The main conception of Anglo-Saxon period expressed in English literature. Give examples from Old English Period, authors, genres and images.
The earliest phase of English literature started with Anglo-Saxon literature of the Angles and Saxons (the ancestors of the English race) much before they occupied Britain. English was the common name and tongue of these tribes.
Though much of this Anglo-Saxon poetry is lost, there are still some fragments left. For example, Widsith describes continental courts visited in imagination by a far-wandering poet; Waldhere tells how Walter of Aquitaine withstood a host of foes in the passes of the Vosges; the splendid fragment called The Fight at Finnesburg deals with the same favourite theme of battle against fearful odds; andComplaint of Deor describes the disappointment of a lover. The most important poem of this period is Beowulf. It is a tale of adventures of Beowulf, the hero, who is an champion an slayer of monsters; the incidents in it are such as may be found in hundreds of other stories, but what makes it really interesting and different from later romances, is that is full of all sorts of references and allusions to great events, to the fortunes of kings and nations. There is thus an historical background.
After the Anglo-Saxons embraced Christianity, the poets took up religious themes as the subject-matter of their poetry. In fact, a major portion of Anglo-Saxon poetry is religious. The two important religious poets of the Anglo-Saxon period were Caedmon and Cynewulf. Caedmon sang in series the whole story of the fate of man, from the Creation and the Fall to the Redemption and the Last Judgment, and within this large framework, the Scripture history. Cynewulf’s most important poem is the Crist, a metrical narrative of leading events of Christ’s ministry upon earth, including his return to judgment, which is treated with much grandeur.
Anglo-Saxon poetry is markedly different from the poetry of the next period—Middle English or Anglo-Norman period—for it deals with the traditions of an older world, and expresses another temperament and way of living; it breathes the influence of the wind and storm. It is the poetry of a stern and passionate people, concerned with the primal things of life, moody, melancholy and fierce, yet with great capacity for endurance and fidelity.
Caedmon (650-680) Regarded as the earliest of the Old English Christian poets. According to Bede Caedmon was an uneducated cowherd who had a vision in which a voice admonished him to sing the praises of the creation. This was supposedly the impetus for the poem about the creation known as Caedmon's Hymn which Bede recorded and which is available in several dialect versions in Old English. Caedmon was recognised for his worth and on the recommendation of Saint Hilda became a lay brother at the monastery of Whitby and continued to compose poetry on biblical themes, none of which has been definitively identified among that which was assumed later to be by Caedmon.
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Alfred, King (849-899) The most famous of Old English kings, called ‘Alfred the Great’. He was a West-Saxon and assumed the leadership of his community in 871 and was immediately confronted by difficult military engagements with the Vikings who were pressing south. Alfred was also concerned with the reform of monastic life and had a number of translations made which are importants monuments of (early West-Saxon) Old English.
Support the ideas: In the poems the Anglo-Saxons expressed their attitude towards nature, their terrors and fears. Give your point of view.
Anglo Saxon Culture as reflected in Beowulf Every culture has its own set of beliefs values and customs. Cultural beliefs, values, and assumptions are directly and indirectly acquired throughout a lifetime. A culture is the sum of a group’s way of life and this is no different with the ancient Anglo Saxon culture. Cultures usually have distinct figures that reflect their culture as a whole. The importance of religion, values, and heroes are reflected a great deal in the epic poem of Beowulf accurately showing the Anglo Saxon culture as a whole. Men dominated the Anglo Saxon society and the people loved a great hero like that of Beowulf. They believed a hero should be a keeper of his promises.
Realism in Beowulf In the old English Anglo-Saxon writings, many heroes were given fanciful characteristics. For example, Beowulf was depicted with an immense amount of strength that people today could not achieve. Nowadays, the recreation of old fiction is very common. However, when fiction from the eighth century is recreated to fit our modern time, the characters are seen to resemble our human features, skills, and ways of thinking. Eighth-century writing is not as rational as our entertainment today. Comparing today 's modern Beowulf & Grendel (Gunnarsson) with the Anglo-Saxon period Beowulf (Heaney), we are shown the many differences of culture and realism between the characters through their strength, intellect, and way of living.
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7. Support the ideas: Why did “The Canterbury Tales” become one of the most popular poems of its day? Why were “The Canterbury Tales” important for the development of English poetry?
One of the most significant aspects of The Canterbury Tales is the language in which Chaucer chose to write. The text is in Middle English, a version of English spoken in what is present-day England from approximately 1100 to 1500. Modern readers may not even recognize Middle English as English, but it is an early stage from which our current English has evolved.
It may not seem unusual to modern readers that Chaucer wrote in the language that people in his area actually spoke, which is called vernacular, but it actually was a bold decision. Most poets during that time were writing in an earlier version of the language we know as French, or Latin. These were the languages of scholars, religious figures, and upper class people. As an upper-class, well-educated person himself, Chaucer would have been able to write in various languages, but he chose to write The Canterbury Tales in the vernacular of his country that more people would understand and connect to. For this reason, The Canterbury Tales is regarded as one of the first poems written in the English language, and Chaucer himself is one of the ''fathers'' of the written English language.
Chaucer most famous work, The Canterbury Tales, also has similarities with Italian literature: the unfinished poem draws on the technique of the frame tale as practiced by Boccaccio in The Decameron (1349-1351), though it’s not clear that Chaucer knew The Decameron in its entirety.
The Canterbury Tales innovates on this model in significant ways. Far from being noble, Chaucer’s tale-tellers run the spectrum of the middle class, from the Knight to the Pardoner and the Summoner. And the tales are not told in the order that might be expected—from highest-ranking pilgrim to lowest. Instead, each character uses his tale as a weapon or tool to get back at or even with the previous tale-teller. Once the Miller has established the principle of “quiting,” each tale generates the next. The Reeve, who takes offense because “The Miller’s Tale” is about a cuckolded carpenter (the Reeve had been a carpenter in his youth), tells a tale about a cuckolded miller, who also gets beaten up after his daughter is deflowered. As in many of the tales, subtle distinctions of class become the focal point of the story.
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What is the Restoration Comedy or the drama of social behavior? Excellent examples are William Congreve’s The way of the World and William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, dramas of George Etherege. Study about these comedies.
Restoration comedies are plays by such late-17th- and early-18th-century British playwrights as William Congreve, Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, George Farquhar, John Vanbrugh, and, later, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Molière, too, is sometimes considered a scribe of the Restoration era, by way of France. Restoration as a historical period was a time when England was an established colonial power in the world. It was a time of materialism and commerce and the people of the period emphasized money, pleasure . Love and marriage were judged in terms of money. Artificiality and immorality were the defining features of the age. People looked towards relaxation and pleasure and serious things mattered less to them.
By highlighting these things, The Way of the World exposes the issues of money, love, marriage and in short the behavior of the people of the time in the language of prose. The rakes, fops, gallants and wits are the primary types dealt with in a language that is outwardly brilliant but lacking philosophical and emotional or psychological depth. This makes the play a typical restoration comedy of manners. The mode employed is satiric and ironic which befits the social reality of the time.
Use of wit is a remarkable aspect of Restoration Comedy. The characters use language in a very tricky and clever way. Use of repartee basically refers to quick replies while the report is related to sharp return in speech. Wit was a sharp weapon in the late seventeenth century, to be used for the amusement of those intelligent enough to follow the exchange.
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The Country Wife by William Wycherley was published in 1675 and premiered the same year at the Theatre Royal in London. It is classified in English literature as a Restoration comedy.
Like many restoration comedies, The Country Wife features a plot that can be described as scattered and weaves together multiple narratives into a single play
The Country Wife makes fun of people’s manners as they behave in public. According to Wycherley, people from urban societies were “naturally affectatious,” which means that they put on airs without even consciously trying to do so. Wycherley commented on such traits with one-liners that induced laughter from the audience. He then often explained the line with another witty remark, provoking more laughter.
Sir George Etherege, (born c. 1635, Maidenhead, Berkshire, England?—died c. May 10, 1692), English diplomat and creator of the Restoration-era comedy of manners.
Sir George Etherege developed and refined the comedy of manners with his dramatic works. The developmental process is evident in his first work, The Comical Revenge, and the fruition of his efforts is revealed in his The Man of Mode. Etherege’s first comedy, The Comical Revenge; or, Love in a Tub, was premiered at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre in 1664. An immediate success, it was novel in its exploitation of contemporary manners, especially in the intrigue of the stylish Sir Frederick Frollick. It still followed earlier tradition, with its romantic plot, in heroic couplets and blank verse, and farcical subplot. Its success gave Etherege an entrée into the world of fashion, where he became the boon companion of the literary rakes Sir Charles Sedley, the earl of Rochester, and the earl of Dorset.
The Man of Mode, or, Sir Fopling Flutter is a Restoration comedy by George Etherege, written in 1676. The play is set in Restoration London and follows the libertine Dorimant as he tries to win over the young heiress Harriet and to disengage himself from his affair with Mrs. Loveit. Despite the subtitle, the fop Sir Fopling is only one of several minor characters; the rake Dorimant is the protagonist.
Every character in this play seems to be obsessed with their actions and the actions of others. They critique, complain, and monitor each other; sometimes they try to do the same for themselves (but not as often, of course). Sir Fopling's manners and decorum come under the greatest of scrutiny; he is certainly mannered and decorous, but has taken that to an excessive level. He is called "insipid" and "pert" by the circle, although they do admit that his manners are polished enough that he may fool others, who might therefore consider him a great wit.
The play's great strength comes from its wittiness in exposing and critiquing folly and foppishness. While all of the characters have some degree of undesirable characteristics (Dorimant is a womanizer; Belinda is self-interested; Harriet is cruel), Sir Fopling Flutter is the main target of censure.
9. Find a few points where Scott's narrator self-consciously mediates between the reader of 1820 and the medieval setting and characters of the novel. Why might a narrator impose a strong "historical consciousness" upon the story he tells rather than simply relate it without such treatment?
https://www.skuola.net/letteratura-inglese-1800-1900/historical-novel.html
10. Find a few points where Scott's narrator self-consciously mediates between the reader of 1820 and the medieval setting and characters of the novel. Why might a narrator impose a strong "historical consciousness" upon the story he tells rather than simply relate it without such treatment?
The historical novel is a literary genre that links strong dramatic plot lines and credible human psychology, within a setting characterized by specific historical details. The founder of this genre, which had a great impact on Romantic Europe, was Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), whose novels starting with Waverley (1814), created a passion for the historical novel among readers and writers that remains strong up to this day. Scott's main achievement was to get people to realize that history was not just a list of political and religious events, but the product of human decisions. He took the past of Scotland as his main subject and mixed it with imaginative adventures. He blended highly figurative language with dialect to portray real and living characters, who belong both to the aristocracy and the low, humble classes. He introduced a new concept of history, based on the lives of the ordinary people, rather than on those of kings and noblemen. His interpretation of English history offered him various examples of compromise between two extreme situations: the fight between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans, which had given rise to a mixed people, the English and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which had marked the end of the struggles between the King and Parliament. He was interested in the moments when an important historical crisis especially in Scottish history, caused personal problems in individuals or in groups:
Ivanhoe (1820) and Waverley (1814), his most important works, respectively describe these conflicts. Most of his novels follow a pattern which has been called the journey: a traveler, that is, Ivanhoe or Waverley, moves from a safe situation inside an ethnic group, comes into contact with another ethnic group and shares their life for a time. In the end he will return from where he came with a different experience of life which will enable him to mediate between two rival groups.
https://www.skuola.net/letteratura-inglese-1800-1900/historical-novel.html
Shakespeare's last period of creative activity. Loss of illusions about realization of ideals of humanism and in this connection growth of fantastic elements and allegory in his dramas: The Tempest.
The plays of his fourth period, 1608-1613, are remarkable for calm strength and sweetness. The 4th period of Shakespeare's creative activity is mainly constituted by the romantic dramas - plays written around a dramatic conflict, but the tension in them is not so great as in the tragedies, all of them have happy endings. The fierceness of Othello and Macbeth is left behind. In 1608 Shakespeare's mother died. Her death and the vivid recollection of her kindness and love may have been strong factors in causing him to look on life with kindlier eyes. The greatest plays of this period are Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.
*The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, probably written in 1610–1611, and thought to be one of the last plays that Shakespeare wrote alone. After the first scene, which takes place on a ship at sea during a tempest, the rest of the story is set on a remote island, where the sorcerer Prospero, a complex and contradictory character, lives with his daughter Miranda, and his two servants — Caliban, a savage monster figure, and Ariel, an airy spirit. The play contains music and songs that evoke the spirit of enchantment on the island. It explores many themes including magic, betrayal, revenge, and family. In act four, a wedding masque serves as a play-within-the play, and contributes spectacle, allegory, and elevated language. Though The Tempest is listed in the First Folio as the first of Shakespeare’s comedies, it deals with both tragic and comic themes, and modern criticism has created a category of romance for this and others of Shakespeare’s late plays. The Tempest has been subjected to varied interpretations—from those that see it as a fable of art and creation, with Prospero representing Shakespeare, and Prospero’s renunciation of magic signaling Shakespeare's farewell to the stage, to interpretations that consider it an allegory of European man colonizing foreign lands.*
I propose to displace the postcolonial approach to The Tempest criticism with a revisioning of this a play as allegorizing humanism's positive and negative characteristics. I will argue that The Tempest is a humanist play in the sense that it engages with the humanist world and politics at a number of levels. In arguing for the play's strong humanist orientation, however, I am not merely endorsing humanism as a practice of learning and reading as refashioned in the play. I also claim that some writers, including Shakespeare, showed humanism's negative effects, and call this self-reflective critique humanism's dark side. From the outset of the play, Shakespeare announces that humanism is under pressure, not merely upheld. The shipwreck in the opening scene, for example, could be read as a kind of over-literal satire of the Petrarchan image of the galley sinking under the weight of sighs and tears that is an early humanist cliche, an emblem of government's pinnace overfraught.
The Tempest presents a picture of the glorious victory of the righteous human soul over all things around it. Prospero represents wise and virtuous manhood, while Caliban is the lowest and Ariel the highest extreme in the wonderful chain of earthly existence. Prospero represents the middle link - the wise and good man who is the ruling deity to whom the whole series is subject. Ferdinand stands for passionate chivalrous devotion of youth, while Miranda represents the yielding simplicity and sweetness of the unsophisticated girl. The young lovers are the hope of mankind representations of those natural instincts which, watched and guided by the paternal care of Prospero will bear their rightful harvest of happiness as well as pleasure.
John Galsworthy uses the Forsytes to represent the upper-middle class Victorian/Edwardian family. What characteristic, at least according to Galsworthy, BEST describes their mind-set?
John Galsworthy (14 August 1867 – 31 January 1933) was an English novelist and playwright. Notable works include The Forsyte Saga (1906–1921) and its sequels, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932. Galsworthy was born at what is now known as Galsworthy House on Kingston Hill in Surrey, England, the son of John and Blanche Bailey Galsworthy. His family was prosperous and well established. In 1895 Galsworthy began an affair with Ada Nemesis Pearson Cooper (1864–1956), the wife of his cousin Major Arthur Galsworthy.
From the Four Winds, a collection of short stories, was Galsworthy's first published work in 1897. These and several subsequent works were published under the pen name of John Sinjohn. His first play, The Silver Box (1906). Along with those of other writers of the period, such as George Bernard Shaw, his plays addressed the class system and other social issues, two of the best known being Strife (1909) and The Skin Game (1920).
He is now far better known for his novels, particularly The Forsyte Saga, his trilogy about the eponymous family and connected lives. These books, as with many of his other works, deal with social class, and upper-middle class lives in particular. Although sympathetic to his characters, he highlights their insular, snobbish, and acquisitive attitudes and their suffocating moral codes. He is viewed as one of the first writers of the Edwardian era who challenged some of the ideals of society depicted in the preceding literature of Victorian England.
The Forsyte Saga is a series of three novels and two interludes published between 1906 and 1921 by John Galsworthy. They chronicle the vicissitudes of the leading members of an upper-middle-class British family. Only a few generations removed from their farmer ancestors, the family members are keenly aware of their status as "new money". The main character, Soames Forsyte, sees himself as a "man of property," by virtue of his ability to accumulate material possessions—but this does not succeed in bringing him pleasure.
Character Jolyon Forsythe is presented as the eldest among the "older" generation of the family. His philosophical mind makes it possible to observe some events of the narrative not through the eyes of the actor, but as if from an outside observer.
James Forsythe and his eternal phrase: "I never tell anything", as it represents in forsythes all the fears associated with the possible collapse and care, more often expressed in financial terms than in the manifestation of warmth.
Surrounding himself with luxury and trying to emphasize his wealth in every possible way, Swithin Forsythe can easily be taken as an example of a proud, full of self-conceit man who does not think about anything, in addition, whether he makes an impressive impression on others.
Soames Forsythe — a combination of sincere affection for his daughter and parents, with blind possessive feelings towards his first wife. He knows about painting, but the way he treats it, once again exposes him to a businessman.
Fleur Forsythe is a typical representative of the younger generation. Spoiled, does not know failure in anything girl, able on occasion to go for the tricks and lies for their own purposes.
Forsythe is an owner who is used to evaluate everything in monetary terms, he is extremely restrained and he rarely has sincere emotional impulses. But the most important drawback, which the author blames for this image, is that the true foresight is not able to truly comprehend the beauty (this is replaced by his desire to possess it or just "buy" it at a similar price).
But for all their cynicism, the heroes of the "Saga of Forsytes" show considerable care about the family. Family is highly valued by them.
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