England
trilingual. The English Aristocracy was replaced by the Norman
aristocracy, while the Norman episcopate displaced the English
Clergy. By the time William the Conqueror died in 1087, he left
England with a ruling class that spoke French as well as a
Clergy that still retained Latin. Lower class still spoke English
One of the major writers of the Middle English Period was
known as Richard Rolle. He had come to characterize the ideal
of the age. He dropped out of school at 18 because he
discovered that life in the world was full of vanity; as such he
went into hermitage –he had to exclude himself from the
contamination of the world. Therefore, while in recluse, he
wrote the following books: Ego Dominio, The Commandment
and The Form of Living. In the books he tried to instruct man
on the essence of life.
Life of reclusion was characteristic of religious minded
people during the Middle English Period. During this period,
great value was placed on the life of contemplation and so

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spiritually enlightened people withdrew themselves from
society in order to contemplate the real essence of life. Value
was also placed on religious devotion.
There were three major categories of writing during the
Middle English Period in Literature. They are, Religious writing,
Courtly love and Arthurian Romances.
1. Religious writings were mostly literatures that sought to
explain the Godly essence to man. It was mostly
instructive. And the examples of religious writings are
Richard Rolle’s Ego Dominio, The Commandment and The
Form of Living.
2. Courtly Love texts are mostly epic poems that
demonstrated manly or Knightly Heroism, not in the art
of war but in the art of love –sexual love of an elevated
type.
3. Arthurian Romances represented writing that also dealt
on love topics.
The major writers of the period quite apart from Richard
Rolle were Hoccleve, John Gower, William Langland, Julian
Norwich, The Gawain Poet and of course Geoffrey Chaucer.
Each of these writers depicted in his poem or prose the
social realities of his or her time, be it about life in the King’s
court, or about the havoc wreaked by the Black Death in
England. Black Death was a plague or disease that ravaged the
population of England in the fourteenth century.
William Langland especially captured the havoc of the
plague in his poem entitled, The Vision of Pier Plowman.
However, of all these writers, the one that dominated the
literary life of the Middle English Period in Literature was
Geoffrey Chaucer. Apart from writing Troilus and Criseyde, he

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also wrote and was famous for The Canterbury Tales. The Tales
consisted of the following:
The Knight’s Tale
The squire’s Tale
The Wife of Bath’s Tale
The Merchant’s Tale
The Franklin’s Tale
The Miller’s Tale, etc.
All these are narrative poems in that they told stories; they
also always rhymed in an iambic pentameter form at the each
ending.

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1.2 Renaissance and Reformation Period in Literature (1510 -
1620)
This period in literature was a period of great changes. Henry
VIII, the reigning king at the time, had enforced the use of
English Language and encouraged the spread of English culture
upon ascension to the throne. This move was, however,
resisted by Scotland, which insisted on its autonomy from
Great Britain and allegiance to France. Henry VIII declared war
on Scotland and defeated it in Flodden in 1513.
The inability of Henry VIII’s wife to bear him a son, who
would be the eventual heir, made Henry VIII to want to divorce
her. In matters that concerned the holy wedlock, the head of
Christendom, who was the Pope, at the time, was always
informed. During this period, the Church was superior to the
state and Rome was the official headquarters of the entire
Christendom. The Pope refused to endorse the divorce being
that it was against Christian principles. However, King Henry
VIII went ahead and divorced his wife. The Pope had to ex-
communicate him from Christendom. This action by the pope
angered the King so much that he, through the act of
parliament declared England’s independence from papal Rome.
The independence from papal Rome marked the beginning of
Reformation in England. In order to ensure that papal influence
was greatly reduced, King Henry VIII went ahead and
disbanded about 800 Monasteries.
Just as institutional changes were going on in England
through reform by Henry VIII, there were also changes or
rebirth going on in literary, political and philosophical thoughts.
Renaissance we must know means rebirth. Many intellectuals
of that period, especially John Skelton did particularly feel that

14
works written in Chaucerian language were awkward (see
Sanders, 1996: 86). People yearned after classical traditions of
Rome and Greece; and there was a growing need to make
education more practical and scientific. Therefore, a group of
scholars, writers and educators known today as renaissance
humanists devoted themselves to this task.
In England some scholars and writers had to travel as far
as Italy to study humanism by learning from the great
humanists of that time. One of such early travelers to Italy to
be trained in humanistic principles was Robert Flemmyng and
then Thomas Linacre (1460-1524). Linacre was a student
under the great Italian humanist called Politan. After Linacre,
the next to travel to study under Politan was William Grocyn.
Thomas More and John Colet were students under William
Grocyn. When Grocyn returned to England, he delivered the
first public lecture on Greek at Oxford (see Johnson, 2000: 43-
44).
As can be seen, these men penetrated the universities
and began thus to initiate great changes in the spirit of
Renaissance Humanism, which insisted that literature or texts
must represent the greatest values and ideal; as such its
criticism must avoid looking at texts on their face values. In
critiquing a text, they asked questions about its origins, its
credentials, its authenticity as well as the objectivity of its
contents (Johnson, 2000: 44). This critical approach to textual
issues was to prove fatal to the unity of the Church once
renaissance humanist began to apply their method to sacred
texts too. It was not until 1497 that John Colet evolved a
different approach in the critique of sacred text. His approach
was different from the scholastic approach which seemed to

15
always want to pull down. His approach was greatly praised
and thought to represent a historical approach (2000: 45).
Some of the major writers of the renaissance period were
Thomas Thyme, who produced the new edition of Canterbury
Tales or Chaucer, John Skelton, who wrote a critique on The
Art of Poesie, Edward Spencer, who wrote the Fairy Queen, Sir
Philip Sydney, who wrote the Defense of Poesie, Thomas
Nashe, who experimented with his fictions, The Unfortunate
Traveler (1594) and Pierce Pennilesse his Supplication to the
Divell (1592), Thomas Moore who wrote Utopia and above all
William Shakespeare who seemed to be the greatest of them
all with his dramas.
Humanists sought the best for human life on earth. They
devoted their time and energy to human needs, interests and
values. They also approached issues regarding humanity
rationally, objectively and pragmatically.
There are various types of humanism –literary,
renaissance, western cultural, philosophical, Christian, modern
secular and religious humanism.

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1.3 Revolution and Restoration Period in Literature (1620-
1690)
There were great revolutionary changes in England during the
reign of James 1. While Henry Vlll sought to make his State
independent of papal Rome, and stronger than the Church,
King James 1 sought to establish the unified Church of
England.
The fact that many a man sought to sing his praise made
King James think that his reign was ordained by God: there
was a theatre performance by one of the great writers of the
period in which it seemed news about the anointment of
earthly kings by God came from the new world discovered in
the moon. The theatre performance even symbolized for King
James 1 that indeed God anointed earthly kings.
In his bid to establish a unified Church of England, he
enacted religious policies that most English people found
antagonistic. One of these policies was the integrated union of
the Church with the state, with the King as the head. The
appointment of Bishops was also to be his prerogative.
There were, however, some group of men, who felt that
the spiritual essence of the Church was drifting away under
King James1 and who felt that the doctrines of the Established
Church were contrary to true Christian principles as outlaid in
the Bible. Moreover, they opposed his policies, including his
idea of the Established Church of England. These men were
known as the Puritans.
Their opposition to the King’s policies regarding the Church
as well as their belief in the ideal Christian principles, made
them enemies of the state; as such they faced great

17
persecution. They decided to leave England to a place they
would call New England, where they would be free to worship
the way they wanted. Their first destination upon arrival to
New England was Plymouth Plantation in Virginia. They were
burning with fervour to practice to the letter what was in the
Bible. Because of the extreme nature of the King’s policies,
these men replied in word and deed with equal extremity.
Therefore, it could rightly be said that extremity marked the
politics and literature of that period, hence revolution and
restoration.
The Puritans, however, did not agree in their search for
the original pattern of the ideal Christian principles with regard
to the Church in that apostolic age when people were burning
with passion for religion. They broke down into different
doctrinal groups: the Calvinists, Presbyterians,
Congregationalists, Arminians and the Quakers, who to some
extent could be termed transcendentalists.
The Calvinists were mostly Puritans devoted to the ideas of
John Calvin, a Swiss, who himself had adopted the Augustian
Theology or Theory. The Calvinists believed that man was not
able to save himself since the fall of Adam; that means, he
could not will not to sin. They also believed in the doctrine of
irresistible grace –which means that man is solely dependent
on the grace of God for salvation. They believed too in the
doctrine of predestination –which means that man’s fate was
already pre-destined at birth.
All these doctrines were contained in the book written by
John Calvin called The Institute. He expounded on the
Theology of St. Augustine in the book.

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 The Presbyterians shared almost the same doctrines with
the Calvinists, only that, unlike the Calvinists, they believed
that the Church should be governed by a series of
representative assembly.
The Congregationalists for their part did not believe in the
theory of the Unified Church; however, they believed in the
doctrine of the elect –that means one was chosen by God
through predestination and as such only God could call the
elect not otherwise.
The Arminians, who were adherents to the doctrines of
Arminus, a Dutch Puritan, rejected the principle of
predestination. They also rejected the doctrine of limited
atonement –that means, they rejected the Calvinist belief that
Christ died only for the elect and therefore by implication, they
also rejected the doctrine of the elect. They also rejected the
doctrine of irresistible grace by claiming that the Grace of God
was for all regardless of faith or religious inclinations. However,
they believed that life on earth was a testing ground for
humanity and that humanity was capable of good and evil; but
that man could redeem himself by casting off the sin incurred
by Adam.
The Quakers, like the Arminians, rejected all the doctrines
of the Calvinists; but they, for their part, believed that only
those who permitted the always available love and light of God
to flow through them could achieve salvation –in other words,
salvation was open to all.
King James 1 achieved the unification of the Church with
the State and succeeded in establishing the unified Church of
England, but without the Catholic Scotland. His son King
Charles 1 tried to force Catholic Scotland into the unified

19
Church of England with terrible consequences. Most Puritans
did not support the King. The King declared war on Scotland
against the majority opinion of the parliament that was
dominated by Puritans. Through act of Parliament, the
Parliament declared war on the State. The Parliament led by
General Cromwell defeated King Charles 1 and his lieutenants,
who were mostly Bishops. In fact Bishop William Laud led the
King’s Army. Upon the defeat of the State by the parliamentary
army, the actions of the King and his general, Bishop William
Laud were found treasonable. They were, therefore sentenced
to death. William Laud was executed in January 1645, while
King Charles was executed in 1648.
Revolution and Restoration period in Literature cannot be
discussed without the contributions of major writers and
thinkers of that period. These thinkers and writers were John
Donne, Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon, John Milton, John
Bunyan and John Dryden.

(a) Francis Bacon (1561-1626): The Advancement of

Learning

Bacon was highly interested in applied knowledge. When he

entered the University, he was greatly interested in philosophy
and logic. He was not interested in the Aristotelian Philosophy
because he felt it only led to contentions and disputations
without proffering solutions to real-life problems. He has
always argued that knowledge ought to be functional.
He started writing The Advancement of Learning by
praising King James 1 in the dedication. He thought he could
flatter the King and get him to invest in scientific knowledge or
research. Scientific knowledge for him meant applicable

20
knowledge, regardless of the fact whether the knowledge in
question was in the arts/humanities or sciences/natural
sciences. Once knowledge was applicable, it was scientific
knowledge for Bacon.
He had argued that too much knowledge was not able to
lead to atheism or make the mind swell; the mind for him was
very elastic and as such capable of containing all knowledge.
True knowledge, he had argued, could not lead man astray, as
many thought it would, owing to the fact that it was thought
that man was driven out of paradise for the over-cultivation of
the intellect. What could lead man astray was negative
knowledge. He believed that the mind of man contained the
spirit of God, which was like a lamp; and if man’s mind was
like a light, being that it contained the spirit of God, real
knowledge in man must of necessity radiate light, which itself
is of God. Being an advocate for knowledge he had once said
that ‘reading maketh a man; but writing maketh a real man’.
He was credited to be the father of scientific method.

(b) John Donne (1572-1593)

John Donne was one of the greatest writers of the period. At

11 he enrolled to study at Cambridge with his brother Henry.
His father was a relatively wealthy man. His brother was
arrested at a time for harbouring a catholic priest. Remember
that owing to the civil war in which Parliamentary army
defeated the Royal army, England became a commonwealth
with republics. The country was being ruled by the Puritans,
who were members of the Parliament and who had fought the
royal army under the command of General Cromwell.

21
Catholics faced great persecution in the Anglican England; and
so when John Donne’s brother, Henry, was arrested, he was
sent to jail. He caught fever in prison and died in 1593. His
death affected Donne so much that he questioned his faith. He
spent 8 years in Cambridge and another 8 years in Oxford but
could not graduate: he had refused to take the oath of
Supremacy, which was required at the time of Catholics. He
later was admitted to study law in 1592 as a member of the
Thavies Inn as well as a member of the Lincoln Inn.
His brother’s death in 1593 made him become sober and
melancholic. He began thereafter to write poems. His first set
of poems was Satire 1, Satire 2, Satire 3, Satire 4, etc.
He joined a naval expedition group to Cadize and Azores.
However, when he returned to England in 1598, he was
appointed private secretary to Lord Egerton. He went ahead to
marry Lady Egerton’s niece, Anne Moore, secretly. Her father,
Sir George Moore did not like the union and so he had John
Donne sent to prison. He also made John to lose his post as
private secretary to Lord Egerton. Things took a difficult turn
for Donne and his family. It was during the period of his
suffering in the wilderness of life that he wrote his Divine
Poems. He also wrote Meditations and Good Friday, Riding
Westward.
At forty, he wrote two critical works, Pseudo Martyr and
Ignatius his Conclave, which was very critical of the catholic
faith. With these books, he publicly denounced his faith as a
catholic.
In 1615, he joined the Anglican ministry and became the
royal chaplain later the same year. He preached his first
Sermon in 1625 when King Charles 1 first ascended the throne.

22
Before his death in 1631, he preached a sermon many thought
was funeral sermon titled Death Duvel; and the last poem he
wrote before he died was called Hymn to God my God in my
Sickness.

(c) Thomas Hobbes (1588-1674)

Thomas Hobbes was one of the early English rationalists. His

political writings were occasioned by the state of war England
had found itself. He had argued deductively (in deductive
reasoning you argued from the general to the specific, while in
inductive reasoning, you argued from the specific to the
general) that since men were equal in strength and cunning,
they could not be secure among themselves and as such their
condition, so far as there was no civil power to regulate their
behaviour, would be a state of war against themselves; and
such a state is not in accordance with any kind of civilization.
Such savage state of the nature of human relationship could
only make man lonely and alienated, poor, mean and brutish:
man would live in a rat race (see George and Thomas, 1973:
429-30).
Originally, Thomas Hobbes had argued for a strong central
authority embodied in a monarchy. However, during the period
of the Commonwealth, he still made the argument of the need
for a strong centralized authority to which the people would
need to submit and which in turn would guaranty civil order
and regulate the behaviour of the people in order to avoid a rat
race situation in the evolving society, whose relationship with
citizens would be in form of a contract. In this contract, men
will submit to the central authority, which or who will then
regulate their behaviour and maintain order and ensure a

23
civilised relationship among men. He expressed these thoughts
in his book entitled LEVIATHAN. In other words, that central
authority would be in the form of a big giant monster, a
Leviathan, which regulates people’s behaviour and guaranty’s
civil order.
However, when General Cromwell leader of the
Commonwealth died in 1658, there was disorder in the
commonwealth, making the Monarchy to be restored to
Charles 11, the son of Charles 1. Once the monarchy was
restored, Hobbes began to argue again that the central
authority in question should be the Royal authority now under
Charles 11.

(d) John Dryden

Dryden dominated the literary life of the restoration period to

the point that the period was known as the Age of Dryden. And
because the parliament during the commonwealth era was
dominated by Puritans, theatre, his strong hold was banned.
Puritans thought that theatre or drama corrupted morals.
When the Monarchy was restored, theatre was allowed again.
Dryden began to write plays. His first play was titled The Wild
Gallant. The play was a failure. However, in 1668 the Kings
company commissioned Dryden to write three plays each year
for it. Dryden was also a shareholder in the company.
From the 1660s to the 1670s his major source of income was
from play writing. In 1667, he was honoured with a poet
laureate. Then in 1672, he wrote one of his Restoration
Comedies entitled Marriage a la Mode. He also wrote Heroic
Tragedies and Regular Tragedies. His most successful was All
for Love (1678).

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 (e) John Milton (1603-1674)

John Milton was a very argumentative young man while in

school. In fact, he was suspended once for disputing with his
tutor, Mr Chappel. He hated school because he felt he was
disliked by his mates. He, however, went ahead and obtained
his BA in 1625; he also obtained his MA in 1632. Being
argumentative it is not surprising that he wrote prose
polemics. Between 1643 and 1645, he wrote about four tracts
or essays in support of divorce. One of the essays was entitled
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. He was believed to have
had an unhappy marriage and that was probably why he wrote
so much about divorce.
In this essay, he had argued that unmatched marriages
were some kind of chaos against the natural order made by
God. He probably witnessed the execution of King Charles 1 in
1649 and as such wrote much later the same year The Tenure
of Kings and Magistrates. In the essay, he argued that a
group of powerful people had the right to depose a tyrannical
or wicked leader and even go as far as executing him after
proper conviction (see Sanders, 1996:227). He had also
written an essay in support of free speech in 1644. He called
the essay, Aeropagitica. In this essay, he argued for a
broader constitutional right in favour of an uninhibited
exchange of ideas in a free protestant commonwealth. In
1660, he wrote The Readie and Easie Way to a Protestant
Commonwealth. In this essay he had argued in favour of the
fragmenting Republics in the Commonwealth and reasoned
that a free Commonwealth should be devoid of an ecclesiastical
Monarchy; but instead there should be a strong
Commonwealth which will recognise civil and religious liberties.
25
Furthermore, he reasoned that this protestant Commonwealth
should have some form of federating counties under a national
parliament (see again Sanders 1996:227).
In spite of all the essays he wrote, John Milton was known
mainly for his epic poem, Paradise Lost. It is divided into 12
books.

(f) John Bunyan (1628-1688)

He was a puritan to the very core. He was not as educated as

some of his contemporaries. Being a puritan with Calvinist
inclination, he believed he was elected or chosen for the
mission to preach the Gospel of Christ. During his period,
preaching was banned by the King, but he always preached
and so was always going to jail. He had even spent about six
years in jail for breaching the code of conduct by preaching. He
believed, however, that his suffering was the cross he had to
bear. He also believed that the glory of eternal life after death
was an inspiration for him to keep working for the salvation of
the faithful. It was during the period of great suffering that he
wrote his Magnum Opus, The Pilgrims’ Progress. The prose
fiction is an allegory because it uses symbols to tell the truth of
human existence. Its characters are human attributes or vices
used allegorically to represent those qualities –they are Mr
Wordly Wiseman, Mr Formalist and Hypocrisy, Mr Talkative, Mr
Love-lost, Mr Enmity, Mr Cruelty, Mr Hate-light, Mr Implacable
and Mr Live-loose.

26
1.4 The Age of Enlightenment: Eighteenth Century Literature
(1690-1780)
18th Century is known as the age of Newtonian influence
because Sir Isaac Newton, through his theory of the
symmetrical and mechanical order in the universe as well as
the uniformity of the planetary systems, gave his heirs a
theoretical framework on which additional theories were based.
In his essay, Principia and Opticks, he demonstrated
that there was a glorious order that pervaded the Universe. He
argued that the order did not arise from the simple laws of
nature, nor did it arise from the uniformity in the planetary
system: the order, he argued, was the handiwork of a very
intelligent and kind creator. He insisted that these intelligible
laws observable in nature could be proved mathematically and
through physics.
Most thinkers and philosophers, who were heirs to the
theory of order by Isaac Newton, tried to apply it in their
theories of Religion, Politics, and Aesthetics or Arts. They also
thought that since it was a kind and intelligent Creator that
bequeathed this order on the Universe, the great was related,
therefore, to the less; the cosmic to the terrestrial, the divine
to the human.

(a) John Locke (1631-1704)

He and his student, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671-1713)

thought that as a result of this order in nature, knowledge or
true knowledge was gained through external sensation or
experience, not through inner light or revelation as argued by
most medieval scholars and even some Puritans during the
revolution and restoration period.

27
 In his essay, Concerning Human Understanding,
John Locke argued that the human mind could be compared to
a blank board or white board –a Tabula Rassa; that all
materials of reason and knowledge are gained through
experience. The mind, he argued, admitted experience like a
Camera Obscura: ideas pass through the aperture of human
mind to the brain or royal presence –royal presence because
the human being is made up of body, soul and spirit. The spirit
in the human person carries therefore the spark of the
benevolent and intelligent creator.
In book III of Concerning Human Understanding, Locke
dealt on Language. He believed that language was or is a
creation of society in that people consented among themselves
that certain words in language have to be signs, not of things
but of ideas, to communicate certain meanings authoritatively.
These meanings could be in every-day language usage or in
philosophical discourses; therefore, he argued that language
was a creation of society, whose members agreed that certain
words must stand for certain ideas. In order words, common
language usage or even mutual consent provides an acceptable
authority for regulating the use of words in conversations or
even in philosophical discussions.
John Locke also made some contributions to Government
in his Two Treatises of Government published to coincide
with the success of the glorious Revolution, which ushered in a
Commonwealth of a republican nature. The major arguments in
the book are that civil societies are bonded with their self
interest, that there was need for individual and personal
liberty, and that there was also need for individual property
right and that government existed on trust: therefore,

28
members of society who felt that government was derailing
could withdraw that trust and that once that was done,
government would cease to exist. Here he was indirectly
talking about the right to vote people into government or to
vote them out of government. John Locke also suggested, in
the essay, a government headed by a ceremonial Monarchy
and an elected government. He also advocated for a mixed
constitution of Monarchy, Oligarchy and Democracy (see
Sander, 1996: 274).

Today in England, there is such a mixture: the Queen, whose

leadership of government is ceremonial, the Parliament, which
consists of Oligarchs in the House of Lords and people elected
through democratic process into the House of Commons as
well as the Prime Minister, who is the head of government,
selected from the party with majority vote cast.
Apart from John Locke, Shaftsbury was also another
philosopher/thinker of the 18th century in literature, who
propagated the ideal of symmetry and order in nature.
Shaftsbury believed that through contemplation one can
understand or know that there was a deity or God that is in-
charge. He was, like John Locke, a proponent of religious
toleration and rational Christianity based on common sense. He
believed that the nature of God could be perceived through His
creation than through inner light or revelation; therefore, as he
argued, (1) Man was inherently good by nature since his or her
nature is also an extension of that great symmetry and order
in the universe, (2) the Universe and its order was God’s own
way of propagating his own nature, (3) he believed that man
was sociable and virtuous from nature –these attributes were

29
derived from a reasoned observation of the order in nature and
it leads to what he called sociable morality. This morality, he
argued, was enough to extinguish any form of tyranny in man
as well as unhealthy passions and misanthropy; (4)he also
believed humankind was essentially good and that (5) human
destiny lay in finding the correspondence between individual
spirit and God and that finally (6) Contemplation of the
Universe was the only means which could establish the sound
belief in God and that such sound belief in a blessed order was
strong enough to negate the godless confusion of atheism and
the sinful world of orthodox Christianity (see Sanders, 1996:
275).
Sociable Morality in this context is the capacity to
associate or deal with fellow human beings, maintaining high
moral principles in the association, by not appropriating
unjustly from them.
However, the Dutch thinker Bernard de Mandeville (1670-
1733) did not believe in-to-to, Shaftsbury’s argument. He
published a book or essay A Search into the Nature of Society
to prove that man did not possess the ultimate sociable
morality characteristics that Shaftsbury attributed to man. He
compared the activities of men and women in society to the
activities of bees in their hive. He tried to prove that bees in
their hive struggled to take from nature or even from
themselves to build a strong beehive. He argued that
humankind, just like bees, were acquisitive in nature. He,
however, opined that this acquisitiveness was of benefit to the
public, because it enhances prosperity and promotes
commercial activities in society.

30
 John Locke, Shaftsbury and Bernard de Mandeville
differed in three major ways:

(a) John Locke maintained or conceptualized that man

needed to be rounded in all his faculties to connect or
prove to be connected to the great symmetry and order
that pervades the universe.
(b) Shaftsbury for his part argued that that act of
conceptualizing of philosophizing was in itself an act of
propagating good breeding or a way of proving that man
was inherently good.
(c)Mandeville in his search into the nature of society proves
that the inherent goodness of man consisted in man’s
acquisitiveness –that means social morality or good
breeding must not exclude man’s acquisitive nature.

The great social strife, riots, persecutions and bigotry of

the 18th century after the glorious revolution caused many
thinkers to look again at the theory of order and symmetry
imposed from above, because of the great disorder and
disruptions from below. This was a proof that man, might
altogether, not be inherently good by nature as Newton, Locke,
Shaftsbury and Mandeville had argued. If at all man was
inherently good, something below, which was of bad influence,
corrupted man’s goodness.
This symmetry and order thought to be prevalent in the
Universe by Newton was adapted and applied to theories of
nature, aesthetics, religion, politics and society; it also
reflected in architectural designs, which emphasized balance,
subdued good taste, a strict adherence to classical proportion.
The same symmetry and order in architecture became

31
associated with a liberal minded oligarchy as opposed to royal
autocracy (see Sanders, 1996: 276).

(b) William Hogarth (1697-1764)

He was a famous English painter, who went further in his New

Theory of Aesthetics to prove or show that man was not
inherently good. He insisted that men should learn to think for
themselves instead of propagating Newtonian ideas without
reflection. He tried to demonstrate in his works that the
eighteenth century was not exclusively reflexive of ideas or
order and proportion. Beauty for him did not lie solely in the
demonstration of Grand Style in Architecture nor in further
refinement of classical tradition, nor in the observation of
nature according to Newtonian precepts.
Irked by thinkers who saw themselves as heirs to the
theory of symmetry and order by Newton to the extent that
they could not think in other direction, he painted a satirical
image of himself standing on volumes of Shakespeare, Milton
and Swift. With that he implied that he was also heir to the
dramatic, epic and satirical tradition established in English
Literature. In 1761, he added his own couplet to his satirical
painting – Time Smoking a Picture.
Jonathan Swift was one of the great writers of the 18 th
century period. He wrote many books and novels, one of which
is The Battle of the Books (1704). He wrote this book at the
instigation of the former British Secretary during the period,
who believed that ancient or classical literature was far better
than modern literature. Of all his books, Gulliver’s Travel
(1726) was the greatest; and it was it that brought him fame.

32
 In his writings, he exposed the subtle ambiguities of life;
he always tried to show the opposite side of things, to bring to
the fore the alternative voice. This was his way of thinking for
himself and proving that there was something else apart from
the order in the universe.
In Gulliver’s Travel, he advocated passion not harmony in
nature. He showed how depraved man was and how he could
not live up to the ideals of harmony in the universe
Apart from Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope happens to be
one of the most influential writers of the period. He is said to
be the third most quoted writer after Shakespeare and Alfred
Tennyson in Oxford Learners Dictionary.
During his time Catholics were not allowed to participate
in social or even academic activities. For example you could
not teach or even go to an Anglican School if you were a
Catholic. Therefore Pope’s parents moved to a regional suburb
in London so that Pope could attend Catholic school. Pope
attended an illegal Catholic school. As a Catholic, you couldn’t
vote or be voted for; you couldn’t also attend universities.
Pope was therefore mostly taught by his aunt. He grew up and
became a great mind despite the limitations society put on
Catholics during his day.
He wrote mostly heroic couplets. Heroic couplet is a
traditional form of English poetry. It refers mostly to narrative
poems, epic poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming
pairs of iambic pentameters.
Pope worshiped and admired Newton. He was thrilled by
his theory of order and symmetry in the universe as well as the
theory of the uniformity of the planetary systems. He even
once said that God commanded: Let there be light and there

33
was Newton. He wrote the works: Essay on Man, Essay on
Criticism, Rape of the Lock and Dunciad.
Daniel Defoe belonged also to the league of important
writers of the 18th century. He gained fame with his work,
Robinson Crusoe. The work was referred to, for the first time,
as a novel because of certain characteristics:
-Realism, that is, it was objective, critical, innovative, truthful
and anti-tradition. Realism is, therefore, an objective, critical
narrative portrayal of truth or seeming realities. It is also an
aversion for traditionalism in this context.
The realist novel in the 18 th century differed from the
prose fiction of the past by not taking material from
mythology, legend or history or even past literature –it was
indeed novel, that is, new and unique.
Realist in the 18 th century believed in truth of individual
experience: that is, what you experience is what you know.
That is the only way of knowing the truth, in their opinion.
Medieval realists believed in what they called the universals –
that is, abstract realities, the inner light or subjective realities.
Therefore the novel of Daniel Defoe differed in a great way
from the works of Shakespeare, Spencer or even Milton. These
writers took material from mythology, legend, history or
imitated previous literatures.
Defoe was believed, however, not to be the sole inventor
of the literary type called the novel: Samuel Richardson and
Henry Fielding started out on a new terrain as Defoe in their
experimentations in their works. Richardson was known for
Clarissa and Pamela, while Henry was known mainly for his
Tom Jones.
Characteristics of Robinson Crusoe:

34
-it is fiction
-it is true to life
-the writer tried to convince the reader of the solid reality of
Crusoe
-it was based on the true adventure of a castaway or
shipwrecked called Alexander Selkink (1676-1721). Defoe
aimed at more than a historical account. Being marooned in an
island, away from family and society would mean a new
beginning for Crusoe. His truths would be based on the new
individual experience he would make. This is quite different
from the past where the major test for truth was based on
series of traditional practices to which references could be
made.

35
1.5 The Romantic Period in Literature (1780-1830)
The Romantic Period in Literature was indeed a period of great
upheavals like the French Revolution, Industrial Revolution as
well as European Revolution.
During the Newtonian era, a rational culture began to
evolve. People were no longer interested in the revelation of
inner light, but on hard realities observable by science.
Scientific thoughts and innovations gave rise to industries or
industrial revolution. The 18th century could rightly be said to
be the age of enlightenment or the age of the machine.
The growing industrialisation occasioned the emergence of a
new class of individuals quite apart from aristocracy. This class
was the bourgeois class, the owners of industries and
businesses, and as such, the new owners of wealth or capital.
This class displaced, with their emergence, the old feudal
system, which ensured that wealth or capital was the exclusive
preserve of the royals and noblemen.
The new Bourgeoisie, being owners of industries and
businesses must therefore be pragmatic, shrewd, rational,
empirical and logical in order to run their businesses and
create even more wealth for themselves (see Habib, 2005:
350). They shrewdly exploited labour-force to maximise wealth
or to keep accumulating wealth.
The effect of this new system of wealth ownership and
mind-set to sustain wealth accumulation reflected in the
environment or nature so that there increased urban slum,
poverty of the exploited class and debasement caused by the
use of the machine or industrial revolution.

36
 In the late 18th century, intellectuals and artists sought to
respond to the pervading sense of science and redeem nature
thereby from its state of utter destruction caused by industrial
revolution. The activities of those intellectuals and artists in
redeeming nature during the late 18th century and early 19th
century are what is known as and called Romanticism. They
sought to redeem nature and man by

1) Focusing on human subjectivity and its expression.

2) Through the worship or adoration of nature.
3) Through placing intuition over reason.
4) Through love of emotion, instinct and spontaneity.
5) Through the pursuit of the essence of simplicity
expressed in childhood.
6) Through love of freedom over conservatism.
7) Through a belief in spiritual life and mysticism.
8) Through love for the primitive form of society.

In other words, they were anti-reason, anti-science or

enlightenment, anti-philosophy or logic because scientific and
industrial revolution disfigured natural life and beauty; and
values were all based on reason, science and logic.

The major intellectuals of the romantic period, who really

influenced the period both in France, Swiss and England, quite
apart from Holderlin, Geothe and Kant in Germany, were Jean-
Jacque Rousseau, William Godwin, William Wordsworth,
William Blake, Coleridge, Shelley and John Keats.

Jean-Jacque Rousseau (1712-1778) was born in

Geneva, Switzerland in 1712 to Isaac Rousseau, a watchmaker
and his wife Suzanne Bernard Rousseau. His father was

37
thought to be unstable: he left his wife and first child and went
back to his father and later left his father again. Rousseau
mother died one week after he was born. He was raised by his
uncle and aunt, who sent him off to boarding school, where he
said he learnt all useless trash in the name of education. He
married in 1746 a certain Therese Levasseur, with whom he
had four children. They sent the children to orphanages.
During this period, sending children to orphanages was a
common response to poverty. He regretted doing that later in
life, but still thought he would have made a very lousy father.
A literary prize instituted at that time with a pecuniary
prize attracted his attention. He contested the prize with his
essay –Discourse on Arts and Science and won in 1750. He
tried to prove in the book that man was inherently good –an
18th century argument; but that man was only corrupted by
society which was shaped by reason, philosophy, logic and the
machine –that is, industrialisation. He called for a return to
nature –not in the jungle or desert sense of nature but in the
appreciation of the beauty of creation and the divine will of
God operative in it.
He also published a book entitled, Discourse on the Origin
and Fundamentals of Inequality among Men in 1755. This was
an essay he submitted for a literary competition in 1753. It
won the prize eventually. In the book, he accepted the
biological inequality among men; but he did not see any other
bases for political, economic, social and moral inequalities.
These inequalities, in his opinion, existed as a result of the
existence of private property and the need for their owners to
protect them by the use of force, if necessary. He argued that
as a result of the corrupt state of affairs in society, it would be

38
ideal for man to withdraw from civilisation, but then that was
no longer possible because civilisation has become part of
human nature; therefore, the best we could do was to lead
simple lives with only a few luxuries.
In 1762, he wrote his famous book, Social Contract. He
also wrote a novel in the same, and it was entitled Emile. It
was a discourse on child education. In the book, he rejected
any form of education in which force was used. He posited that
nature was the best educator for the child; and that the child
should be nurtured gradually so that its potential could be
unfolded. He advocated heuristic education –a kind of
education, where the child learns by experiencing. He posited
further that moral education should continue till the child was
12. Intellectual education could begin from the age of 18, so
that the child could reasonably accept religious beliefs and not
mythology as religion.
In his Social Contract Theory, the individual was not
separate from the society. In fact, the individual is the society.
The society was for him a moral person who embodied the
general will of all in society. Therefore the contract among
individuals who make a society is the contract of association
for the common or social good. The law in society, therefore,
would not be the law made by government, but the natural law
because of the inherent goodness of man exemplified in his or
her ability to feel the suffering of another. This ability to feel is
the common or social good, which in itself constitutes the
General Will. Individuals in society, therefore, will not need
government. In fact government for him was the source of
corruption in that it encouraged laziness in the one and
overwork in the other.

39
 In fact, in social contract, men and women in society are
guided by natural laws, and not laws made by government.
Rousseau, though a French man, influenced Romantic thoughts
in England. His philosophies of society and state of nature
influenced English writers and thinkers like William Godwin
(1756-1836).
William Godwin seemed to be the first English anarchist.
He believed that the sole aim of human existence was for
universal happiness and social well-being. He suggested the
gradual abolishment or melting away of government which
would be replaced by radical anarchism. In this state, law,
inequality, injustice, government and even marriage would be
abolished.
During this period, writers, intellectuals used fiction to
promote their idea of social revolution; and so William Godwin
used his novel The Adventures of Caleb William to articulate his
ideas.
Some influential women writer like Mary Wollstonecraft
used their fictional works and essays too to promote their ideas
of social re-engineering. Wollstonecraft wrote the novel Mary
and the essay, The Vindication of the Right of Woman. She
also wrote The Vindication of the Right of Man.
There was also Percy Shelley, very prominent during the
period and who wrote Prometheus Unbound and the Revolt of
Islam. Other prominent writers of the period are William Blake,
William Wordsworth and John Keat.

40
1.6 High Victorian and Edwardian Literature (1830-1880)

Scientific and Industrial Revolution pushed the capacity of the

human mind to the frontiers. “It was an age of conflicting
explanations and theories, of scientific and economic
confidence, of social and spiritual pessimism, of a sharpened
awareness of the inevitability of progress and of deep disquiet
as to the nature of the present”(see Sandra 1996,398). In
short, the world seemed to be exploding and the Victorian
intellectuals put in great effort to hold it together and stop it
from exploding.

Universally accepted truths and solutions were during this

period discovered to be all wanting. The arguments about the
inadequacies of these theories were major themes in the works
of various writers; for example, Carlyle’s criticism of the 1830s,
Charles Dicken’s social novels of the 1840s, Mathew Arnold’s
speculations of the 1870s, Morris’s socialist prophecies of the
1880s, the sober early poetry of Tennyson as well as the
theology of Hopkins.

During this period, Christian religion still had a large

followership; however a cloud of doubt was already cast upon
it, which resulted from the ‘’Higher Criticism’’ of the German
biblical scholarship. The doubt occasioned by this criticism was
even consolidated ‘’by the appearance in 1859 of Charles
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by means of Natural
Selection (Sanders, 399).”

The increasing number of intellectuals who were disciples of

Darwin worsened the situation. As can be seen, the biblical

41
creation story was now in question .However, the Mid-Victorian
society was still held together by Christian morality. The
puritan sexual mores had somehow contributed to the
sustenance of the Christian moral teaching. Value was placed
on the virtues of monogamy and family life. As Sanders
opines:

Although the supposed blessings of ordered family life

were generally proclaimed to be paramount, many
individual Victorians saw the family as an agent of
oppression and as the chief vehicle of encompassing
conformity (1996: 399).

Queen Victoria herself, as the age suggested passed for the

quintessential woman, a role model who was seen to represent
the stereotype of virtuous womanhood as projected by
novelists and poets of the time.

This idea of virtuousness in man, particularly in woman

was refuted by writers like Thackery, who in his Pendennis,
1849 and Vanity Fair, (1848) tried to depict the real man
bereft of virtue, but at the mercy of temptation or the
vicissitudes of nature. In the work, a young man had tried with
great effort to resist temptation in the form of a desire for sex.

In Architecture, the age was expressed with a mixture of

Greek, Gothic, and Italian Styles as representative of the spirit
of the time. It was also the same in literary expression. In this
age, art was applied and the new technologies were also
applied in all aspect of design and production (see Sanders,
1996: 399).Being the age of the machine, it was natural for
there to be an increase in material benefit and social
advantages of the factory system and of the vigorous,
unrestrained capitalism (see again Sanders, 400).

42
 The true meaning of the principles of liberty of conscience
and the freedom of the individual as enshrined in the law as
well as in the writings of Thomas Macaulay and Mill was really
felt; however, only by middle-class men. The teeming majority
of women, who were still denied proper education, property
right and the right to individual freedom, did not really feel the
impact of principles of these liberties during this period of
unregulated industrialism. Not only that, the majority of the
working people didn’t seem to be really free and couldn’t own
any property. This seemed to be the consequence of
unregulated industrialism. The now permanently established
middle-class, who own most of the industries, did not relent in
their crass exploitation of labour force.

Thomas Macaulay, one of the great intellectuals of the

Victorian Period detested the almost unquestionable authority
invested on magistrates. Magistrates then had insisted that
government trains the individual in society towards being
better. He, however, refused to accept the fact that
magistrates were the sole possessors of knowledge and
wisdom. He always argued that there was no evidence that a
magistrate was wiser than any ordinary person in the society.
By implication no human being invested with any authority in
society is wiser than the people who are not in authority;
therefore, their pronouncements on issues can never be
sacrosanct. He maintains that industrial manufacturing, seen
as the bedrock of progress in England and by implication all
industrialising nations, can only lead to increased morality. He
argues that civilisation is not engineered by government but
instead by the energy, industry, intelligence and prudence of
persons in the given nation. He is also of the opinion that
43
governments achieve their objectives through threats and
bribes and establish their doctrines by instilling hopes and
fears in the people.

Therefore, Thomas Macaulay’s argument can be looked at in

the light of decision makers in Nigeria, who seem to see
themselves as knowing what the ordinary Nigerian needs more
than they know themselves.

Stuart Mill, for his part, advocates the concept of

utilitarianism, which is accepted to be the foundation of the
moral principle –utility. Actions which contribute to the general
happiness of all have utility, according to Mill. For him,
Education should contribute to the general good, since it is in
itself an end –that is, happiness. Happiness consists in all
those things that will normally bring about no pain, while those
things that will bring about pain are in themselves
unhappiness. A morality is usually derived from Stuart Mill’s
Utilitarian principle –that is, Utilitarian Morality. This morality is
explained in the sense of a sacrifice done not only to the
advantage of others but also to one’s own advantage.
Therefore, the morality implies that any sacrifice done at the
expense of the one sacrificing is a waste because it possesses
no utility. Its utility contributes not only to the general
happiness, but also to the happiness of the person sacrificing
something.

The golden rule of utilitarianism is that one should love one’s

neighbour as oneself and also do unto others as one would
have them do to one.

44
 Furthermore, Stuart Mill writes On the Principle of Liberty.
In this essay, he insists that a society is not free when its
citizens cannot exercise their liberty to feel, think as well as
the liberty of conscience. He argues that a free society is such
in which the citizen is at liberty to express his or her opinion on
any issue –be the issue religious, moral, ethical, etc. However,
today in the world, not all societies are free to the extent of
allowing their citizens the liberty to express that freedom.

The novels of that age reflected this industrial exploitation

of women and children, the torture, suffering and denials
experienced in society by the week. These were particularly
represented in Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton, in Disraeli’s Sybil as
well as in kingsley’s Alton Locke –all published in 1840 (see
George H. Sabine /Thomas L Thorson, 1973: 635).

Aside from these writers, writers like Thomas Carlyle(1795

—1881) contributed to the ongoing discourse of containing the
already exploding world full of pretensions with his novels—Life
of Schiller, his translation of Goethe’s seminal novel Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship and also his perplexing novel Sartor
Resartus or The Tailor Retailored. He had argued that a heretic
and reformer was he, who challenged conventions and
pretensions. He believed the age of the machine could be
replaced by human enterprise and confidence.

Charles Dickens’ Novels, for their part, reflected “the

nature of Victorian Urban Society with all its conflicts and
disharmonies (Sanders, 405)”. His Nicholas Nickelby exposes
the exploitation of unwanted children in a bleak Yorkshire
School; the novel also attacks the snobbish aristocracy, who do
nothing to stop the degeneracy; it also attacks the members of
45
Parliament, who he thinks are inefficient; it also attacks
capitalism of the day (Sanders, 406).

In his David Copperfield, he depicts the suffering of

orphans: how they are made to suffer by people under whose
protection they are put. Charles Dickens uses the character of
the mean, harsh and cruel Mr Creakle to represent the conduct
of people under whose protection children, the helpless and the
weak are placed. One sees how poverty during this period is
viewed more as a curse than a circumstance. Poor people are
seen as deficient and liable to suffering. Charles Dickens shows
this in the character of James Steelforth and Ham Peggoty.
While being poor is viewed as a curse during this period, being
wealthy and noble is seen as a virtue. Therefore, Charles
Dickens tries to prove that the character, James Steelforth,
who seduces Ham Peggoty’s fiancé, uses and abandons her, is
depraved or wicked and unrepresentative of virtue as ascribed
to wealth and class. Instead he shows Ham Peggoty as
possessing virtue through his gracious act of trying to save
James Steelforth from drowning, in spite of his betrayals.

He also portrays gender situations at the time, because in

the industrial society of England, during the Victorian era,
women were believed to be inferior to men. Dickens therefore
shows in the character of Clara Copperfield, who is married to
Mr Edward Murdstone, that she is a case of a woman under
subjugation. Mr Murdsatone maltreats her, makes her voiceless
and submissive by always trying to correct everything she does
and by always finding fault with her actions. He tries through
this means to show that it is his responsibility to teach her
morals. Dickens, however, shows in the character of Dr Strong

46
and his wife the perfect example of a couple striving to
equality: he does not shout down on her as Murdstone does to
Clara Copperfield; even when he corrects her, he does so only
for her to learn. Through these expositions, Charles Dickens
shows himself as not in total support of gender equality, but he
is definitely pointing toward the future when women will be
equal to men.

In Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens shows us the industrial society

of the Edwardian period with its established middle and upper
middle classes. He makes us see, through the themes of the
work, that many have become, during this period, wealthy and
materially progressive. In other words, the middle class has
become established, which means that money has come into
the hands of the supposedly industrious people. This results in
greed in the society. Many seek for ways to acquire wealth and
as such wealthy people are always suspicious of their relatives,
who may want them dead so that they could inherit their
wealth. These are represented in the characters as Mr Pecksnif,
who takes in Martin Chuzzlewit, not because he likes to train
him but because he wants to see how he could get a share in
the will of the wealthy Martin Chuzzlewit snr., and also the
character as Jonas, who desires the death of his mean wealthy
father Anthony Chuzzlewit in order to inherit his wealth.

This was also the period of the Brontë sisters – Charlotte,

Emily and Anne Brontë. They used their works to contribute to
the discourse on women freedom, free will, ethical, social and
political dilemmas of the period. Charlotte wrote The Professor,
Vinette and her magnum opus, Jane Erye. Charlotte Brontë
hated or disapproved of the role of women at the time: women

47
were always expected to represent virtuous womanhood;
however, if virtuous womanhood meant accepting an unequal
position to the man, she totally rejected it.

Emily was famous for her Wuthering Heights, while their

little known sister, Anne wrote Agnes Frey and The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall (1848).

William Ernest Henley, though amputated in both legs,

was able to become famous through his poems, especially,
Invictus.

William Butler Yeats captured the decadence of this

world and prophesied a new beginning in his poem, Second
Coming; In other words, the great material progress of that
period with its concomitant loss of faith had made it imperative
that the world be rediscovered with its beauty. W.B. Yeats
endeavoured to re-inject beauty in the life-blood of the world
through his poems, one of which is The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The Falcon cannot hear the Falconer;
Things Fall Apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
5 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Browning identified the essence of

the poets of the age in her Poets and the Present Age.

Other writers of the period include Alfred Tennyson,

Charles Swineburne, who was famous for his Sing before
Sunrise (1871): in the work, he detested what he felt was the

48
Christian narrowness in spiritual things. Others are William
Morris (1834-96), Elizabeth Browning and George Eliot (1815-
50) among others.

49
1.7 Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature (1880-1920)

The earnestness attached to life by writers and intellectuals of

the Mid-Victorian age was deflated by writers and intellectuals
of the late Victorian and Edwardian Period –that is, during the
closing years of the 19th Century.

The Idea of moral uprightness, religious orthodoxy, sexual

reserve, hard-work and a confident belief in personal and
historical progress of the Victorian period up to the Mid-
Victorian period had somehow become oppressive and
appeared wrong and laughable. It had to be supplanted by a
new and more probing seriousness (see Sanders, 1996: 457).
As Sanders puts it:

Although Queen Victoria, that embodiment of matronly

uprightness, reigned until January 1901, and although
last years of her reign appeared to patriotic observers
to mark the apogee of national and imperial glory,
“Victorian” values, beliefs and standards of personal
and social behaviour were already being challenged
sometimes angrily by a new generation of intellectuals
and writers (1996: 457).

During the late Victorian Period, “society itself was assumed to

be developing according to certain laws, but they were laws
which threatened old, orderly assumptions by introducing
notions of flux, chance and adaptation (see Sanders, 458).

The intellectuals of the period were such that did no

longer see truth or meaning as fixed. In fact “the advent of
popular democracy, and mass popular dissent, seemed to
many observers to entail the diminution of the function and
ideology of British Liberalism (Sanders, 458)”.

50
 Some people like Bernard Shaw saw Socialism “as the
true liberating politics of the future (Sanders, 1996).” It was
during this period that Thomas Hardy became influential with
the novel Tess of the D’Urberville. Samuel Butler’s The Way of
all Flesh also denounced the narrow Victorian family values and
attempted to stress the importance of social evolution and
family influence and believed that Victorian ideology confused
theology with righteousness (see Sanderss, 460).

Apart from Tess of the D’Urberville, Hardy also wrote

Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure and Far from the
Madding Crowd among others.

It must not be forgotten, however, that this period was

also the period of colonial Expansion. The scramble for Africa
had started after the Berlin Conference of 1885. The most
famous colonial writers of the colonial period were Joseph
Conrad and Ruyard Kipling. Conrad had tried in works like Lord
Jim and the Heart of Darkness to expose the brutality,
dehumanisation and alienation of experience by both the
colonised and the colonisers.

The post-colonial writer and intellectual, Chinua Achebe

had tried to discover the racist implications of Conrad’s colonial
works. Kipling for his part is famous for his The White Man’s
Burden. He saw Asia and Africa, in the work, as some piece of
burden on the earth of the white man. Henry Kissinger, the
former American secretary of state had argued disparagingly
that the world was seen by America and by implication the
white man as an observable reality. If that is the case, then by
implication Asians and Africans saw the world subjectively.
However, the Palestinian American Intellectual, now late,
51
Professor Edward Said faulted Kissinger with his great books,
Orientalism and Palestine under the American Eye.

Other writers of the period desired so hard “to create a

little world out of the beautiful, pleasant and significant things
of this marred and clumsy world (Sanders, 495).”

52
1.8 Modernism and Post-modernism: Literature
(1920 -1945 and Beyond)
Modernism or modernity was a term common more in
Germany than in France or the Anglophone intellectual world.
It is used to describe the post-feudal era. German thinkers like
Jürgen Habermas think of this period as one of progressive
enlightenment and rationalisation (see Rivkin & Ryan (eds.),
1988: 353).
If one goes by this definition, then the modern era definitely
dates back to the Age of Enlightenment, the age of scientific
and industrial revolutions, when many believed that the world
could only be known through empirical observation. Truth or
meaning could be identified through known structures –
anything to the contrary was unscientific!
The New Bourgeoisie, who emphasised individual freedom,
practical and rational approaches to issues as well as
objectivity, became also the new owners of property and
wealth. They formed government and used the instrument of
coercion to protect them. In fact, they constructed “an ideal of
reason that licensed the definition of alternative to the society
as madness (Rivkin and Ryan, 338).”
Such tendency was also adopted in literature, whereby a
novel was to have defined form with a harmonious plot, a
setting located within a specific time frame and characters with
definable and identifiable identities.
Nevertheless, this particular tendency of knowing things
through known and identifiable structures in progressive
societies was subverted in Germany by Nietzsche through his
writings. He had especially done the subversion with his Birth

53
of Tragedy, Ecce Homo and Also Sprach Zarathustra. Therefore
if Modernism in Germany was synonymous with progressive
rationalism based on empirical observation and the knowing of
truth from known structures, Nietzsche was already Post-
modernist by insisting that the truth or meaning supposedly
known through knowable structures emanated from disorder;
in other words, truth and meaning were flux; as such that
state of fluidity of meaning or truth must be accepted:
assigning meaning to things or categorisation cannot be
accepted.
Therefore, if Post-modernism was already a way of
accepting fragmentations in human ideas, thoughts and even
consciousness, if it was a way of accepting truth or meaning as
flux in Germany, it could be said to be Modernism in England;
for as the first world war ended, people were shocked at the
utter human and material destruction. The years after the end
of the war were years “haunted by long memories, some
tender, some angry, most sickening (Sanders, 1996: 505)”. In
fact it took more than ten years for most of those who fought
in the war to really “come to terms with what the war had
meant to them ... (Sanders, 505)” they had to deal with that
first of all before they could transform their experience into
literature: imagine a dying soldier in the battle-field close to an
unfeeling friendliness of a wild flower or flowers by his side. He
would eventually die, but the flower or flowers will not stop
radiating beauty to the nature around it. Rats around
unmindful of the dying soldier would continue to feed on the
feet of an already dead soldier lying around. That was the state
of things in the war and thereafter.

54
Writers before this period did not seem to have noticed this
other side of things in their writings. Therefore, as Sanders
puts it:
Nevertheless, it was the incongruity implicit
in the idea of the “friendliness” of the unfeeling
wild flowers not by Lutyens, as much as that
of the equally indifferent poppies, cornflowers
skylarks and rats of the poetry that had emerged
from the war, that effectively marked the end an
art which had once reached for comforting and
sympathetic images from nature (1996: 505)

Human inventiveness, which reached its peak during the period

of scientific and industrial revolutions, had unleashed great
suffering and even death on the same humanity it wanted to
advance. Although science had achieved the status of a
religion, yet the catastrophe of the world wars brought about
by it destroyed the faith in science as a harbinger of progress
and prosperity (see Paul Davis, et al., 2003:4).
The horror and bewilderment of the post-war period
meant that a new start had to be made, in politics and society
as much as in art (see Sanders, 505). The “New Sciences, such
as psychology, anthropology, and sociology sought to
understand the sources of irrationality, violence and brutality
(2003:4)” as exhibited during the wars by the so-called
civilised world. This would eventually make the simple
dichotomy of primitive and civilised peoples lose its validity
(Paul Davis, et al., 2003). It also gave way to experimentations
in literature on human psychology. Therefore, when Virginia
Woolf, a post-war writer “announced with a devastating
flippancy that in or about December 1910, human character
changed, she was expressing what seemed by 1924 to be an

55
accumulated sense of exhilaration at a vanity of new
beginnings and rejections of the past (Sanders, 505-6).”
In fact the world marked a turning point in its history with
the first-world war and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Civilisation halted as the war progressed. At its end new
thoughts and attitude emerged: intellectuals started to
question the past traditions and culture. With that tendency,
new perspectives began also to emerge. Modernism is actually
rooted in that questioning. The turn it took in literature a few
years before the outbreak of the second-world war seemed
very post-modern in that it became really urgent to free the
novel from commonly received understanding of plot, time and
identity became imperative. It was already a tradition to see
the form of the novel in that light. Furthermore, established
religions, social, philosophical and political truths were
deconstructed in the manner Nietzsche had done it in
Germany. Truths or meanings these departments were thought
to represent were after all seen to be in flux; in other word,
there was no end to meaning or truth.
In her book entitled ‘Modern Fiction’ Virginia Woolf argued
against the traditional mode of representation in works of
fiction. Prior to her criticism, a novel was thought to have a
particular form which must have an organised plot system or
story arrangements with harmonious patterns. The story must
be set within a particular time frame and have characters
identifiable with definable traits. Such harmonies were no
longer necessary in the opinion of Woolf since the human mind
received innumerable impressions –some trivial, some fantastic
and short-lived, while others were engraved with the
sharpness of steel (Virginia quoted in Sanders, 1996: 514).

56
However, if a writer could base his or her work on his own
feeling and not on convention, then there won’t be need for
plot, there would be no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or
catastrophe (see Sanders, 1996: 515), because as we receive
impressions of a feeling of comedy, we also receive
impressions of tragedy.
Therefore, according to Virginia Woolf, the novel of the
20th century, or rightly put, the novel of the future would have
such a new form as would represent the “myriad impressions
which daily impose themselves on the human consciousness
(Sanders, 515).”
In her novels, she experimented on the new modes,
whereby “specific characterisation receded and the detailed
exploration of individual identity tended to melt into larger and
freer expression (Sanders, 515).”
In her Mrs Dalloway (1925) particularly, she
experimented on the representation of Mrs Dalloway. She also
wrote The Voyage Out (1915), To the Lighthouse (1927) and
The Waves (1931).
Virginia Woolf was not alone in the experimentations.
Mrs Richardson in her Pilgrimage did not “offer a fiction of
fortuitous shapes, of patterns, of images or of manipulated
events (Sander, 519).” In fact, her narrative did not abide by
the rule of a straight-line development. She did that “to allow
for a reader’s freedom of engagement with her implied
thematic structures (519).”
For his part D.H Lawrence centred his new philosophy
on the idea of liberating human sexuality from inherited social
repressions. These were somehow experimented upon in his
novels –Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women

57
in Love (1920), Kangaroo (1925) and The Plumed Serpent
(1926).
T.S. Eliot achieved the most striking effect of
inconsistence, of perceptions, Juxtaposition, Multiplicities and
Fluxes typical of modernism in his poem The Waste Land (see
Sanders, 533).
James Joyce defied the rules of form in Ulysses. In
Finnegans Wake, he tried to proof that he didn’t need to follow
form to be able to communicate meaning.
George Orwell, in all his novels like The Animal Farm,
1984, writes directly or indirectly against totalitarianism. He
was for democratic socialism.
Some writers of the modernist period were still active
during the post-modern era. However, like in every epoch,
some remarkable writers emerged. The post-modern
characteristics in the writings of some modernist writers like
Virginia Woolf did not stop, it continued with the writers of the
post-modern period. Some of these writers were Samuel
Beckett, Graham Greene, Salman Rushdie, William Golding,
Doris Lessing and so many more.
New Theatres and New wave of Morality emerged:
women took to taking pills, adultery became fashionable and
the question of gender as biologically determined or socially
constructed became rife with a growing number of males and
females adopting alternative sexual behaviour –that is,
homosexuality.

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 2
Literary devices and their meaning

Let us look, briefly, at the meanings of these ingredients of

literature, these literary devices which make literary studies
scientific:
Simile is one of them. In Literature, Similes are often
used to compare two things, ideas, concepts and situations.
The comparisons are done with the use of ‘ as' or ‘ like'.
Examples: (a) Mr Usain Bolt, the 100-meter-athletic Champion,
runs as fast as lightning. (b) The Conference Hall, teeming with
people, is as noisy as the market. (c) Hulk Hogan’s grips are
like those of a lion.
Metaphors are extensions in the use of words beyond
their primary meaning to describe referents that bear
similarities to the words’ primary referents (see Finegan,
Language, its structure and use, 1989: 172). They have been
assigned role in our perceptual and cognitive processes (Mey,
2008: 302). For example, (a) Samson is a Lion: he is
compared to the Lion in terms of physical strength, because
the Lion is known to be a very strong animal; (b) Professor
Chike Obi is a mathematical wizard: his mathematical brilliance
is compared to wizardry. There are metaphors that refer to the
notion of time; for example: (a) I look forward to seeing you
again this weekend. (b) Experts do not foresee an increase in
inflation in the near future. (c) He drags up old grudges from
his youth. In English, time metaphors are constructed as if we
physically move through time in the direction of the future
(Finegan, 1989: 173). Furthermore, with metaphors, ideas are
sensed as if they were objects –as such ideas can be smelt, felt

59
or heard. Example: (a) your proposal smells fishy. (b) I failed
to grasp what they were trying to prove. (c) I’d like your
opinion as to whether my plan sounds reasonable (1989).
Writing process is often talked by writers and critics as
“cooking”: (d) I let my manuscript simmer for six months. (e)
Who knows what kind of story he is brewing! (f) Their last book
was little more than a half-baked concoction of earlier work
(1989). Metaphors of emotion are based on a common
principle of the “heart being a place where emotions are
experienced”; example: (a) It is with heavy heart that I tell
you of her death. (b) You shouldn’t speak light-heartedly about
this tragedy. (c) The rescuers received the survivors’ heartfelt
thanks (1989). Finally, as Finegan puts it:
Most of the metaphors discussed so far are
relatively conventionalized –that is, they are
found in the speech and writing of many
language users because they are preset. But
language lends itself to creative activities, and
language Users do not hesitate to create new
metaphors of their own. Even when speakers
and writers, create their own metaphors,
however, they must follow the principles that
regulate conventionalised metaphors. In
English, metaphors that refer to time must
obey the convention of “moving through time
in the direction of the future (1989: 174).

Personification ascribes human qualities and

characteristics to inanimate objects and non living things .It is
used to heighten the quality of the discourse, lending it
emotional strength. Examples: (a) Speak in low tones for Walls
have ears. (b) After reading The Famished Road, I heard the
trees singing. As can be seen, human qualities are given to
forest and leaves, which are inanimate objects.
With Paradoxes, statements usually seem contradictory
or opposed to common sense and yet are probably true (see

60
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10 th Edition). Example
(a) A child is the father of the man; (b) Her happiest day was
her saddest. In poetry and high prose, it is used to create
ambiguity which typifies the complexity of the human make-
up. It also create avenue for the self to expire to go beyond
self in order to experience the “truth”.
However, with Antithesis, ideas are contrasted by means
of parallel arrangement of words, clauses or sentences as in:
they promised us freedom and provided slavery (see again
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary).
Oxymoron combines contradictory or incongruous words;
for example: (a) cruel kindness. In reading this, the reader
asks himself or herself whether cruelty can be kind, but he or
she is only made to imagine the extent or depth of that
kindness. Another example is: (b) women are necessary evil:
you are struck by the truth of the statement in spite of its
incongruity, because even when women are evil, still you need
that evil for life to be complete.
Apostrophe addresses an absent person, usually or a
personified thing rhetorically, for example: Carlyle’s: O Liberty,
what things are done in thy name; or as in the bible: O Death
where is thy sting! As can be seen, the expressions are
emotive.
Pun is humorous use of different words which sound the
same or of two meanings of the same word. For instance, as
he rolled down the road, like a huge load gathering no moss, I
looked at the fool as he wounded his foot.
Rhyme is the sameness of sound of the endings of two or
more words at the ends of lines of verse, e.g say, day, play;
measure, pleasure; puff, rough (see Oxford Advanced English

61
Dictionary) or even alternately. Let us look at particular
examples in the poem: The Fire Has Gone Out by Lenrie
Peters.
The Fire has gone out
The last flicker gone
Nothing but aching gout
To weather the coming storm.

5 The children have gone away

Wafted to the South
Where they will forget how to pray
After the passing age of doubt (Nwoga, 1967: 71).

As you can see, the lines rhyme at the end of the lines
and of course alternately –out with gout, gone with storm;
away with pray, south with doubt. Rhymes can also be internal
–that is, internal rhymes: let us look at the lines 4, 6 and 7
of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s 14 line (Sonnet) poem:
4 Why do men then now not reck his rod? And
6 And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
7 And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

In line 4 we see men/then rhyme internally; we also see

seared/bleared/smeared rhyme internally; and finally
wears/shares also rhyme internally (Ferguson, Salter and
Stallworthy, 1997: 1111). Furthermore, all the rhymes above
are masculine rhymes because “they consist of a single
stressed syllable (1997: 1112), except for a-way in line 5 of
Lenrie Peter’s The Fire Has Gone Out: it is two-syllabic, one
unstressed and one stresses. Had they had stressed syllables

62
that were followed by unstressed syllables, as in
chiming/rhyming, they would have been feminine rhymes.
Let us look at the first 8 lines Hopkins’s God’s Granduer in its
entirety:
1 The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
2 It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
3 It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
4 Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
5 Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
6 And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
7 And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
8 Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

In line 3 we notice the use of Alliteration –ooze of oil

(1997: 1112). In alliterative statements or alliterations,
consonant sounds are repeated in neighbouring words or
syllables, as in wild and woolly, threatening throngs: as can be
seen, their meanings are conveyed through sound harmony. It
can take the form of Assonance, that is, a relatively
juxtaposition or repetition of vowel sounds or Consonance,
that is, recurrence or repetition of consonants, especially, at
the end of stresses syllables without the similar
correspondence of vowels –as in the final sounds of “stroke”
and “luck” (see Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary).
When these sounds are pleasant to the ear they are euphonic.
If rhyme is the sameness of sound of the endings of two
or more words at the end of lines of verses, Rhythm is the
regular succession of weak and strong stresses, accents,
sounds or movements (in speech, music, dancing, etc. (see
again Oxford Advanced English Dictionary). It is a very

63
important component of language. As Ferguson, Salter and
Stallworthy put it:
[W] hen we speak, we hear a sequence of syllables.
These, the basic units of pronunciation, can
consist of a vowel sound alone or a vowel
with attendant consonants: Oh; syl-la-ble.
sometimes m, n, and l are counted as vowel
sounds, as in riddle (rid-dl) and prism (pri-zm).
in words of two or more syllables, one is almost
always given more emphasis or, as we say, is
more heavily stressed than the others, so that
what we hear in ordinary speech is a sequence
of such units, variously stresses and unstressed
as, for example: A poem is a composition written
for performance by the human voice (1997: 1104).

The activity of analysing the stressed and unstressed

syllables of a poem is called scansion. With scanning, the
divisions of lines of poems into metrical feet are determined
(1997: 1104). And the metrical feet or Meter is the recurrence
of regular units in the rhythmic structure of a poem (1997).
English poetry has four metrical systems –the accentual, the
accentual-syllabic, the syllabic and the quantitative. Accentual
meter has two strong stressed syllables; Accentual-syllabic has
a combination of two or three stressed and/or unstressed
syllables; “syllabic meter measures only the number of
syllables in a line without regard to their stress (1997: 1110)”,
while quantitative meter “is based on notions of a syllable’s
duration in time or its length (1997).”
Furthermore, the four most common metrical feet in
English poetry, which come under the accentual-syllabic meter,
are (a) Iambic, Trochaic, Anapestic and Dactylic (1997).
There are many more, but these four are the most common.
Iambs usually have an unstressed syllable followed by a
stressed one. It is considered to be the meter closest to
ordinary speech. Examples of iambic meters are: New York;
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and as used by Charles Dicken in his novel A Tale of Two
Cities:
Ìt wàs │ thè bést │ òf tim´es, ║ ìt wàs │ thè wórst │
òf tim´es (1997: 1105). Note that the (`sign) is for
unstressed syllable, while the (´ sign) are used for stresses.
The double bar indicates a natural pause in the speaking voice.
It is called the censura (1997: 1104).
The trochaic meter has a stressed syllable followed by an
unstressed one. Example: London (1997: 1105).
An Anapest has two unstressed syllable followed by a stressed
one as in *Tenn*es´see (1997: 1106). And a Dactyl has a
stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones –as in
´Len*in*grad (1997); and as Ferguson et al put it:
Iambs and anapaests, which have a strong
Stress on the last syllable, are said to
Constitute a rising meter, whereas trochees
And dactyls, ending with an unstressed syllable
Constitute a falling meter ... (1997: 1106).

In climactic situations (Climax) with regard to literature,

a series of phrases or sentences is arranged in ascending order
of rhetorical forcefulness. For example: The angry and unjustly
treated servant entered the house of his boss, caught him
making love to his wife and stabbed him to death. I had tried
to use making love to his wife, euphemistically (Euphemism),
as in the statement above, to soften the raw obscenity the
expression having sex would have evoked. In other words,
Euphemisms are used to soften the harshness of a rather
provocative or obscene word.
If, however, the man kills his boss because he caught him
on top of his wife, he has certainly contravened the law and
will be liable to capital punishment by the court. Shall we then

65
stop marrying, because we are afraid our wives might be taken
from us by rich men? This is a Rhetorical Question that is
not intended to be answered. It is rather a literary device
meant to strengthen a point being made or to stress an
instruction being given. The rich man, who was killed,
happened to be an old man; as such one expected that he
respected his old age, because in African traditional society,
(a) we respect grey hair: this implies that old age, which
wisdom is associated with, is respected in Africa. We also
respect the crown in Africa: that means that royalty, which is
associated with the crown, is honoured. The literary device is
used to replace the name of one thing with the name of
something associated with it and it is called Metonymy: it
seems to have taken the place of metaphor and reflects a
contemporary shift from the emotive and the sensory, which
metaphor is thought to represent, to the intellectual
(Surdulescu, 2002). At the present a combined device of
metonymy and metaphor are used by writers and critics, so
much so that there is today what is known as metonymic-
metaphor –this is to be found in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of

the Lock: From silver Spouts the grateful Liquors glide, While
China’s Earth receives the smoking Tide. According to
Surdulescu “the phrase “China’s earth” is both a metonym,
referring to the porcelain object of art (a tea cup), and a
metaphor, standing for the whole body of China, with its
mushrooming population (2002).”
Parallelism is a repeated syntactical similarities
introduced for rhetorical effect. This device was skilfully used
by Dr. Martin Luther King in his great speech during the one-
million-man march: I have a dream. This was used repeatedly

66
to express his hopes for America, making thereby his rhetoric
very effective.
Other literary devices are Hyperbole, Enjambment,
Irony, Syllogism, Satire, Synecdoche and many more.
Hyperbolic statements are often extravagantly exaggerated.
The exaggeration, however, is only for the purpose of driving
home a point. For example, when the case of the man, who
killed his boss because he was having affairs with his wife, was
brought to court, the whole country came to witness the
sentencing of a frustrated man. Of course the whole country
did not come to the court to witness his sentencing, but I used
the Hyperbole to draw attention to the damage frustration
could do to a man. However, seeing the rich man as he carried
along his life of opulence and philanthropy, you could not but
see him as an honourable man. He was an honourable man
indeed! This statement is ironic, because no honourable man
would be seen making love to the wife of his servant. And so
Irony is a literary device used to express something other
than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning. Wole
Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation as well as Alexander Pope’s
The Rape of the Lock (see The Northon Anthology of Poetry,
1997: 1043; 323) is a poem rife with irony.
Syllogism is usually, according to Merriam Webster’s
Collegiate Dictionary, a deductive scheme of argument
consisting of a major and minor premises as well as a
conclusion. For example: every virtue is laudable; kindness is a
virtue; therefore kindness is laudable.
Enjambment involves the running over of the sense and
grammatical structure of a verse line from one verse line or
couplet to the next without a punctuated pause. It is also

67
called Run-on line. For example, Philip Larkin’s Here runs-on till
the line twenty-four before it paused:
Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistle to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
5 Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river’s slow presence,
The plied gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:

Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires-
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers-

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling

Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed wheat fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages, where removed lives

Loneliness clarifies. .... (see Toolan, 1998:1-2).

Meanwhile, if satire, according to Abrams in his Glossary

of Literary Terms, diminishes or derogates a subject by making
it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement,
contempt, scorn or indignation(1985: 185), then Soyinka’s The
Interpreters is rife with satire—political satire. In the book,
questions about life, death, sex, etc, are raised while the
author rages against the corruption that has eaten deep into
the fabrics of his society: The corruption in his society is so
endemic that it has become a way of life. For example, people
like Chief Winsala or Sir Derin or even the members of such
groups as the Morgue, would feel the corruption in the those
characters in the book reflecting in them, thereby making them

68
feel diminished, contempt and scorn for themselves, while
being amused at the same time (1965: 260).
Synecdoche is a literary device by which a part is put for the
whole as in fifty sail for fifty ship, or the whole is put for a part
–as in boards for stage (see Merriam Webster’s Collegiate
Dictionary).

69
 3
Critical methods

In literary appreciation, the formalist critic is not interested in

the writer’s work’s reference to social realities. He/she is
necessarily interested only in the science of the text, in the use
of poetic language as opposed to practical language as means
of communication. The formalist methods include the following:
Russian Formalism, European Structuralism, Post-
structuralism, Deconstruction and American New Criticism.

With Russian Formalism literature is expected to serve a

scientific purpose: its study should not be to understand other
facts which it is thought to reflect, but to understand its
literariness, the poetry of its language. Russian Formalists
“were concerned with elucidating the modes of operation of
entire genres such as the novel (Rivkin and Ryan (eds.), 1998:
6).”
“New Critics concentrated their energies on individual
literary works, especially poems. Close greading is the term
most often used to describe their method. The purpose of such
close reading was not, however, the analysis of literary devices
or motifs considered as an end in itself. It was instead the
elucidation of the way literature embodies or concretely enacts
universal truth, what the New Critics called “concrete
universals (1998:6).” As such, American New Criticism does
not expect that literature should serve any scientific purpose
because all truths, as science claims, are not grounded in
empirical facts knowable only through scientific methods. The
American New Critics responded, therefore to modern positivist

70
science through the description of literary devices in the
literary text –devices such as metaphor, irony, and paradox ,
simile, personification, euphemism, etc. (1998:7). They
believed that these devices were capable of supporting the
structure of meaning within the text. Their study of literature
was such that was concerned with the traditional religious and
aesthetic values, which was being displaced by science –that
is, values of Christian theology and idealist aesthetics, “(that
is, an aesthetics rooted in the idea that universal truth is
available through art of a kind that is not determined by
material social and historical circumstances (1998) ).” In The
Verbal Icon (1954), William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley
described two fallacies which are encountered in the study of
literature: Intentional Fallacy and Affective Fallacy. On the one
hand, “Intentional Fallacy” is the mistake of attempting to
understand the author's intentions when interpreting a literary
work. They believe that such an approach is fallacious because
the meaning of a work should be contained solely within the
work itself, and attempts to understand the author's intention
violate the autonomous value of the work. On the other hand,
"Affective Fallacy" is the mistake of believing that a work has
effect upon its audience or reader. The new critics believed
that a text should not have to be understood through the
reader response, because the meaning and merit of the text
are inherent in the text.
European Structuralism is based “on the realization that
if human actions or productions have a meaning there must be
an underlying system of distinctions and conventions which
make this meaning possible (Jonathan Culler in Rivkin and
Ryan (ed.), 1998:73).” In other words, finding a meaning in a

71
literary text, for example, is only possible through a set of
institutional conventions –as in the use of linguistic, stylistic,
pragmatic or even semiotic, methods. For example,
semantics, according to Edward Finegan “is the study of
systematic ways in which languages structure meaning,
especially in words and sentences (Language: its use and
structure, second edition, 1994: 156).” He gave further
examples with some sentences, whose meanings he tried to
locate semantically:

Sentence 1: I went to the store this morning

Sentence 2: All dogs are animals.
Edward argued that both sentences had meaning for
different reasons; for whether sentence 1 was true depended
on whether or not the speaker was, in fact, telling the truth –
as a matter of fact, nothing about the words of the sentences
made the sentence inherently true. In contrast, sentence 2 was
true because we were aware that the word dog described
entities that were also described by the word animal.
Therefore, the truth of sentence 2 did not depend on whether
or not the speaker was telling the truth (1994: 157). In the
first place the sentences have meaning because they are well
formed syntactically and the words in the sentences have
meaning; for example I is a pronoun, went is a verb, to is a
preposition, the is a definite article, store is a noun, this is
demonstrative adjective, while morning is an adverb indicating
a time of the day. In the sentence, I went to the store this
morning, I is the subject referred to by the predicate went to
the store this morning. This is also true with the sentence, all
dogs are animals. All dogs is a noun phrase and subject of the

72
verb phrase predicate, are animals. There meanings are
therefore derived from their structure, which is well-formed.
Edward gave further examples with two more sentences:
Sentence 1: I saw duck; sentence 2: she ate the pie. He
argued that sentence 1 could be interpreted in two ways
whereby duck could be a verb referring to the act of bending
over quickly or it could be a noun referring to domesticated
bird. In other words, the sentences are ambiguous because of
the two possible readings of them. Sentence 2, in Finegan’s
opinion is not ambiguous, but vague, because if we try to take
the sentence out of context, we will see that while it is obvious
that the subject of the predicate, ate the pie, is a female, we
cannot still know who she refers to or even what particular pie
was eaten; for the pie indicates that the speaker has a
particular kind of pie in mind. Therefore, linguistic semantics
shows the different ways in which language “means”
(1994:158).

A brief look at Stylistics will further show us how the

European formalist method works. “Stylistic is the study of
language in literature (Toolan, 1998: viii).” In other words, we
are able to understand the anatomy and functions of language
if we examine very closely the linguistic particularities of a
given text. For example we may want to understand the
naming practices in a novel through systematic study – that is,
whether the protagonists in a given text are named through
pronouns (e.g., she), or by a proper name Oliver Twist or by
various definite descriptions (the man, the Jew; or the
elegantly dressed matron (see Toolan, 1998: xi) or even
through cohesion or deixis (1998: 24-33).

73
 However, Emmanuel Ngara, one of the foremost literary
critics in Africa, has argued that Content in literary criticism
referred always to critical method which argues that literature
must of necessity reflect social realities; Form, he insists is
Stylistic Criticism (Art and Ideology in African Novel, 1985:1).
But he believes, like every other formalist that form and
content are inseparable. He believes, however, that African
writers are in constant search of a new social vision as well as
new aesthetic standards; that they occupy themselves not only
with artistic forms, but also with ideological problems facing
their societies; that they are very committed and extremely
sensitive to the various social problems of their day and time
and that they are constantly preoccupied with the role of art in
society and are endeavouring to develop literary forms that
match their social vision (1985).
Though a formalist, yet he believes that Marxist Criticism
should be married with Stylistic Criticism, for, in his opinion,
the only philosophy that has most adequately engaged itself
with the difficult problem of ideology is Marxist philosophy and
it is his conviction that Marxist aesthetic offers a deeper
understanding of the relationship between art and ideology
than any other aesthetic in vogue today (1985).
He believes that the critic of African literature ought to
work hand-in-hand with the politician, the philosopher,
theologian or educator to find solutions to the numerous
African problems. The literary scholar has to bear in mind,
therefore, that literary studies is both a critical as well as a
hermeneutic practice which demands of its practitioners an
ability for critical thinking; and that the literary text itself is
criticism as much as it is the object of Criticism.

74
 Furthermore, he spelt out what he called the goals of
Stylistic Criticism by differentiating general linguistics from
Stylistic criticism. While, in his opinion, general linguistic is
about the analysis of the various levels of language, like the
phonetic, the grammatical, the lexical as well as the semantic
level; Stylistics uses these general linguistic principles to
isolate the distinctive features of a variety of the idiosyncrasies
of an author (Stylistic Criticism and The African Novel,
1982:11-12). He argues that the stylistic critic makes use of
the principles of general linguistic to identify the features of
language which are restricted to a particular social context.
S/he also accounts for the reasons why such features are used
and when and where they are used. He also quantifies stylistic
features in order to determine frequencies of occurrence.
Furthermore, Ngara maintains that the literary stylistic critic
can apply the methods of stylistics to the language of
literature, while the sociolinguist’s domain is that of the
relationship between language and society, that is, the
question of national languages, standard languages, dialects,
orthographies, language contact, bilingualism, language and
social class, and so on (1982:12). He argues further that the
distinction between the stylistician and the sociolinguist was
not clear-cut, as the sociolinguist was frequently called upon to
use the methods of the stylistician, who was in turn called
upon to make use of the techniques and principles of general
linguistics; thus general linguistics became the basis of other
branches of linguistics which overlap with one another (1982).
Therefore, the stylistic critic uses the analytic tools of the
linguist and stylistician; he concerns himself with minute
details of grammar, lexis, phonology, prosody, meaning, as

75
well as with the wider issues of deviation from the norm, the
relationship between language and character, the relationship
between the author and his audience. But, more than that, he
relates his analysis of linguistic features to considerations of
content value and aesthetic quality in art (Ngara, 1982:12).
While the stylistician, according to Lodge, “seems obliged
to rely upon an implied or accepted scale of values, or to put
aside questions of value altogether, the literary critic
undertakes to combine analysis with evaluation (Language of
Fiction, 1966: 56).” The stylistic critic is, therefore, interested
in theme, plot and character except that his interest is always
related to the role that language plays in the delineation of
these features of the novel (Ngara, 1982:12).

Stylistically, Ngara analyses fiction in the post-colonial

African literary formalistic concept of literary appreciation
and engagement into four constituents – that is, content,
narrative structure, character and linguistic format. The
subject-matter, the theme, the views and attitudes
expressed by the writer as well as the message of the
work constituted the content for him, while the linguistic
format comprised the linguistic features proper and the para-
linguistic affective devices. The linguistic feature, he insisted,
constituted (a) the grammatical level, where questions of
syntax, sentence type and the relationship between meaning
and form are considered; (b) the phonological level, which did
not exclude rhyme, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, etc.; (c)
the lexical level, which involved the writer’s choice of words,
the combination of words, metaphors, similes, their effects and
meanings; (d) the level of tenor discourse which was about
tone as well as the degree of formality and informality between
76
the participants in the drama of the novel and between the
author and the reader and (e) the graphological level at which
one considered how the print, the colour and shape of the
printed marks, punctuation and paragraphing contribute to the
aesthetic appeal and readability of a work of art. Meanwhile,
the para-linguistic affective devices referred to symbolism,
myth, allusion, allegory, which ordinarily could not be analysed
in terms of normal linguistic description (1982: 17-22). He
argued further that linguistic format could be determined by
medium, that is, the method used to communicate language;
by mode, that is, the genre of the work under discussion and
by language, context, and field of discourse, participants, and
audience as well as personal factors (Ngara, 1982). In effect,
Ngara was only arguing that the criticism of African literature
could be as structural or formalistic as it could be socially
engaging.
However, Post-Structuralism is a counter-movement to
Structuralism, which dominated French intellectual life in the
late 1950s (1998). It was not interested in knowing how the
system that helps create order works: it was largely interested
in finding out how the order being created by the system could
be undone “so that the energies and potentials that they held
in place might be liberated and used to construct an altogether
different kind of society (1998: 334).”
If, therefore, Structuralism uses linguistic method to find
order everywhere, its successor, Post-Structuralism uses
linguistic method too to argue that such orders arise from an
essentially endemic disorder in language and in the world that
cannot be mastered by any structure or semantic code that
might assign it a meaning (Rivkin & Ryan (eds.) 1998: 334).)

77
 Meanwhile, while Post-Structuralism tries to undo the
order or truth or meaning created by Structuralism,
Deconstruction wants to know what justifies the distinction
between inside and outside, intelligible and physical, speech
and writing. It wonders whether there has to be a prior act of
expulsion, setting in opposition, and differentiation in order
that the supposed ground and absolute foundation of truth in
the voice of the mind thinking the presence of truth to itself to
come into being (1998: 339). Deconstruction believes that if
philosophy is about intelligibility, then it is worth the while to
be able to make a distinction beforehand between what is
intelligible and what is sensible or material or physical or
graphical (1998). If, for example, the ground of truth, which is
the effect of something more primordial and which should
have no other ground apart from itself, is derived,
Deconstruction would want to know that more primordial thing
in order to assert that it is also derived, making the circle of
derivation of truths unending (1998).
Post-Modernism became another word for Post-
Structuralism by 1979. However, whenever names change,
things change, too (Rivkin &Ryan (eds.) 1998: 352). Post-
Modernism originated in America and being that America was
struggling to locate its position in world discourse, it used Post-
Modernism to counter almost all the positions of European
thoughts –from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism. Lyotard,
with his publication Post-Modern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge, became the avant-garde of Post-Modernism. In the
book, he argued that the old west European master narratives
of progressive subjective enlightenment and rational liberation
(Liberal Humanism and Marxism especially) was no longer

78
applicable to a world of micro-narratives that could not be
dominated by any single legitimating meta-narrative (1998:
352). European Structuralism had sought to establish order or
truth through known conventions or structures. Post-
Structuralism and Deconstruction tried to displace this ordering
or structuring of truth so that the energies or potentials that
they held could be harnessed and channelled into creating a
new society. However, Post-Modernism postulated that truth
was no longer the possession of a rational subject, nor was it a
property of a reality that would be described objectively using
objective scientific methods; rather it was determined by the
effectiveness of knowledge within a particular economic
situation dominated by corporations that had the power both to
shape the world and to say what counted as scientific truth
regarding the world. What would count as true was what was
useful from their point of view. For instance, tests on drugs
that provided justification for marketability would be deemed
true; tests that provided contrary results would be avoided: so
long as people continued to smoke and buy cigarettes, it would
be true that they could not be banished –in other words, only
tests that proved they could not be banished would be deemed
true(1998:352-353).
In Psychoanalysis, Freud tries to prove that dreams are
the expression of our unconscious. He goes further to write
that literary texts are like dreams, for they displace
unconscious drives, desires and motives into imagery that
might bear no resemblance to its origin but which nevertheless
permits the imagery to achieve release or expression (1998:
125)
Feminism theorises both the essential and constructed

79
nature of the female as well as the role of language in feminist
constructivism. The condition of the woman under patriarchy
was essentially the preoccupation of the women movement of
the 1960s and early 1970s. They had suddenly realised that
the canon taught in schools were overwhelmingly male and
that they heard only male points of view that were noticeably
misogynists and so they wondered if there were no female
writers (1998: 527-8). Gender Theory, for its part,
preoccupies itself in certain writings on whether gender was a
question of biology or simply a social construct, while Ethnic
studies and Post-colonial Theory help us to understand the
ethnic issues of our given societies as well as the conditions of
post-coloniality. Cultural criticism tries to locate cultural
phenomena in contexts of domination and freedom.

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 4

Literature and Praxis

In the twenty-first century, the study of literature must reflect
the dynamics of society. In other words, there has to be a way
in which literature, in refining our faculties and heightening our
sensibility, must be functional –that is, the knowledge of the
scholar of literature must be concrete and practical. One of the
critical theories that allows for that to happen is Marxist
Criticism. This does not mean a subscription to communism:
Marxist Criticism as a form of literary criticism originated
in the former Soviet Union. It postulates that the intent of the
writer is always a code for a particular set of ideologies in the
writer’s own day. For Marxist Realists authorial intent is
inherently present in the text and must be placed in a context
of liberation and materialist dialectic. Marxist Critics believe
that the writer cannot be separated from their works, just as
their works cannot be separated from their informing society.
For them writers are the critical purveyors of the imperatives
of our human condition.
Marxists, according to Ngugi, believe that society is
structured according to class; therefore, the class in power
controls not only the forces of production in the society, but
also the cultural forces. And because the society is an
interaction of so many forces –production, exchange,
distribution and so on, the quality of life of the individual in
society is therefore affected in so many ways: the forces affect
their way of consumption of goods and services, their private
and social lives (1997: 67). For Ngugi, literature is as much

81
about human beings as politics is. In other words literature
reflects “actual men and women and children, breathing,
eating, crying laughing, creating, dying, growing, struggling,
organising, people in history of which they are its products, its
producers and analysts (Ngugi, 1997).” Therefore the criticism
of literature will also reflect the conditions of these actual men
and women, children, breathing, eating, crying and laughing,
etc.
Furthermore, we must bear in mind that Terry Eagleton had
argued that criticism has never been an innocent discipline;
that Marxist criticism, which is a branch of criticism itself,
makes enquiries into the history of criticism itself and as such
it always posed the question of under what conditions and for
what ends does literary criticism come about. He argues that
criticism has a history and that the history is more than a
random combination of critical acts; for even if literature was
the object of criticism, it was not its point of genesis.
Therefore, criticism did not arise as a spontaneous response to
the existential fact of the text, organically coupled with the
object it tries to explain: criticism, he maintained, has its own
relatively autonomous life, laws and structure. In short
criticism is interwoven with the entire literary system and not
necessarily reflexive of it (Criticism and Ideology, 1976:17).
If, therefore a reader or critic in the process of critiquing
a text, reads it and is struck in the process that the writers are
talking about something serious –that is, the works are telling
him or her something (see Ashcroft, Post-colonial
Transformations, 2001:73), that the characters express the
feelings he/she most likely is very familiar with as well as the
experiences he/she knows; if he/she, therefore, jumps in and

82
out of the work at will, and acquires thereby a deep
understanding of his/her nature and respect for the complex
identities of others, including diverse histories and cultures. If
he/she begins to interpret and evaluate the information in the
works from a variety of sources in relation to the society and
the writers, if he/she makes complex intellectual connections
across disciplines, cultures, and institutions while reading the
books, if he/she begins to exchange the world of the works
he/she is immersed in with the world that he/she knows, if
he/she becomes conscious of his or her condition and desires
to apply the knowledge he/she has gained in solving his/her
problems, then the reader or critic is actually applying
literature, that is he/she is making literature practical; for, first
and foremost, he/she has seen the text as reflecting social
realities –the realities he/she is very familiar with. These social
realities are mirrored in texts. For example most Nigerian texts
are a description or representation of Nigerian life and could,
therefore, help to visualise some of the social issues in Nigeria
–issues like ethnic conflicts, which most often cannot be
directly observed. These texts are able to help in visualising
ethnic conflicts because they are a representation of reality and
detail perceptively why ethnic conflicts occur. They also identify
barriers to settlement, and indicate procedures to manage or
resolve the disputes.
Therefore, a scholar of literature, who has become better
informed of the Nigerian condition by reading Nigerian
literature, for example, may naturally aspire to make his/her
knowledge of these situations concrete and practical. He/she
may even become concerned with people’s political situations
as a whole – these political situations are already represented

83
in literary texts – rather than being narrowly concerned with
immediate interpersonal relations which can be abstracted
from the concrete whole (Eagleton, 1983: 208).
Literary studies does not preoccupy itself only with political
questions, and moral arguments, its scholarship ought to be
able, therefore, to equip its students with the ability also of a
genuine moral and political argument, with the depth of insight
and critical thinking to see the relations between individual
qualities, values and the whole material conditions of
existence.
Furthermore, since the information in literary works is a
carrier of knowledge, it is the scholar’s responsibility to
appropriate the information in them and transform them into
knowledge –knowledge of the situation around the world,
knowledge of the Nigerian condition, the corruption, injustice
and ethnic conflicts –and then transform that knowledge into
action; for example the resolution of the ethnic conflicts. Trying
to resolve the Nigerian ethnic conflicts is an effort to be
practical or to make one’s knowledge functional. Therefore, in
the course of studying the works that reflect ethnic conflict
situations in Nigeria, the scholar may acquire a deep
understanding of him/herself and respect for the complex
identities of others, including the histories and cultures of
Nigeria. Thereafter, he may want to participate actively as a
citizen not only in the complex democracy of the globalised
world, but also in the politics of Nigeria, being able to discern
the ethical consequences of decisions and actions of leaders
and people in positions of authority.
The scholar may likely begin to see Nigerian Literature as
existing generally within Nigeria’s specific culture. He would

84
even see that the literature ennobles and validates the culture.
Therefore, the version of high culture it imparts, according to
Said, should not be marginal to the serious political concerns of
[the Nigerian] society (see The World, the Text and the Critic,
1983: 2).1
Edward Said had accused professional humanists of
telling their students and their general constituency that they
defend the classics, the virtues of a liberal education, and the
precious pleasure of literature even as they show themselves
to be silent on or even incompetent about the historical and
social world in which all these things take place. This has led to
an institutional divorce of the cultural realm and its expertise
from their real connections with power. This was wonderfully
illustrated to Said by an exchange with his old college friend,
who worked in the department of defence for a period during
the Vietnam War. The bombings were in full course and
Edward Said was naively trying to understand the kind of
person who could order daily B-52 strikes over a distant Asian
country all in the name of the American interest in defending
freedom and stopping communism. His friend had told him
about the defence secretary, whom he considered a complex
human being. His friend believed that the defence secretary did
not fit the picture Said might have formed of the cold-blooded
imperialist murderer, because the last time he was with the
defence secretary in his office he had noticed the novel,
Alexandria Quartet, by Durrells on his desk. By that Said’s
friend implied that no-one who read and appreciated a novel

1
While Edward wrote about the ennobling and validating role of literature from the
universal point of view, I believe also that Nigerian literature exists within Nigeria’s
specific culture and that Nigerian literature ennobles and validates Nigerian culture.
85
could be a cold-blooded butcher one might suppose the
defence secretary to be (see Orientalism, 2003: 2-3).
The whole implausible anecdote made sense to Said after
many years and struck him as typical of what is obtainable,
that is, that humanists and intellectuals somehow accept the
idea that you can read classical fiction as well as kill and maim
because, according to Said:
[T] he cultural world is available for that particular sort
of camouflaging, and because cultural types are not
supposed to interfere in matters for which the social
system has not certified them. What the anecdote
illustrates is the approved separation of a high-level
bureaucrat from the reader of novels of questionable
worth and definite status (2003: 2-3).

In other words, the cultural world should not be separated

from the political world, because politics gets sustenance from
values and values are cultural types expressed always in
literature, which itself is a humanistic enterprise, that is to say,
it is about human beings and their values, capacities and
worth.
Literature centres on human lives. Therefore, scholars of
literature are humanists. Understandably, according to
Abrams, a humanist in the sixteenth century was one who
taught or worked in the humanities; and the field of humanities
then included grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral
philosophy (1993: 82). Abrams was of the opinion that the
field of humanities was distinguished from fields less concerned
with the moral and less imaginative aspects and activities of
man, such as mathematics, natural philosophy, and theology
(1993: 83). He insisted also that in the nineteenth century,
the new view of the word implied the dignity and central
position of man in the universe; therefore, the study of

86
classical imaginative and philosophical literature was
encouraged and emphasis was on the moral and practical
values rather than aesthetic ones. Reason was expected to
always prevail over instinct and wild passion and the rounded
development of the various and diverse powers – mental and
physical – of man was of great importance, while technical or
specialised training had lesser appeal (1993).
A humanist of the twenty-first century or humanities as a
study in the twenty-first century ought to concern itself with
human experiences which are both objective and subjective as
well as values which are also both practical and abstract. The
primary concern of a humanist or humanities, therefore, should
be to study aspects of the human condition in regard to how
human beings respond to or cope with the encompassing
totality of the experience of being human and living human
lives (see Abrams, 1993: 83).
Post-colonial studies, being part of the new humanism, is
a study about the human condition in post-colonial societies of
both the developing and developed world; therefore it should
have practical implications, which should be manifested in the
literary studies of both their societies. In studying the
literatures of the post-colonial societies of both the developing
and developed world, their practical implications should be
emphasised. And the practical implications of the texts will
take into consideration those things with which the writer
engaged himself or herself in relation to his or her society; that
is, the corruption, ethnicity, racism, religious bigotry and so
on. It should also consist in knowing what those things mean
to the reader or audience, how he or she could be affected by
the information he or she appropriates from reading texts as

87
well as what the duty of the professional humanist is in
imparting knowledge and disseminating information
appropriated from texts. All this constitutes a theoretical basis
for literature and praxis.
While Bill Ashcroft’s constitutive theory (2001) may be
useful in understanding what happens between the writer and
the reader of a literary work, a theory of literature and praxis
will go beyond that to demonstrate what can be done with that
which happens between a writer and the reader, and of course
the teacher, the professional humanist, who may as well be a
reader. Ashcroft theorised that just as a reader rewrites the
text in the process of reading the text and just as the reader-
function is present in the writing as the focus of “meanability”
of the writing, the author is also present in the reading (see
Post-colonial Transformation, 2001: 73). For Ashcroft, “this is
the specific and practical way in which consumption and
production are linked. Again, this is firstly true at a conscious
level, where the reader accepts the conviction that the author
is telling him or her something through the text (2001).”
Therefore, he argues further that readers respond to the text
as telling them something because language is used in such a
way as to make the text tell something. However, in his
opinion, “one cannot tell others anything that they do not
incorporate or tell themselves (2001: 73)”; for as he argued,
“the mind is active in knowing: whether a child learning a
language or a scientist “observing” an “objective” universe,
knowing is conducted within the situation of horizons of
expectations and other knowledge (2001).” Furthermore,
Ashcroft is of the opinion that as a reader reads a text, a
horizon of expectation is partially established by the text as it

88
unfolds, while the horizon of knowledge which is acquired
through other texts, a relevance of other knowledge, is
established by exploration. The reader thus constructs the
other dialogue pole of discourse. This is possible because
speaking is a social act (2001)). As Ashcroft puts it:
[R]eaders do not simply respond to the “intentionality” of
the work itself, quite apart from imputation of an author. The
work is a way of seeing and responding, a way of directing
attention to that which is “given to consciousness”. It is more
accurate to say that the reader sees according to, or “with” the
text rather than “see it”. This orientation to the intentionality
of the text occurs whenever we assign an author to a text. We
can deduce from this that the intentionality of the text can be put
for the direction of the author’s consciousness. Thus
interpretation is never univocal but the reader is subject to the
situation, to the rules of discourse and to the directing other as
the author is subject to them (2001: 73).

Therefore whenever there is a text to be read by a scholar,

he/she, in trying to see “with” the text, must of necessity let
the text tell him or her something. Once the text tells us
something we are able to gain some knowledge from it. The
knowledge gained must be brought alive. In fact, he or she
must impact on his or her world.

89
 5

Conclusion
In the twenty-first century, literary education should consist
not only in making its scholars men and women of culture but
also in making the education of literary scholars concrete and
practical.
The context of worldly interactions, as Said had noted,
have become increasingly stirred up, ideologically turbulent
and even murderous. Patterns of power and dominance remain
unbearably evident. The third world is entrapped in debt and
broken into dozens of structurally weak entities. One sees
everywhere an ever-growing and an alarming pattern of ethnic
and religious conflicts, local wars and terrorism, which are not
only confined to the so-called third world (see Said 2003: 348).
Therefore, scholars of literature have a responsibility here
being humanists: their trained consciousness, perceptive and
observable faculties have to be put to good use. It is hoped,
therefore, that this book would make students of literature to
really appreciate the fact that the ability of literary studies to
make them better persons ought to be such that would make
that state of being a better person really practical and
concrete; that is to say, literary studies ought to be enough
preparation for them to face the challenges of life and to be
useful to the entire humanity and particularly their various
societies in a positive and impacting way, so that literature or
the cultural realm and its expertise will never again be
institutionally divorced from their real connections with power
– a case which was wonderfully illustrated for Edward Said by
an exchange with an old college friend of his who worked in
90
the department of defence for a period during the Vietnam war
(2003: 2-3).

91
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York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999.
Ashcroft, Bill. Post-colonial Transformation. London/New
York: Routledge, 2001.
Blackham, H. J. Humanism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1968.
Booth, James. Writers and Politics in Nigeria. United Kingdom:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1985.
Broich, Ulrich, et al. Functions of Literature. Tübingen:
Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1984.
Davis, Paul, et al. The Bedford Anthology of World Literature
1900-the Present. Boston: Bredford/St.
Martin, 2003.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. An Introduction. London:
Basil Blackwell, 1983.
---Criticism and Ideology. London: NLB, 1976.
Ferguson, et al. A Norton Anthology of Poetry. London: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1997.
Finegan, Edward. Language, its Structure and Use. New York:
Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1994.
Fowler, D Jeaneane. Humanism: Beliefs and Practices. Uk:
Sussex Academic Press. 1999.
Johnson, Paul. The Renaissance. London: Phoenix Press, 2001.
Magnet, Myron. What Use is Literature. City Journal, (2003).
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Ngara, Emmanuel. Art and Ideology in the African Novel.
Heinemann: London, 1985.
--Stylistic Criticism and the African Novel.
London: Heinemann, 1982.
Nwoga, Donatus Ibe. West African Verse. Essex: Longman,
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Sabine, H George and Thorson, L Thomas. A History of Political
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Sanders, Andrew, The Short Oxford History of English
Literature . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996
Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Pengiun Books, 2003.
The World, The Text and The Critic. U.S.A:
Harvard University Press, 1983.
Soyinka, Wole. The Interpreters. London: Heinemann
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Toolan, Michael. Language and Literature: An Introduction
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Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. Writers in Politics: A re-engagement with
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93
 Index

Abrams, 59, 77, 78

Achebe, 42

Alliteration, 5, 54, 67

Anglecynn, 9

Angles, 8

Anglo-Saxon, 9, 11

Antithesis, 52

Arminians, 18, 19

Ashcroft, 73, 79, 80

Assonance, 5, 54, 67

Barbarians, 8

Britain, 8, 9, 11

Calvinists, 18, 19, 29

Celtic, 8

Chike Obi, 50

Christendom, 14

Civilisation, 35, 46

Commonwealth, 21, 23, 24, 25, 28

Congregation, 18, 19

94
Criticism, 15, 37, 47, 61, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 83

Culture, 8, 14, 32, 46, 74, 75, 76, 81

Deconstruction, 4, 61, 69, 70

Democracy, 29, 41, 75

Denmark, 8

Eagleton, 73, 75, 83

Edward, Edwardian, 2, 16, 37, 41, 63, 64, 76, 81, 83, 84

England, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 29, 33, 36, 45

English, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 17, 23, 36, 50, 51, 53, 55

Emile, 35

Folklore, 9

Francis Bacon, 20

Frisians, 8

Geoffrey Chaucer, 12

Germany, 8, 33, 44, 45, 47

Henry viii, 14

Humanism, 15, 69, 78, 83

John Bunyan, 20, 26

John Donne, 20, 21, 22

John Dryden, 20, 24

John Locke, 27, 28, 30

Industrialisation, 32, 34

Institute, 18, 34

Jutes, 8

Leviathan, 23

Literary Criticism, 65, 72, 73

95
Literature, 2, 3, 5, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 27, 29, 32, 37, 41, 44, 45, 46, 50, 56, 61,
62, 64, 65, 66, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 89

Meditations, 22

Modernism, 2, 4, 44, 45, 46, 48, 69, 70

Monarchy, 23, 24, 25, 29

Monasteries, 14

Monks, 9, 10

Monogamy, 35

Newton, Newtonian, 27, 31, 32

New Criticism, 61

Ngugi , 72, 73, 84

Normans, 11

Oligarchy, 29, 31, 37

Oxymoron, 5, 52

Pirates, 8

Post-colonial, 42, 67, 71, 73, 78, 79, 83

Post-modernism, 2, 4, 44, 45, 69, 70

Post-structuralism, 4, 61, 68, 69, 70

Presbyterians, 18, 19

Puritans, 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 27

Psychoanalysis, 6, 70

Quakers, 18, 19

Reformation, 2, 14

Renaissance, 2, 14

Restoration, 2, 17, 18, 20, 24, 27

Rome, 14, 15, 17

96
Roman Empire, 8, 9

Romanticism, 33

Rousseau, 33, 34, 36

Russian Formalism, 61

Saxons, 8

Scotland, 14, 20

Simile, 5, 50, 62, 67

Social Contract, 35, 36

Socialism, 42, 48

Soyinka, 58, 59

Structuralism, 4, 61, 62, 68, 69, 70

Stylistics, 5, 64, 65, 66, 67, 83

Thomas Hobbes, 20, 23

Ulysses, 48

Vortigern, 8

97