ISTORIA LITERATURII ENGLEZE PROZA BRITANICA SI AMERICANA: secolele18 si 19 Specializarea A i B Anul II sem I. Coordonatori: Lector univ. dr.

Oana Godeanu (sec. 18), Lector univ. drd. Cristina Crian (sec. 19)

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PROSE Objectives The objective of the course is to familiarize the students with the English literature written in the eighteenth century, both in England and in the American colonies. At the same time, the students will be introduced to a series of critical concepts, such as story, plot, order, frequency, persona, Bildungsroman, epistolary novel, picareque novel, satire, autobiographical novel, memoir. At the end of the course, the students will be able to explain the emergence of the novel as literary genre, to identify the forerunners of the genre, as well as the general features of the 18th century novel. They will be able to identify in a text the type of narrative, to differentiate between first person and third person narrative, and to identify an omniscient narrator. The literary works will be presented in their social and political context, in order to show the connections bewteen the themes the novels of the age deal with and the historical background (the rise of middle class, the clash between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, the democratic movements beginning to stir Europe). Each author will be approached from the perspective of his biography, as well as from that of the innovations he brought to the novel as genre. In parallel with a brief presentation of the plots of the novels discussed, the authors of this course will also offer possible readings of those literary works, using different approaches : feminist, political, narratological.

1. The British Historical Background

In 1689 William and Mary accepted the invitation of Parliament to rule as joint sovereigns. Their arrival on the British Throne is known as the Bloodless Revolution and was meant to insure stability in a country divided by political conflicts between king and parliament and among the various religious factions. The Church remained Anglican and through the Toleration Act of 1689 the right of religious worship was granted to Protestant nonconformists. A new age was beginning, full of social and political transformations, but also of new developments. Literature too was affected by the shift in the balance of social and political power marked by the Glorious Revolution. As a result, the themes chosen by the playwrights and authors of the day seemed to endorse the rise of the merchant, of the middle class individual, and dealt less with subjects inspired by the aristocracy. The reading public grew constantly, through the large numbers of upper class women and rich people of both sexes in the trading middle class who were literate and to whom literature offered entertainment. Journalism developed as well, thus meeting the public demand for information about politics, science, philosophy, scandal and gossip. Due to this gradual popularization of the genre, literature became a gainful profession, which meant that the writers could make a living by the pen and no longer needed patronage. Despite the numerous changes in the social and political sphere, the age does not show any direct challenge to the larger social order: normality seems to be represented by the life of a country gentleman and the heroes of the novels rebel against the comfortable yet dull environment. For instance, in Gullivers Travels the hero was the youngest son of a country squire, in Robinson Crusoe the hero, also a younger son is intended for law but runs away to sea. In Tom Jones, the process is reversed. It is Tom who grows into the social status which his supposed status of a bastard had denied him, and discovers his noble origins, thus taking his rightful position in the social hierarchy. Nonetheless, despite their temporary fit of rebelliousness, both Gulliver and Robinson return to the status of a middle class gentlemen after their youthful adventures, an example that for the 18th century individual, the norm may be challenged, but never rejected. 2. The Aesthetics of the Age The period was called by its contemporaries and still is called the Augustan age; this alluded to the model that had been embraced, namely that of classical Rome, rather that classical Greece. Among the main features of the neoclassical artistic ideal a key position was

occupied by clarity, precision, order, harmony, universality, reason. These ideals of propriety and harmony led to such things as unacceptable genres, banned words, and even taboo subjects altogether. Among the more important literary figures that constituted a tradition worth emulating, there was a small group of approved English authors: these included Shakespeare, Spenser, Ben Johnson. Milton and Dryden. Yet the greatest influence came from France, both in theory and in practice, mainly because the court was still very much under French influence, since the arrival of Charles II from exile. The most influential genres were the public ones: the satire, the moral essay; they dealt for the most part with the everyday experience of men and women in society. Their tone was simple and commonplace as they tried to address the reader with confidence. The epic and the tragedy were also popular, possibly as a direct result of the model that the Augustan age had proposed for itself that of recreating the Roman classical ideals in a recognizable British form. On a less sophisticated note, the biography and autobiography the memoir were also quite popular. However, the great change came with the rise of the novel. It started as a comic epic in prose and described the social becoming of a low-born character. The British novel was influenced by similar development on the continent, among which Cervantes Don Quixote, which was translated in 1700, the writings of Rabelais, or of Lesage, particularly Gil Blas. The creators of British novel as we understand it today were Defoe and Richardson. Both belonged to the middle class and wrote of its interests and problems. In fact the novels and books in the 18th century stayed very close to the actual and the normal. The literature of the age is written in the first person, and has a very pronounced introspective and subjective character. At the same time, there is direct interaction between author and his readers; this is visible in the direct forms of address, rhetorical questions and generally in the constant presence of the authors assumptions on the reactions of their readers. Daniel Defoe created a more complex sort of novel. In his work, the internal quest is doubled by an external quest, and the reader is invited to share in the heros dreams, visions and disillusions. Thus, Moll Flanders represents the first attempt at presenting the heroins psychology in British prose. At the same time, Samuel Richardson uses sex and virtue as a metaphor of social survival. For him, preserving ones virtue, in fact technical purity, is a guarantee for a socially successful marriage (Pamela) and the loss of this virtue can entail the very loss of identity and sanity (Clarissa). He is the creator of epistolary novels, which are

novels created through the interplay of letters, and represent a genre extremely popular in Augustan England. Henry Fielding constructs the action in his novel Tom Jones on a larger scale, combining various literary techniques, such as the parody, the travesty etc. He also used a serious amount of organization, so that his novels are well constructed and symmetrical. Jonathan Swift excels in satire; his work is an indirect comment on the realities of the day, and offers many-layered readings. Thus, while mimicking the actual travel narratives that were popular at the time, the fantastic stories of Gullivers Travels represent a subtle critique of British politics, but due to its particular narrative structure, it was enjoyed both by children and sophisticated readers. Laurence Sterne on the other hand experiments with form. His main work, Tristram Shandy goes no where in particular; the main interaction seems to be between the narrator and the readers, than among the characters in the book, while the disruption of chronological time, plot and of the narrative conventions make it an interesting early commentary on the strategies of writing. 3. Daniel Defoe (1660 ? -1731) Daniel Defoes life is full of gaps and mysteries, of contradictions and dramatic turns. Born supposedly in 1660 or in 1661 in a Dissenting family, Defoes career took him from trade, to the army, then journalism and ultimately literature. As a journalist, he excelled in the writing of the political pamphlet, and his criticism of the system made him highly controversial, and even landed him in prison. In time, his journalistic career in time gave birth to a literary career; Defoe was sixty in 1719 when he wrote Robinson Crusoe, and during the following five years he was to write most of his fiction, thus becoming one of the most prolific writers. All in all, during the last eleven years of his existence, although he never abandoned his career as a journalist, Defoe devoted his energy and pen to the writing of fiction, primarily of novels. With him, the writing of literature left the ivory tower of the educated elites, and set out to conquer the middle class, and even the lower rungs of society. Defoes journalistic experience influenced both his style and his choice of characters. His heroes belong to the lower and middle class (Moll Flanders is a London prostitute, Robinson is the son of a lawyer); his novels tell their adventures and account for the way their experiences shape their characters. Defoes language is simple, plain, and expressive, again owing to the clarity required by journalistic writing. At the same time, his narrative strategies owe a lot to the popular writings of the day, to

the Elizabethan romances, to the picaresque stories created either in England or on the continent, but also with other popular narratives, such as the lives of criminals, or contributory forms like the essay and biography. Despite the popularity of some of his other writings, such as Moll Flanders (1722), the story of a London prostitute and of her progress towards middle-class respectability, undoubtedly the work by which posterity remembers Daniel Defoe remains Robinson Crusoe (1719). In literary history, the book is regarded not only as a classic travel and adventure story, but also as the prototype of the novel, because of its focus on the daily, external and internal activities of ordinary people, in its exploration of both the internal and of the external aspects of their existence. Inspired by the real story of the survival of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who had survived a five years of solitary existence on a desert island, Robinson Crusoe is presented as a story told by an old man about his adventurous life: his experiences on several sea voyages, his adventures as a slave with the Moors, as a planter in Brazil, as a castaway on a desert island, and finally his return to civilization. The novel covers thirty-five years, twenty eight of which cover Robinsons stay on the desert island. These represent the most fascinating part of Defoes creation, as they follow both Robinsons transformation of his environment, and his use of religion as a way of finding balance in his solitude. At the end of these twenty eight years, Robinson had managed to re-create on the island a small version of the world he had left behind. His help and servant is a native he names Friday, and his other companion is a parrot. Robinson is rescued by a ship and returns to civilization, to take up his place in the social hierarchy he had rejected as a young boy. Because of the emphasis on the development of the individual, Robinson Crusoe can also be interpreted as the fruit of a synthesis of two existing traditions: the picaresque novel, and the personal journal or the memoir. The first emphasized the adventures of one individual in his journey to progress, and represented to some extent a modern version of an initiation journey at the end of which the hero finds maturity and respectability. The second emphasizes the mental states and evolutions of the individual, thus narrating the psychological processes that give shape the inner life of its heroes. Robinson does both. It is a first person narrative, and the action and events the picaresque elements are all filtered through the mind of the narrating-I the journal elements. As a result, we can say that the novel maps the meanders of

Robinsons internal exploration of himself, of his process of coming of age, and of the creation of his personality as a fully grown man. Because of this, Robinson is also considered to be the prototypical Bildungsroman in English literature. The Bildungsroman is a literary genre that started in Germany, and is, in many respects, equivalent to a fictional autobiography. We consider to be Bildungsromans all the novels that deal with the development of a young man (or in some cases a young woman). According to the definitions of Websters Dictionary, a Bildungsroman is a novel dealing with the education and development of its protagonist. Of course, there are variations within the genre, and one or more elements may be left out of a particular novel, which makes it that novels such as Joyces Ulysses, or Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre can both be included in the category. However, the basic principles of education and development remain, as does the progress from childhood to adulthood. The basic formula of the Bildungsroman was especially suitable to the growing world of the Victorian age where the experiences of the hero of the Bildungsroman mirrored the actual ones, in the real world, for those moving from childhood to adulthood in that era. Read in the bigger picture, Defoes book, as representative of the novel as literary genre, was rooted in the rise of the modern capitalist society. This odyssey of a middle class individual became in time a founding myth of bourgeois society. It offers the reader, even today, a small version of the larger processes that were reshaping the face of the world everywhere in the world: the Western spirit colonizing the world, dominating nature, civilizing both the wilderness and those inhabitants. The novel can also be read as a metaphor of colonialism, the relationship between Robinson and Friday appearing as the archetype of colonial relations. At the same time, Robinsons experiences mirror the internal journey of a Protestant individual, as in Defoes vision, the western entrepreneurial is inextricably connected to religion. But beyond such considerations, Robinson owes its popularity to being categorized as an exciting travel and adventure story. It has been published and republished in different media (from cartoons in the 18th and 19th century to a 2000 movie adaptation, Castaway featuring Tom Hanks). Of course most of these adaptations focused on the period spent on the island, and neglected, or left out completely the other stages of Robinsons adventure. Defoe wrote two sequels to the story: The farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Serious Reflections during the Life and

Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), but they failed to attract the public attention and have remained largely unknown. 4. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was an Anglo-Irish; he was born in Dublin and until his death he was known as Dublins foremost citizen. He lived in England for a decade, during which time he studied at Oxford and made himself a name as pamphleteer, satirist and poet, then moved back to Ireland, yet travelled to and fro between London and Dublin for the rest of his life. Swift was also an Anglican priest, and throughout his literary career he commented on the political realities of the day, attacking the English policy towards Ireland. An intimate of other Augustan wits and literary men of the day, such as Addison, Steele, Pope and Congreve, Swift stands apart from his contemporaries by reason of his imagination, mordant wit and emotional intensity. Gullivers Travels (1726) is Swifts most universal satire, and perhaps the only one that is still widely read today. Although it is full of allusions to contemporary historical events, it is as valid today as it was back then because its objects are mans moral nature and the defective political, economic and social institutions which human imperfections create. One important thing to realize is that Gullivers Travels is not a novel. Swift adopts an old satirical device, that of the imaginary voyage. The popular form of travel literature is parodied and adapted to his own satiric and moral needs. The book starts like a real life travel journal, with an elaborated apparatus, maps and detailed descriptions of Gullivers life and background. This has as objective the creation of a fictional world that seems real. But this comfortable appearance is upset the moment Gulliver is shipwrecked in Lilliput and when we realize, from the description of the little inhabitants of the country, that it is not a realist fictional work, but a fantasy. Gulliver goes on four voyages, all of which end disastrously and which allow for Swift to satirize four aspects of the British society of the time. Although it is written in the first person, and the reader has access to the realities described in the text only by means of the consciousness of the main character Gulliver the book lacks the internal coherence of a novel. There is no unifying plot, and no unifying personality. Indeed, Gulliver, although the main character, is not a hero, but a persona. In literature, a persona is a mask, a device used by

the writer to express his own opinions in a text. It is not a true character., but rather a particular point of view from which to write. Indeed, Gulliver does not have the consistency and solidity of a character; he lacks a coherent psychology, we do not follow his development, there is no element of growth as a result of his explorations, as he merely represents the means by which Swift constructs his satire. If we were to compare him with Robinson Crusoe, for instance, it becomes obvious the extent to which in this novel its author, Daniel Defoe, dealt with the inner workings of his heros mind, the transformations his personality underwent as a result of his adventures, while Gulliver merely describes and comments on the realities he encounters. This is realized in Swifts clear style, which is very characteristic of his age: clear, pointed, precise. Critics say that he seems to have no difficulty in finding words to express exactly the thoughts which he wishes to express. Despite the surface mockery, the clarity of the style makes his ideas easily graspable by his readers, often due to his oratorical style. In the good neo-classical tradition, there are no rhetorical flowerings, no repetitions, and no studied effects In the first part of Gullivers Travels, Swift satirizes the court of George I. His primary satirical device here is allegory- the Lilliputian government leaders stand for Whig leaders in the tumultuous years between 1708 and 1726. In Part II, a voyage to Brobdingnag, the country of the giants, it is Gulliver who represents the English attitudes which Swift wishes to criticize, when confronted with the good giants that stand for the ideal of the enlightened monarchy. From the attitudes and practices of the Lilliputians Swift makes his readers realize in how many ways these doll-like creatures are small. Their physical dimensions are symbolic by their meanness, pettiness and narrow-mindedness. In this small world Gulliver is the giant. The perspective changes dramatically in the second voyage when Swifts character is shipwrecked on the Brobdingnag shore. Not only does he become Lilliputian compared to the king of Brobdingnag, but also he is petty, mean and shallow in comparison. The giants monstrous appearance is in fact a hint at their broadness of mind and their goodness, as Swift transposes literally the qualities of the spirit. When he appeared in the land of Lilliput, in many ways Gulliver was disgusting, repulsive and grotesque. Yet finally it was the delicate, tiny Lilliputians, who proved to truly be grotesque. As far as the Brobdingnagians are concerned, physically they are just as repulsive to Gulliver as he was to the inhabitants of Lilliput. Yet it is the giants compared to Gulliver who

are refined, sophisticated and generous. Their big bodies hide big hearts and wide horizons. In his creation of the two parallel worlds of Lilliput and of Brobdingnag, Swift accomplishes two things. The Lilliputians are literally small; they are also figuratively small (small-minded and narrow of spirit). Outwardly they may seem attractive, yet their smallness makes them repulsive to the spirit. The inhabitants of Brobdingnag are literally and figuratively big (large in their sympathies, big-hearted, open-minded). In Part III the Projectors are allegories for certain members of the Royal Society, whom Swift was attacking satirically, thus criticizing the exaggerations that the fascination for science could attract. This third part of Gullivers adventures is therefore conceived an attack against the extremes of theoretical and speculative reasoning, which Swift critiques because he believes that such excessive interest in science can lead those involved in it to lose touch with reality. The Laputans and Projectors are isolated scientists, cut off from the world because they are so concerned with abstract matters and with their individual abstract preoccupations. In Part IV the allegories are not so clear-cut; the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms are both exaggerated representations. Both represent two opposite tendencies that naturally live side by side in the human spirit, namely instinct and reason, a contrast dear to the hearts of the Augustans. If a healthy mix of instinct and reason is human, pushing to the extreme in one or the other direction may have monstrous results. Swift presents us with the fruits of such an experiment: the Yahoos, who are the embodiment of a humanity ruled by instinct only are just as repulsive as the Houyhnhnms, who are intelligent horses, embodiment of a cold humanity, ruled by reason only. At the same time, this part is also a satire directed against mankind and against its extremes. Owing to their great stores of reason, the Houyhnhnms have done away with flaws such as lying, corruption, infidelity, etc., from their world. In certain ways theirs is an ideal world. Yet such a society which is governed entirely by reason appears under Swifts pen as less attractive, less desirable, less human, because it lacks any human warmth, any human feeling of love, affection, devotion, generosity. As an interesting comment on such a society governed by cold reason only, Swift dwells on the fact that to the Houyhnhnms even life itself seems less precious, as both birth and death are natural things, inevitable, common and therefore indifferent to everyone. Due to his mix of reason and feeling, Gulliver sees himself as neither a Yahoo nor a Houyhnhnm. Caught between these two contrasting worlds,

Swifts character an embodiment of common humanity finds it impossible to identify with either of them. 5. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) The age when Richardson lived and wrote was one of deep transformations, which however were less brutal than those that were to re-shape English society a century later. The rise of the trading class, together with the development and spread of Methodism contributed to the shaping of a romantic and spiritual revival from the beginning of the Georgian era, the rise of the trading class had been slowly infusing into public opinion a new spirit of probity and fervour. About 1740, the Methodist movement was in full activity, and the sentimental reaction was gathering an impetus destined to contribute to no less a result than a romantic revival with strong ethical and moral overtones. Richardson set out to explore turned to account for human psychology, so that his novels dig deep into the human character. At the same time, he is an advocate of realist prose, in the way inaugurated by Daniel Defoe, but he advocated above all the moral purpose of art. Art in his opinion was made to instruct, to offer a model to be imitated, to educate while amusing. Like Defoe, Richardson belonged to the middle class. He was a successful printer by the time he started his literary career. As a direct consequence of his social background, his work expresses middle-class values and interests. His target audience was feminine, and his novels were, for the period, strikingly new in their minute and subtle analysis of emotion and state of mind. From this perspective, later critics considered Richardson to be a pre-Freudian in his analysis of the deep workings of the psyche. Through his first person, subjective narratives, the author pries inside his characters consciousness in a way that no earlier author had done. At the same time, Richardson shows a close attention to the various pressures that society and morality placed on women, and the effects of these pressures on their psyches. He is indeed a pioneer of the analytical study of behaviour under the pressures of a social code. Thus, through his

depiction of characters such as Clarissa and Pamela, the readers have the possibility to see a mind in action.

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His two most famous novels both have as titles the names of their heroines and are both epistolary novels, a genre Richardson excelled in. An epistolary novel is written as a series of documents, usually letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents can also be used. An interesting advantage of the epistolary novel is that it allows the writer a realist approach to several points of view, while avoiding the use of the omniscient narrator (a God-like narrator, who knows everything about every character) and of the third person narrative. Pamela, published in 1740, tells the story of a virtuous servant who resists the advances of her master. In the end, conquered by her purity, the master decides to marry her. Despite its formal flaws, the book enjoyed tremendous success, particularly due to the mix of feeling and reason that the novel displays, and entranced the country in a collective emotion. The readers were sympathetic of Pamelas honor being threatened, and happy to see her virtue and her resistance rewarded in the end. The novel appears therefore as a moralistic story. Of course, the virtue displayed in Pamelas story is a very calculated one. In fact, Pamela resists her seducer precisely because she knows that if she plays her cards right she will reach her objective and step up in the social hierarchy. Pamelas innocence is self-conscious and

premeditated, which represents the consequence of the hard, materialistic, calculating and almost cynical view of virtue and vice that is visible throughout the book. As Richardson embodied a bourgeois class that was consolidating its power at the time, and even challenging aristocratic institutions of control, his characters behaviour is conditioned by two distinct modes, one governed by the middle class values, the other on the aristocratic behaviour. Unavoidably, family and class bear leave marks on Pamelas choices. By resisting her aristocratic seducer, who uses his double position of power as man, and as employer - and eventually marrying him, Pamela becomes part of the very system that turned her into a victim in the first place. She does not rebel against the system, but joins it, and through this, Richardson can be said to have been able to both destroy and support the patriarchal order of the novel: he destroyed it in having his feminine character resist the persecution of her (male) aristocratic oppressor, but he upheld it in having her marry him a convenient form of happy ending. The same tension between individualism and the values of a patriarchal family are explored on a more tragic note in Richardsons novel, Clarissa. Clarissa Harlowe the heroin of

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the novel is a virtuous and intelligent young woman of an upper middle class family, who, after the death of her grandfather, has become the heiress of his estate. Interestingly, in Richardsons world, property offers no power for Clarissa. Significantly she gives control of her fortune to her father, thus continuing in the position of economic and familial subordination to him. Robert Lovelace is an attractive, witty, if morally dubious aristocrat, courting Arabella, Clarissas sister. Clarissas family try to make Clarissa marry a man of their choice, whom she detests. Scared at the prospect, she runs away to London under the protection of Lovelace, who is in fact planning to simply add her to the list of his conquests. She resists his advances, and in time, Lovelace becomes more and more impressed by her virtue and her personality. In an access of passion he rapes her, she manages to escape him but remains ill and eventually dies, but she does so in full consciousness of her virtue, and hoping for a better lot in the afterlife. Lovelace will die too, in a duel with Clarissas cousin and in the end the girls family realize the misfortune their decisions have caused their daughter. Like its predecessor, Clarissa was a financial success but also enjoyed the appreciated of more sophisticated literary critics; soon, its characters were to become popular culture heroes. As in his other work, in Clarissa, Richardson sets to work an ethic based primarily on reason. Pamela is a calculated virtuous woman, yet Clarissas case is more complicated. In Clarissa, Richardson preserved the basis on which the moral code of his heroine was constructed, yet he presented it in a more sympathetic manner. Morality is assessed rationally, and Clarissa opposes cold reason to the passion that Lovelace displays, and which pushes him to rape. At the same time, Clarissa and Lovelace are not just opposed individuals; they each represent a class, a moral code, and a way of life. Again, we are confronted with the contrast between the bourgeois middle class virtuous woman and the promiscuous wealthy aristocrat that Pamela had dealt with. From this perspective, Clarissa is about the tension between the middle class and the aristocracy; this tension is visible at many levels, but Richardson also construes it as a complex struggle between two individuals who each try to attract the other into their own culture, but at a deeper level end up being swept in the universe of the other. A feminist reading of the novel would emphasize the double pressure exerted on Clarissa as woman in 18th century England: that of her family and that of Lovelace, both imposing their wills and trying to use her to their ends: her family is trying to marry her with

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Solmes, while Lovelace is trying to use her for sexual gratification. Richardson rejected the path of female emancipation or active feminism. Clarissas plight is connected to her own progress into the depths of the conventional female role of victim. She does not try to free herself from her fate, but succumbs to it step by step; from eloping, to being raped, to dying, Clarissa emerges as a powerful stereotype, that of the suffering virtuous virgin. A very schematic construction of womanhood follows: into black and white. The other side of the coin embodied by the virtuous virgin is the promiscuous and evil Ms Sinclair and the prostitutes in her brothel where Lovelace takes Clarissa. Indeed, by facilitating the rape, the latter commit a gratuitous evil that is worse than Lovelaces deed. On the other hand, however there are many ways in which Richardson validates the individualism of his heroine. Indeed, the novel can be read as an epic of resistance to the reduction of women to objects or instruments by a patriarchal society. Even if at an external level she is a victim, at a psychological level every act of oppression against Clarissa makes her stronger in her own beliefs. As pointed out earlier, when she dies, she dies certain of her virtue and of her rightfulness, so that from this perspective even her death represents a triumph over her enemies. The story of her sufferings, minutely analyzed and described by Richardson, anticipate the writing of such modernist masters as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. In fact, although the epistolary novel as a genre failed to develop in English literature in the centuries to come, it is currently considered to have anticipated and laid the grounds for the stream of consciousness technique and the interior monologue. 6. Laurence Sterne (17131768) By the time Sterne started writing, the psychological elements began to be perceived as more important both in art and in philosophy. As a natural consequence, the individuality of the writers impressed itself more and more unreservedly upon the development of this aspect which, in the days of Defoe and even Richardson, had been dealt with primarily from outside. Sternes work will bear the mark of this new tendency in British thought and aesthetics. Laurence Sterne was educated at Cambridge and was a vicar of Yorkshire. The publication of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-7) was begun in 1760 (vols. I and II), and continued until a year before his death in 1768. His revolutionary exploding of the novel made it that this eighteen century novelist, that did not enjoy tremendous popularity

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during his life, despite the sensation that the publication of Shandy caused among the London public, became a crucial source of inspiration for later twentieth century writers and literary critics alike. Tristram Shandy is an unusual creation that mocks all the conventions of the new genre of the novel. It importance for contemporary literary criticism lies in the fact that it is a precursor of a very modern phenomenon, the anti-novel with an anti-hero, with failure as one of its major themes. This is due to its original structure that does not respect the conventions of story-telling, as well as to the very special relationship between author and reader that it proposes. Indeed, novels are usually written with no clear reference to their potential readers and most authors write without thinking about the ideal reader. By contrast, Tristram Shandy has a precise idea of the ideal audience in mind, and from the beginning to the end of the novel it constantly tries to seduce the reader and capture his attention and imagination. By manipulating the idea of readership as he pleases, Sterne shows us that a book is first and foremost an object directed to an audience, and at the same time, Tristram Shandy is also a reminder that a novel is a material object, not just a transparent story. It is no accident, then, that Sternes creation should have exerted a profound influence on the fiction of James Joyce, because both Sterne and Joyce liked to use the possibilities of prose fiction and mould it into something very different from the ordinary novel. We can therefore say that by using caricature, digressions, by employing sometimes absurd language to describe the most ordinary things, tricks, and by his rich distribution of strange, eccentric characters, Laurence Sternes play with conventions announce modernist strategies and explains why Tristram Shandy enjoys critical attention even today.

Thus, this nine-volume-comic meta-novel remains one of the most interesting reflections on the nature of the Book. Tristram Shandy is a metanovel because ultimately it is an extended meditation on story-telling, having as central premise the idea that what the story is about is of secondary importance to how it is told. As a result, digression is central to the authors narrative logic and it is the central narrative strategy of the book, thus giving it unusual structure. The so-called narrative intrusions and comments actually form a linear narrative whose subject is the composing of a narrative. The text intends to be an autobiography of Tristram, but instead ends up to be a long digression that never manages to tell the story it sets

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out to tell. The birth of the hero, which the author sets about to discuss on the first page, does not finally occur until volume four, and instead the novel largely deals with events and personages from before the heros birth. Tristrams biography was never finished, as the story of Tristrams life is not told by the end of the ninth volume. There is a direct connection between the time of the creation of Shandys work, and the developments that the novel was undergoing. Thus, at the time Tristram Shandy began to appear (1760), the young genre of the English novel seemed to have stayed stuck in the realist mode, determined to be nothing more than a faithful mirror of contemporary life. In their own ways, the previous authors, from Defoe to Fielding or Richardson, they had all followed the realist streak. Sterne however rejects the temptation of mimesis (imitation of reality), and in Tristram Shandy he sets out to undermine all the subgenres that had become established as part of the novelistic tradition. This new trend is visible from the title; The Life and Opinions: it was not merely a story of the life of Tristram Shandy, but of the extraneous elements that constituted his opinions. In Sternes hands, the novel has ceased to be a mirror of life and manners; it does not tell a story, and the subject the title announces has little to do with the actual contents of the book. One interesting characteristic of Tristram Shandy is its use of heterogeneous materials, which force the reader to become involved in the act of reading and re-writing of the text in fashions the usual prose of Sternes contemporaries do not. For instance, a cross appears on the page when Dr. Slop crosses himself, a black page is supposed to signify the mourning caused by the death of Yorick, blank pages appear to represent pages torn out while an empty page is offered to the reader who is asked to write his own description of Widow Wadmans beauty, since Sterne acknowledges the subjectivity of ideal beauty, and wants each of his readers to use their own ideal of such beauty. Moreover, apparently misplaced chapters suddenly appear out of sequence, thus maintaining constant the connection between the author and his reader and drawing attention on the fact that the text is not transparent, but opaque and needing interpretation. As a result of this original technique, Sternes book is particularly useful for a clear understanding of such narratological concepts as the distinction between story and plot, the narrative time, the chronological time, or the speed of the narrative. Story is a chronologically-ordered deep-structure representation of all the primary and essential

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information concerning characters, events and settings. It is an abstract version of events (the historical truth, so to speak), but it can be structured into the matter of the novel, namely into the plot. One can say that the story is the rough material awaiting the organizing hand of the writer that will transform it into plot. As distinct from the story, that respects the main chronological assumptions of a narrative, the plot is subject to the transformations that the author chooses to make to the structure, sequence of description of the events. Thus the events can be arranged in a sequence which can differ from the strict chronological sequence; the amount of time which is allotted in the novel (the plot) to the various elements of the story is determined with respect to the amount of time which these elements take in the story; when presenting the events, a choice is made from among the multiple points of view from which they can be narrated. As far as the relationship between text and time in the plot is concerned, we can identify three major aspects of temporal manipulation in the movements from story to plot: the order, which represents is the relation between the assumed sequence of events in the story and their actual order of presentation in the novel; the duration, which is the relation between the extent of time that events are supposed to have actually taken up; and the frequency, which refers to the relation between the number of times an event happened in the story, and the number of times it is narrated in the plot. From this narratological perspective it is easy to see that Sterne uses many techniques that contradict the apparent naturalness of its conversational tone and expose the distinction between the story he is trying to tell (the life of Tristram Shandy) and the plot he constructs ( the nine-volume digression that hardly tells us what happened to Tristram). In his construction of the plot, Sterne manipulates time, playing with order, duration and frequency. From Locke, Sterne learned that the true life is lived in the mind, and each mind has its own private sense of time, so that he understands time not as an objective, external element, but rather as a private and subjective element. The writer is able to manipulate time, twisting the story into plot, inserting digressions, moving ahead of the story, anticipating events that are going to happen, and thus drawing the readers attention to the text, which refuses to be transparent, in the realist fashion. It has been said that a good way of understanding Sterns method is by comparing it with cinema, with Sterne as a master of ellipse and montage. As pointed out earlier, Sternes attention to subjectivism, psychological time, and the perpetual present make him the ancestor

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of the thought of Henri Bergson, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and of course James Joyce. Thus, Laurence Sterne remains a clear innovator and an original precursor of the modern novel, in his attempt to reproduce the flow of time in unusual patterns of narrative, memory, and thought, as well as in his emphasis on the constructedness of the plot, on the relationship between author and reader, and on the direct involvement of the reader in the process of imaginatively constructing the text. 7. American literature the colonial period The colonial literature of 18th century North America was clearly dominated by the legacy of the Puritan ethos of the 17th century. The Puritan ideals of good literature depended on religion, on worshipping God, and on illustrating the dangers that the individual faces while on earth. Irrespective of the genre chosen, there are some recurrent lines along which these early writings were organized: life was seen as a test; failing in this test equated automatically eternal damnation and hellfire, while success guaranteed happiness in the afterlife. As the eighteenth century progressed, however, the mood changed, as Enlightenment swept across these remote British colonies, soon to become independent. Indeed, the 18th-century American Enlightenment was dominated by reason, not by tradition, by interest in science, that challenged the until then-unchallenged religious dogma. One palpable result of these global questionings was the 1776 revolution that replaced monarchy by representative government, thus shuttering the mould of political tradition and establishing a model that was to be followed by the French Revolution of 1789, and then emulated everywhere in the world. The genres that flourished at the time reflected the social and political situation of the colony: a largely immigrant population, of various origins, and not always educated; a period of social and political upheaval, when opinions were made and spread by means of the printing press. It was the pamphlet, the satirical sketch and the essay that dominate the literary scene of an 18th century America that was trying to find its path in history. As a result, the American writers that created before and after 1776 devoted their energy and spirit to the development of the ideals of justice, freedom, and equality as the natural rights of man. 8. Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

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The years that preceded the American Revolution were a period of dramatic upheaval and of transformations in the colonial public opinion. Many of the local thinkers and philosophers captured this mood and articulated it in works that fuelled the events that were to culminate in the Declaration of Independece. Of the writings which contributed immediately to this final break, a crucial place is occupied by Thomas Paines pamphlet Common Sense (1776). Published six months before the American Revolution, the 50-page pamphlet, dramatically punctuated by comments such as The birthday of a new world is at hand,, argued that the American colonies had no advantage from remaining a part of Great Britain, which was exploiting them. The conclusion of Paines long and emotional appeal to common sense was that the only solution was the independence of the colonies, which were to create a republican government of their own, thus becoming sole responsible for their own welfare. Common Sense openly rejected the authority of the British government and the royal monarchy in a simple language and unadorned style that made the text easily accessible to the common folk of the American colonies. Paine was not American-born. He was born in England, and came to America when he was thirty eight, at the recommendation of Benjamin Franklin, after a mediocre career on the Continent. His pamphlet Common Sense has the great merit of capturing the psychological moment the colonies were traversing, and of embracing the Enlightenment rejection of tradition. By abandoning legal or historical arguments, Paine paints a dark picture of England, its people, and its system of government. Paine argues that the American colonies had already become alienated from the mother country, and therefore the separation was the next logical step. At the same time, his mistrust in monarchy made him argue that, since government in general was a necessary evil, in order to make sure that this government did not abuse its powers, it should be elected and replaced at regular dates. A monarchy was, from this perspective, unavoidably corrupt, since the elective principle did not apply, and the monarchs were in power for life. Although Common Sense is his most important piece of political writing, Paines career continued in the new republic. In 1787 Thomas Paine moved to England on business, and was caught here by the French Revolution. The French events profoundly shook the public opinion in England, even more than the American Revolution had. Rather than the decision of remote

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colonies to govern themselves, this was an act of rebellion of a European people, close at hand, against its rulers, that culminated in the beheading of the king. Close enough to be uncomfortable, the French Revolution created large controversy in the British public life, with major figures on both sides. While the Romantics cherished the wind of change sweeping over Europe, figures such as Edmund Burke emphasized the dangers of such a tendency, and reasserted the role of tradition and the importance of preserving the status quo. Paine landed right in the middle of this controversy. Published between 1791 and 1792, his book Rights of Man, was a lengthy defense of the French Revolution against the attacks by Edmund Burke, which he had made in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. In this piece of writing, Paine analyses the deep causes of discontent in Europe, which, along the same lines which he had announced in Common Sense, he attributed to arbitrary government, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and war. Because of its anti-monarchical stance, the book was banned in England, and its author nearly arrested. Another of his writings, equally controversial, is Age of Reason, (1794), which, as the dedication to the first edition shows, was meant to explain Paines opinions about religion in relation to reason and in full agreement with his deep belief in human rights. The author praises the achievements of the Age of Reason, but his stance attracted him the reputation of an atheist something rather radical in that day and age and which followed his name well into the twentieth century. 9. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) In many ways Benjamin Franklin is an example of the beneficial effects that the spirit of the Enlightenment was able to have on a gifted individual. Franklin was born in Boston in a poor family; his only formal education lasted for 2 years, because at ten his father gave up on his plans to see his son a clergyman and directed him towards more practical activities. From then on, self- educated but well-read in John Locke, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, and other Enlightenment writers, Franklin constantly tried to apply reason to his own life and to break with tradition, in his case represented by the Puritan tradition, perceived as too narrow and limited intellectually. Over the years, Franklin forwarded American literature not only through his own writing but also by founding and promoting newspapers and periodicals. Indeed, despite this lack of formal education. Franklins passion for reading and instruction, fuelled by his later career as an editor, made him one of the most sophisticated minds of the

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Enlightenment. His early work as an apprentice printer for his brothers journals The Boston Gazette, 1719, and The New England Courant, 1721 was continued by his literary career, notoriously started by an anonymous article slipped in secret under the door of his brothers printing-house at night, and which was validated for publication and became a success series. The rivalry with his brother, jealous of Benjamins popularity, made the latter leave Boston and move to Philadelphia in 1723. Here he began to issue the Poor Richards Almanach. This almanach, published for many years, granted Franklin prosperity and fame throughout the colonies, while providing its readers with encouragement, advice, and factual information crystallized in memorable sayings. Another of Franklins famous writings is his Autobiography, which is partially yet another self-help book, this time addressed to his son. It is not a full account of his life, as it only deals with his first years, but in it the American philosopher describes his rigorous scheme of self-improvement, organized around a list of thirteen virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. Each is presented and elaborated upon with a maxim. He elaborates on each with a maxim; for example, the temperance maxim is Eat not to Dullness. Drink not to Elevation. A pragmatic scientist, Franklin put the idea of perfectibility to the test, using himself as the experimental subject. It is said that his theory announces psychological behaviorism, which makes it that Franklins project of selfimprovement combines the Enlightenment belief in perfectibility with the Puritan habit of moral self-scrutiny. Franklins writings are many and of an extremely varied nature: scientific, political, epigrams or philosophical works. His style was influenced by the many masters that he had read and admired: from Addison, to Swift, or Defoe and Alexander Pope. He emphasized the need for clarity in a text, so that the message to be conveyed can pass easily, so that his philosophical and literary legacy was able to influence generations to come. Because of the affluence and popularity he attained , Franklin also grew to become a politician and statesman. He held local public offices and served long (175374) as deputy postmaster general of the colonies, reorganizing the American postal system. He was a representative of the popular party in Pennsylvania in their case against the owners of the colony, the Penn family, and went to London to argue the cause of their colonists. He was in England at the time of the American Revolution, but returned to defend the interests of his

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home country. He became one of the leaders of the Revolution and one of the early statesmen of the new nation. He was an important figure at the 1787 convention at which the U.S. Constitution was drafted. Also, after the 1776 revolution, he was the first American diplomat to Europe. Between 1776 and 1778 he was the American representative of the state in France, his mission being that of gaining French support for American independence. His mission was a success as French aristocrats and intellectuals embraced Franklin as the personification of the New World Enlightenment and supported the young nation he came to represent.

NINETEENTH CENTURY PROSE (THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN NOVEL)

Obiective principale ale disciplinei sunt urmtoarele: familiarizarea studenilor cu orizontul cultural i literar al perioadei discutate, cu terminologia de specialitate dar i formarea percepiei i exprimrii competente, capabile de a face analiza unui fragment dintr-un roman (dup ce au fost studiate textele incluse n bibliografia primar, innd cont de indicaiile teoretice i metodologice). Sunt ncurajate reaciile creative, avnd ca obiectiv mbuntirea competenei de abordare a textului literar din diverse perspective.

1. The Profile of an Age: Elements of social history. The Cultural and Intellectual Background: Victorian essayists Conventionally, the Victorian age overlaps with the reign of Queen Victoria, from her coronation, in 1837, to her death, in 1901. From a geopolitical point of view, it stands for the age of the British empire which occupied then one third of the world: it extended in Asia to Afghanistan and Tibet, covering the whole of India (in 1877 Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India) as well as to Hong-Kong, New Zealand, Australia, Canada. Britains geopolitical power in the 19th century was a consequence of its being the first industrialized country in the world, due to the scientific and technological progress it had been involved in since the end of the 18th century. Technological advances include the invention of the telegraph, the generalisation of steam power as well as the building of the first successful railroad system. Urbanization changed the countryside, with the displacement of the rural population: this was reflected in literature by the nostalgic rememberance of the rural past in many

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Victorian novels. From a sociological point of view, the dominant middle-class ethics of progress involved materialistic optimism but also excessive pragmatism and mercantilism. Moral duty remained an imperative with most people, whether it be supported by self-interest or Christian principles. But it also involved cultural ambition, an urge of the middle classes for instruction; culture will be used as a public service, with a didactic purpose. The Victorian state was essentially considered as being liberal, non-interventionist, based on the political doctrine of laissez-faire; however, the liberal legislation was considered as impoverishing or oppressive towards the working class. This led to a social unrest, requiring the adoption of a number of Reform Bills which enfranchised the man of property but also meant the modernization of British society. The Reform Bill of 1832 enfranchised the small

bourgeosie from towns and the farmers, while the Reform Bill of 1867 doubled the number of voters and the 1884 Bill brought about the universal male enfranchisement. In 1883 the Factory Act was passed, fixing legal limits for the working hours of children and young persons. The acts passed in their favour were partly due to the works of the novelists of the day who revealed the harsh existence of children as well as the cruel methods of education. In the mid-Victorian epoch, there was no national educational system and little provision for the secondary education of girls. However, the Victorians managed to increase the participation of masses to the phenomenon of culture. They demanded universal primary education and the inclusion of modern sciences and languages in the curriculum. The movement for the emancipation of women became more accentuated in the last thirty years of the Victorian age (J.S. Mill wrote The Subjection of Women in 1869, supporting their social and professional emancipation, providing an impetus to the feminist movement of his time). The 1870 Education Act opened the way to generalised literacy in Britain. Culturally, the Victorian Age can be considered modern in so far as it included generalised mass literacy and the modernization of education as well as quality journalism reflected in the wide

circulation of prestigious magazines. One monthly issue of a literary periodical would contain scientific or general critical essays, poetry and serialised fiction. Among the effects of the Victorian sense of a useful culture is the didactic tone of Victorianism, adapted to the

utilitarian view of culture as a gain from the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers standpoint.

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We should also focus on mans position in the universe during the Victorian age in order to understand Victorianism. The orthodox puritanism of the average man was an uncritical ethically religious doctrine that pragmatically invoked Biblical spirituality to support the ascent of the imperial, most civilized nation. Utilitarianism, the specific Victorian ideology corresponding to this social component, was based on the 1776 treaty The Wealth of Nations, written by the Scottish economist Adam Smith and it assumed that progress of civilization should be associated to increasing national wealth. But the other component of the Victorian cultural background was less optimistic, implying secularism, rationalism based on the study of science and its revelations. Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species (1859) challenged the Victorian perception upon life and old explanations in the field of biology or geology. The evolutionary theory led to the questioning of mans role and importance in the world and influenced the doctrines of important novelists, such as George Eliot or Thomas Hardy. It was an age of controversies and conflicting attitudes that were also expressed in the essay, a favourite literary form with the outstanding thinkers of the age, tackling a great variety of topics. Thus, in the prose of ideas, we should mention the ideological contribution of J.S. Mills Utilitarianism, starting from J.Benthams Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation of 1789, as well as his essay On Liberty(1859) stating the rights of the individual in relation to society, tradition, constituted government. Thomas Carlyle had affinities with the romantics, pleading for transcendentalism, medievalism as reactions against the industrialized, urbanized environment of his days. Another protest against the materialistic faith came from Matthew Arnolds 1869 essay Culture and Anarchy which advocates a neo-classicist cult of hellenism. Arnolds criticism of the materialistic present corresponds to later Victorian criticism of the pervading materialism, expressed as hedonism revived by the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood or by Walter Pater, aestheticism and Utopian socialism introduced by John Ruskin, Oscar Wilde and William Morris.

2. Introduction to the British Victorian Novel The Victorian reading public firmly established the novel as the dominant literary form of the era. The nineteenth century novel was extremely resourceful in meanings and possibilities if we consider the genre from a historical point of view. The outstanding

characteristics of the Victorian novel were:

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a) The English novel originated as a middle-class genre, and it was the logical reading matter for the 19th century bourgeoisie b) Unburdened by tradition or status, the novel was flexible, and hence adaptable to the portrayal of the multitude of changing situations in Victorian life c) Escapism had become a psychological industrialism. d) Realism was the justification for the conscious reader as escapism was the actual satisfier of his unconscious needs. Victorian novelists appealed to their audience with the appearance of the real world. e) The earnest Victorians sought and found in contemporary novels instruction for living amid great complexity and change. f) The novel assumed for the 19th century the mission fulfilled in earlier eras by the epic: formulation of the myth of the age. David Lodge shows that the Victorian novel is a synthesis of pre-existing narrative traditions rather than a continuation of one of them or an entirely new literary phenomenon and underlines the fact that the dominant mode, the synthesising element is realism. The novel appeared as a reaction against miraculous tales and stories of chivalrous deeds, its essence being the parody of so-called elevated genres and the expression of the truth of everyday life. According to M.Bahtin, it is closest to reality and it reflects more profoundly and essentially, with greater sensitiveness and rapidity, the ever-changing social process itself. Only that which develops understands development. The novel has become the main hero of the drama of literary evolution in modern times just because it expresses in the best way the evolution of the new world, because it is the only genre born in this new world and akin to it. It anticipates the future evolution of the whole literature. Becoming predominant, the novel contributes to the renewal of all the other genres2. (Discussing the nature of the novelistic discourse as it was established in the Victorian epoch, Henry James argues in his Art of Fiction that the air of reality the solidity of specification seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel the merit on which all the other merits (including the conscious, moral one) helplessly and submissively depend.) But the Victorian novel as we know it today arrived late in literature since many previous 18th century novelists had used techniques of travel stories, biographies, diaries, historical writings. The idea was that the novel must adhere to truth and probability (D.Defoe presented necessity to an era troubled by chaotic

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his books as authentic accounts of the adventures of real people). The history of the novelistic genre reflects the oscillation between two tendencies, represented by the realistic vein and the romance, the latter being illustrated in medieval English literature by the legends of King Arthur, collected by Sir Thomas Mallory in his Morte dArthur (1485). Clara Reeve, a Gothic and sentimentalist novelist of the later half of the 18th century, stated the difference between the two genres in an often quoted fragment introductory to her fiction. It shows that the romance is oriented towards mythic, allegorical or symbolic forms, being less committed to the immediate and faithful reflection of reality than the novel. Nevertheless it may be hard to draw a line between the novel proper (the realistic mode) and the romance (fiction). Richard Chase shows in his study The American Novel and its Tradition that American fiction of the same age has defined itself by incorporating an element of romance. This tradition,inevitably springing from England has a native quality that tends to differ from the English tradition by its perpetual reassessment and reconstitution of romance within the novel form. Realism marked the need of cultivating truth in art, be it social, economic or individual and of a minute documentation undertaken by the writer seen as a man of science. George Eliot discussed in one of her Essays the nature of truth as a key concept. Henry Lewes, an influential critic of the age, also believed that realism is the basis of all Art, and its antithesis is not Idealism, but Falsism. W.M. Thackeray wrote parodies and burlesques of romantic historical novels, assessing in his introduction to Pendennis: I ask you to believe that this person writing strives to tell the truth. If there is not that, there is nothing.Thus the province of the novel was extended to include the ordinary, the humble, the lower classes. The genre gained a more elevated status, becoming a debate on the urgent matters of the day. In Oliver Twist, Dickens professed that he adopted this principle in the name of the truth ( although Northrop Frye believes that Dickenss novels undeniably stamped by realism are nevertheless fairy tales in the low-mimetic displacement). Publication of novels in monthly installments enabled the poor to purchase their novels. The part-issue form of publication and the periodical novel increased the role of suspense as the solution to the previous crisis was expected. This manner of publication created a close connection between reader-author. However, writing in installments might have proved

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damaging to the unity of the novel serialization.

since the author had to cope with the demands of

Victorian witers are conventionally divided as the first and the second generation of novelists, according to the main features relevant to their works. The first generation is represented by W.M.Thackeray, Ch. Dickens, Elisabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, the Bront sisters and George Eliot. These writers were confident in progress and the moral improvement of the individual. The second generation, represented by Samuel Butler, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, turned against Victorian orthodoxy as pessimism and satire appeared in their fiction. They marked the transition to modernism, being influenced by European literature and philosophy. But Realism appears to the 20th century critic as a mere convention according to which the novel strives to constitute an authentic report of human experience. Does a realist text proper actually exist? The novel is obviously an artefact and there cannot be an absolute objectivity. However, for the Victorians, realism implied the relationship reality-fiction, not that between teller and his tale. The audience had a complete trust in the narrator, sharing the same values. Realists took nevertheless many elements from romance, such as Dickenss romantic treatment of characters within realistic settings (used in many of his bestsellers) or the Brontsuse of Gothicism. Northrop Fryes Anatomy of Criticism may be used as a didactic tool for analysing Victorian fiction, as its first essay structures literature typologically into modes: 1- the divine, mythical mode: gods, 2- the mode of romance, centered on demigods, heroes in extraordinary circumstances 3- the high mimetic mode- human heroes endowed with exceptional features, functioning in natural circumstances, 4- the low-mimetic mode, characters whose status is of ordinary human beings in recognisable social environments, 5- the ironic mode, man looked down from a satirical perspective. In Fryes opinion, Victorian literature combines the lowmimetic mode of realism proper with some traces of high-mimetic, romance or the serious, patronizing ironic mode perspective. What the structuralist critic Hillis Miller identifies as the original point for the Victorian character, his painful separation/alienation of the community in order to become re-integrated at the end of the novel corresponds to Fryes characterization of low-mimetic literature as a a sort of comedy in which the new order is triumphantly installed at the end. We may also read the predictable narrative plots as archetypal manifestations of

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romance which Frye analyses as the mythos of summer in his third essay. Many Victorian novels repeat the quest myth central to romance, according to a structure that develops according to the sequence of the agon, the pathos and the recognition/anagnorisis end. In romance, situations are often symbolic, exemplary or representative from a general or typological point of view. Characters are fairy-tale like, demons, dragons, angels. The Victorian novel oscillates between comic forms at the beginning of the age (Dickens, Thackeray), forms belonging to the tradition of romance but also of the high-mimetic (George Eliot), or mythically ironical (Thomas Hardy).

3. The Manifestation of the Victorian realistic taste in Charles Dickenss novels

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 in Portsmouth. He spent the first 11 or 12 years of his childhood in Portsmouth which remained a pastoral setting later evoked in his novels. The influence on his writing of his unhappy childhood experiences can be seen in the fate of his many lost, abandoned and orphaned children (Oliver Twist is a child brought up in a workhouse, David Copperfield is abandoned by his family in a hostile world, Cissy Jupe is placed into the hands of hard, mecantile persons), in his lifelong interest in prisons and imprisonment. The experience can be seen in his mature work as an indictment of a society that is parentless, usurped by greed for money, social position and power in its many forms. Later on, he became acquainted with the legal system of England, which he denounced in some of his novels. His occupation as journalist developed the inclination to render with minute details the speech of people, their physical appearance. His first novel, Pickwick Papers, was devised as a series of comic misadventures of a group of middle class gentlemen, making use of the device of the club meant to provide a link among the desultory incidents presented in instalments. Pickwick Papers was followed by a series of novels in which comedy often existed side by side with biting social criticism: Oliver Twist (1837-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44). Dombey and Son (1846-48) was followed by his famous David Copperfied (1849-50) which presents a disguised account of his early upbringing. Bleak House (1852-53), the first of what have been called the dark novels of his mature period is a complex vision of society, formally distinguished by the device of having two narrative voices, the first person Esther

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Summerson, and a third person narrator who conveys the panoramic vision of the judicial system which Esther can only glimpse partially. Hard Times (1854) is Dickenss shortest novel, and the only one set wholly outside London; its setting in the industrial north was the vehicle for his attack on utilitarian abuses in the schoolroom as much as the factory. He also wrote one of his most admired works, Great Expectations (1860-61), combining an unusual degree of psychological realism with a complex vision of society. Dickens enjoyed a wide popularity as a spokesman of his age, a social critic as well as an inventor of comic characters and plots. His powerful imagination is fascinated by details of social observation on which he builds chapters, characters. As documents, his writings point to specific institutions and realities of nineteenth century England: child labour, workhouses, the Courts of Law, schools, the debtors prison. His comic inventiveness has created an enormous variety of caricatures, of eccentric and highly coloured characters. They seem intenser than human beings, being associated with symbolic art and the literature of the absurd. According to N. Frye, the structure that Dickens uses for his novels is the New Comedy structure, the main action being a collision of two societies which we may call for convenience the obstructing and the congenial society. Actually he fuses the myths of spring/comedy and summer/romance with characters that may belong to the high-mimetic on the background of Victorian low-mimetic fiction. Exploring the mode of social realism, his observations start from obvious themes which are recreated as new entities or defamiliarized, as the Russian formalist critics would call them. Such is the case, for instance of his fictional emblems called Mr.Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend, Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Time, the Deportment in Bleak House (humans turned into machines, the bleak shadow of social power defended by the forces of a rotten state as typified by the legal institution). Although these characters have been called by E.M. Forster flat characters, types or

caricatures, as they are constructed round a single idea or quality, yet the author succeeds to achieve effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that is not shallow. Dickenss characters begin by being a cast of stock characters engaged in conflicts, such as orphans/heroes, villans, upstarts and hypocrites/alazons, social types that are further on turned into highly symbolic emblems compelling the imagination, rich with significance. These changes are operated by symbolic transformations which add imaginative associations as well as often dramatic, comic ones. We may remark that Dickenss reputation rests upon fantastic

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fertility in character creation, the depiction of childhood and youth (David Copperfield and Pip are unmatched elsewhere in British fiction), robust comic creation (in the tradition of Swift, Fielding, Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Richard Sheridan; he usually relies on rhetorical devices such as the effects of suspense, sympathy, pathos, the characters behaviour, gestures, language, identifying phrases), unconscious artistry in his archetypal, mythical symbols, deeply

ingrained in the psyche, that grip the readers imagination and appeal to his fantasy (pointing to Dickenss allegiance to romantic devices). The elements of concrete social realities acquire the significance of nightmarish forces, haunting the mind. Chesterton seems to have sensed this quality of Dickenss art: Dickens uses reality while aiming at an effect of romance; whereas Thackeray used the loose language and ordinary approaches of romance, while aiming at an effect of reality. Many of his main heroes are children, virtuous and rather flat as they do not experience inner conflicts. Melodramatic effects are usually achieved by means of the child-herot and this brings them close to moralities and allegories. To achieve that, he resorts to coincidences, sensational elements, artificial motivations, final discoveries that explains the puzzling situations. The moral has definite educational purposes and provides poetic justice. With Dickens, the evil is not the given essence of the world, but only an aspect of it which might be removed, replaced by a positive system of values. In Great Expectations, both Pip and Estella are orphans that initially belong to different social and psychological categories. Pip is the village orphan, helped by a series of lower-class, virtuous benefactors: his uncle Joe Gargery, the blacksmith, Abel Magwitch, the convict, Herbert Pocket, his impoverished urban friend. Estella, on the other hand has been educated by her benefactress a vengeful aristocrate, Miss Havisham. The mysterious construction of the plot makes Pip assume that she is his unnamed benefactor who through lawyer Jaggers provides money to send him to London to become a gentleman. This deceptive benefaction affects Pips outward and inward progress in life and than Estellas. Miss Havisham will eventually admit her own villany not only in respect to Pip but also in respect to Estella, whom she has spiritually maimed. She hypocritically uses her wealth and social status to harm both Pip and Estella, while playing the role of

benefactress. At first, Pip is turned into an urban snob addressed by Joe as Mr. Pip. His pretenses of gentility, his great expectations make him intolerable, but his whole appearance

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of gentility is a sham built upon the generosity of the coarse criminal Magwitch. Magwitch, whose other name is Abel, is the only real social benefactor and at the same time social victim (not Miss Havisham, a marriage-victim, abandoned by Compeyson). There is a connection between Pip, the helpless orphan and Magwitch, the convict, as both are socially weak human beings. Pips great expectations of becoming a gentleman are critically retold by old, maturer Pip, the novel being a sort of penance for earlier subservience to false values. Pips gentility appears as parasitism, the work condemning the leisure-class ideal of

contemporary society. Dickens achieves here a memorable success in depicting growth, spiritual transformation and ripening of his central character.

psychic

David Copperfield, semi-autobiograhical, is one of the best-loved novels in English and Dickenss favourite among his works. It traces the development of David from childhood through his widowed mothers re-marriage to Mr. Murdstone, leaving him with a memory of a happy old home, which was like a dream I could never dream Creakles establishment, like that of Dr.Blimber in again. School Mr. forms part of

Dombey and Son

Dickenss attack on unimaginative methods of education. The author traces the characters progress, following his brief employment and toil at his step-fathers business, relieved only by the amiable but improvident Micawber family (prototypes of his own parents), salvation at the practical hands of his aunt Betsey Trotwood. Age and experiece have certainly given his aunt a wisdom and feistiness which combine to make her one of the stongest, most independent-minded of all Dickenss fictional characters. Lodging with the Wickfields, he is attracted by Agnes Wickfield and repelled by Uriah Heep, the obsequious clerk. Shadowing this evolution is a less developed but more autobiographical trajectory as David works first as a recorder of parliamentary business and then as an increasingly succesful novelist. The sense of time in Copperfield is private, subjective, lyrical, focussed in the consciousness of the narrator as he sets down the written memory of his life. The long

rhythm of his memory makes possible the shift from picaresque to bildungsroman in this novel. The picaresque plot of fortune is still there in the story of an orphan boy who makes his way through the world, but this progess is enriched by the complex process of memory. It looks like an early Victorian success-story enforcing the values of hard work, earnestness, prudence tempered by kindliness. David survives early hardships, but others dont. There is the death of his mother at the hands of the Murdstones, the destruction of the

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Yarmouth home of Peggotty and Litle Emly by Steerforth, the crippled lives of Rosa Dartle and Steerforths mother, the death of Dora. Memory unifies the tone of the novel, while its structure owes much to Dickenss exploitation of the serial form that links together a large cast of characters in relationship to the central subject, that of growing up, in a hauntingly poetic creation. Hard Times eschews a vast canvas in favour of a relatively small number of characters. Thomas Gradgrind, Member of Parliament for Coketown a city in a perpetual shroud of industrial smoke, resounding constantly with the unceasing rhythm of factories, has brought up his children as to believe and acknowledge only facts and profit. The novel is an attack against intransigent Utilitarianism; their philosophy means worship of facts that are to suppress imagination, emotion, humanity. For Josiah Bounderby, Mr.Gradgrinds son-in law, human beings are statistical tables, percentage marks, machine tenders. He is a man with a deformed mind whose inclination may fit into the character of the traditional braggart from the Greek New Comedy onwards. Only some poor circus performers radiate the natural creative force that in the person of Cissy Jupe will bring some comfort to the desolate Gradgrinds. What remains with the reader is a sense of a masterfully created dominated by oppression which will finally be discharged. Very few of Dickenss characters are simply humorous creations or eccentrics, as they carry the weight of their symbolic meaning which dramatically informs his fiction. Very few of Dickenss characters are simply humorous creations or eccentrics, as they carry the weight of their symbolic meaning which dramatically informs his fiction. comic work,

4. The novel of intellectual and psychological emphasis GEORGE ELIOT (MARY ANN or MARIAN EVANS)

As a Victorian emancipated and lucid intellectual, George Eliot began by writing for the Westminster Review and in this capacity she became acquainted to the philosopher Herbert Spencer and to the writer, publisher and dramatic critic George Henry Lewes. In the same year she translated Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, the only one of her writings to which she attached her real name (for Fuerbach, God was an ideal substitute for the real world). In 1846, George Eliot engaged in her first literary work, the completion of a translation begun by Mrs.

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Hennell of David Strauss's Life of Jesus, a representative work for the higher criticism of the Bible (investigation that points to the role of imagination and myth in the creation of religious thought). It was not until 1857 that The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton appeared in Blackwood's Magazine. It was followed by Mr. Gilfil's Love Story and Janet's Repentance, all three being reprinted as Scenes from Clerical Life; Adam Bede was published in 1859, The Mill on the Floss, in its earlier chapters largely autobiographical, in 1860, Silas Marner, in 1861. These novels showed another side of her creative concern, the nostalgic desire to present the regional life of the countryside, to recover the past and cultivate the religion of the heart, of feelings and human compassion. Romola, a historical tale of the times of Savonarola (15th century) appeared in 1863 in the Cornhill Magazine, followed by Felix Holt the Radical, a political novel set in 1830s. Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life, which appeared in parts in 1871-72, was by many considered to be one of her greatest works. Daniel Deronda, which came out in 1874-76 was her last novel. George Eliot will probably always retain a high place among writers of fiction. Much of her intellectual background is carried into her fiction, replacing the belief in supernatural forces by humanism and ones capacity to sympathize with individual suffering. There are also feminist ideas in her novels, implied in the condition of her heroines. Her great power lies in the minute painting of character, chiefly among the lower middle classes, tradesmen, country folk of the Midlands and her descriptions of rural scenes that have a singular charm. Chapter XVII from Adam Bede presents her artistic creed under the form of an imaginary conversation with a genteel reader who yearns about heroic deeds. The author states her desire to present average people and their anonymous dramas, to analyse human nature in its complexity. Critics have shown George Eliots sympathy for the rare quality of truthfulness to be found in Dutch paintings, her interest in an almost photographic accuracy, her examination of subjects for the benefit of truth. Her first volume, Adam Bede, is therefore a pastoral novel, presenting the regional life of the countryside against a background of a somewhat idyllic nature. In her essay on The Natural History of German Life, George Eliot states that the task of an author concerned with social or political issues is to devote himself to studying the natural history of the social classes, especially of the simple people: tenant-farmers, artisans,

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peasantry, the degree in which they are influenced by religious doctrines, the consequences of their position towards development. She was a proponent of the positivism of the French philosopher Auguste Comte, who believed the older concepts of faith and immortality should be discarded in favour of a religion of humanity. From Comte she also adopted the scientific attitude towards social behaviour (he was the founder of sociology as a new science). The world in which her imagination finds itself at its greatest ease is that of the province, typifying the universe of her own childhood. The Mill on the Floss describes the emotional and intellectual evolution over a period of ten years of Maggie Tulliver, whose father possesses a mill near the town of St.Oggs. It probes into the life of a brother and sister presented with great sensitiveness. Maggie, a passionate and intelligent nature, reacts against the patterns of provincial life, against the coarse values of the boy. The author relies on the qualities of the omniscient narrator but her method contains oral overtones because the narrator often addresses the implied reader and invites him to take a look at the places and people described in the novel. The story is based on the recollections of the narrator but it is also the outcome of imagination. Through the presentation of two families, the Tullivers and the Dodsons, Eliot investigates middle-class mentality based on decorum and tradition, conventional, unimaginative. Romantic visions, wild, uncontrollable passions, wide perspectives are unknown to these people. The narrators references contain ironic tones in their description, as they construct a world of respectable, thrifty but also flat characters. However, Eliots interpretation finds special qualities in them, as they conduct themselves with propriety and have a certain faithfulness to admitted rules and thoroughness of work. Matthew Arnolds criticism in Culture and Anarchy may be associated to this analysis, as a protest against the pettiness and emotional narrowness of the English middle class, of their lack of interest in ideals and rigid principles. On the other hand, Eliot admits their rectitude of purpose and honesty. The writers concern with unheroic, obscure people is supported by her belief in scientific determinism. Maggies drama unfolds against the background of this rigid provincial mentality. A sensitive child with artistic tastes, she has the intellectual resources for which her environment doesnt provide much encouragement. Her drama is based on the incongruity between her character and the surroundings. Actually, those around see her as unfit for their patterns. One may point out that the narrative deconstructs the motif of the expelled or outcast soul, the lonely

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or unique hero whose knowledge, character and thought transcends its own background. Her life seems to be predetermined by cultural constructs imposed by men. The relationship between Maggie and her cousin Lucy is also an attack on romantic illusion and conventional heroines. Maggie decides to adopt the pattern of self-renunciation in acordance with her own ethical nature and conceptions. Again Matthew Arnolds criticism may be used as he shows that culture in contrast to the limited aspirations of provincial mentalities- may offer a larger sense of human possibilities. Maggie and Philip acknowledge the supremacy of spiritual values as they both value poetry, art, music. But, in M.Arnolds opinion, society needs a balance between these two elements as they are both essential for the development of the spirit. In The Mill on the Floss as well as in Middlemarch, George Eliot subjects the vertical, the ideal to the test of the horizontal conventionality, projecting her high-mimetic protagonists (Maggie, Dorothea, Lydgate) endowed with a potential heroic stature, on the background of the disenchanted low-mimetic plots in which they get intimately involved and trapped by deterministic relationships. The low-mimetic lowers the high-mimetic and the romance (confrontation between good and evil) modes, weakening them in the service of realistic purposes.

5. Thomas Hardy: the last Phase of the Victorian Realistic novel

Thomas Hardy was born at Dorset, the Wessex of his novels, on June 2, 1840. He became acquainted with Schopenhauers work, which had an impact upon his outlook. Hardy can be seen as a poet and novelist at the same time. Before his first great novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), he had published Desperate Remedies (1871), Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) which was a great success. It was followed by the masterpiece The Return of the Native (1878). Next he published The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the challenged Victorian

DUrbervilles, in 1891, Jude the Obscure in 1895. Hardy

conventionalism, so his novel Jude the Obscure was received with hostility by the authorities of the day because of its pessimism and the treatment of new subjects. It was a denial of Victorian conformism and respectability. He put an end to novel-writing and began to publish poetry and drama. His Wessex Poems of 1898 was an edition of collected poems, some written several years before, followed by Poems of the Past and Present in 1901.

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Hardys artistic vision has often been associated to philosophical scepticism, Darwinism as well as to his love for rural Wessex, which gave his novels a local flavour. His works are often set against a background of immemorial traditions and customs with ancient monuments such as Stonehenge, creating an impression of mans struggle with natural forces, with fate or his own instincts. He showed harmony of view with Huxley, Spencer, Comte, Hume, and defined his ideas as evolutionary Meliorism , based on the attempt of perfecting life. There is an affinity between his view and Schopenhauers concept of the immanent or blind Will. His chief fictional techniques are often described as his use of coincidence, symmetrical positioning of characterization, archaic and sometimes awkward vocabulary, while his distinctive stylistic signature lies in the picturesque. Mans struggle and the conflict between instinct and reason take place in a world dominated by omens, unhappy coincidences, accidents. He has been compared to the Greek dramatists. As in the Greek tragedy, Michael Henchards downfall ( in The Mayor of

Casterbridge ) is brought about by a flaw in his nature, although he doesnt intend or enjoy doing harm. The background suits his nature, suggesting some of his predispositions : Mans character is his personal destiny or daimon .The novel has a dramatic intensity, a Shakespearian grandeur, especially in the description of the wild Egdon Heath (the same

atmosphere will be recreated in ample descrition of the heath scorched by the sun and plunged into darkness in The Return of the Native). Themes of guilt, sin, resposibility and remorse are typical for his fiction. Tess of the DUrbervilles, a Pure Woman renders the basic themes of Hardys work, from concrete physical details to the social, cosmic forces shaping human existence. From the beginning of the novel, the relationship man collectivity - cosmos is apprehended. Tesss destiny comes to the reader as an accumulation of omens which are interpreted in terms of folk superstition, myth and dramatized through symbols. Hardys village is not idyllic, it is rather the cradle of fatal conflicts, destructive passions. Fate is ascribed the role of a cruel and capricious force that plays with the lives of mortals. There are mythical, irreducible conflicts between man and his fate. Human beings appear to be crushed by a superior force: first of nature, then of society or the characters own errors. Highly poetized descriptions of

personified nature take a symbolic, active part in the dramatic unfolding of events (for instance in the last but one episode of the novel, describing the sacrificial altar of

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Stonehenge, the Celtic temple dedicated to the sun). The novel also has a closely-woven pattern of unfortunate incidents and folk superstitions. Dorothy van Ghent believes the subject of this novel is mythological as the human opposes preternatural, inimical powers. However, there seems to be no ascent and cathartic purification in Hardys novels which leave the reader frustrated and having a sense of the injustice perpetrated. There is rather a devastating projection of mans marginal position in the universe, being crushed by both fate and society. We may therefore consider that Hardys novels belong, using Fryes terminology, to the mythos following that of autumn or tragedy, namely to the mythos of winter, which joins satire and irony. Strong individuals with strong untameable souls are contradicted by strong social forces, the forces of history or human

civilization. According to the definition given by Frye to tragic irony, the mythos of winter reduces tragic situations to mere comedies of the grotesque. The primaeval Wessex, Hardys region of the mind, is the garden of Eden after the fall. In Jude the Obscure, we are presented with the story of the downfall of a man animated by scholarly ambition, by humanitarian ideals, a man who believes in values of spiritual emancipation but ends up discovering they are hollow and false. Hardy described his work as a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit, his attempt being to point at the tragedy of unfulfilled aims. The intellectual aspirations of the young Wessex villager Jude Fawley are crushed by his own sensuality, his passion for Arabella Donn, the embodiment of instinctual desires and of his weakness, the inclination to drinking. The play of

circumstances also took its toll. He cannot bear the burden of earlier mistakes and besides, he has too many passions in conflict with one another. He views himself in a larger context, being aware of his social disadvantages and finally goes through a downfall. The novel foreruns 20th century literature through the density of psychic life images, of introspection, of inner torments and the description of a hostile society. The heroic element decreases as the ironic increases. The archetypal orders of existence that Frye revises in his Anatomy of Criticism, the third essay, as the divine, the human, the animal, the vegetable, the mineral they are all present in a distorted manner in Hardys fiction. At the divine level, we are offered representations of hell and of the ungodly villains that occupy the godly position: they are called Time, The President of the Immortals, Little Father Time (in Jude the Obscure, he strikes an ominous note by killing Sue and Judes children and

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himself). At the human level, the characters are engaged in a relation of annihilation, trapped. Marriage appears as a destructive machine in most of Hardys novels and short-stories (e.g. Lifes Little Ironies), as a social institution ruined by conditions in contemporary British society. But all institutions cooperate in Hardys fiction for the destruction of man: the institution of learning in Jude the Obcure (a parody of Oxford university, fictionally called The University of Christminster, where Jude aspired to study in order to become a bishop or a scholar), the Christian earthly church in Jude and Tess, the professions in The Mayor of Casterbridge, the city versus the countryside. The vegetable world is more often than not symbolic of modern hells as in The Return of the Native or Tess. The city offers the

embodiment of a fortress that hides villains, such as Alec DUrbervilles, the city (the French ville) being set in opposition to the field in Alec and Tesss names, respectively. Plot contrives against the character, giving it an archetypal value (in Fryes terms). The characters are destroyed by their natures as well: Tesss wild, passionate heritage, Jude Fawleys vulnerability, his tragic flaws, Michael Henchards former mistake There is no doubt that Hardys reliance on the workings of chance and cosmic irony dealt a blow at Victorian complacency. Unlike Thackeray or George Eliot, who were

committed to a normal world and avoided extremes of social behaviour, Hardys novels introduced the tormented hero, later re-discovered by authors such as J.Conrad,

D.H.Lawrence, Camus.

6. Nineteenth century American fiction: the dark voyage

In order to estimate the distinctly American quality of the literature produced in the United States in the nineteenth century, one should take into account the relation in which it stands to the British tradition. In the first half of the nineteenth century, America, an independent political state since 1776, was increasingly gaining ground for the full assertion of a national cultural consciousness. American culture reached this point at a time when the Romantic movement still dominated Europe. In R.Spillers words, the even more ardent nationalism that Romanticism assumed came to the United States at the moment of an awakening national consciousness. However, American literature has its roots in the English tradition. Spenser, Bunyan, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Pope have all been assimilated by

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American literature. The Pilgrims Progress should be viewed as a determining link between English and American literature. The intellectual pattern of New England included, alongside Puritanism, reform movements such as Abolitionism and Transcendentalism (a philosophic movement started by Emerson which implied a strong belief in individual self-reliance, initiating a revolt against the Puritan inheritance). Inspired by English Romanticism and German idealism, it acknowledged Gods benevolence as the sole characteristic of the Supreme Being, laying emphasis on the importance of the freshness of perception opposed to cultivation of the past . As for the writers of the period, they were drawn to romance rather than the novel proper. This narrative tradition appeared to be better suited for the type of investigation that preoccupied them and also to the interest which they took in the self. It is the solitary individual that stands at the centre of such writings as The Scarlet Letter or Moby Dick. By compelling the indidual to take the course of self-scrutiny, American fiction evolved as an investigation of metaphysical, psychological and moral nature as against the analysis of manners and morals that informs an important tradition of the English novel (but this distiction is not so sharp if we take into consideration Wuthering Heights, considered as an example of pure romance in the English novel). Romance signifies an assumed freedom from the ordinary novelistic requirements of verisimilitude, development and continuity, a tendency towards melodrama and idyll, a tendency to plunge into the underside of consciousness. Nevertheless the best American novelists, among whom Hawthorne and Melville hold a prominent place, have found uses for romance far beyond the fantasy and sentimentality often associated with it. They have used romance to introduce into the novel the introspection of Puritanism as well as the imaginative freedom of Transcendentalism. In their opinion, the power of romance lies in the ability to express dark and complex truths unavailable to realism. As R.Chase stated, the history of the American novel is not only the history of the rise of realism, but also of the repeated rediscovery of the uses of romance. The tradition of romance is major in the history of the American novel, but minor in the history of the English novel. If the classic English novel is preoccupied with the illusion of life and solidity of specification, the continuity of events and the characters sense of events, to use Henry Jamess terms, the Americans have a marked preference for symbolism. It allows them to formulate moral truths of universal validity.

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7. Nathaniel Hawthorne - Puritan background and symbolism

The writer rejected many aspects of his Puritan inheritance, especially its dogmatic Calvinism and intolerance. But he retained the Puritan consciousness of the problem of evil and the nature of sin, and in his fiction he saw man darkly. The young Hawthorne grew in company of books, chiefly those of Scott, Bunyan, Spenser. What he wrote, however, became his first volume of stories, Twice-Told Tales (1837). His solitary years enabled Hawthorne to learn the essentials of his crafthow to shape a style and how to create an image of man. During later years he published the works which secured his literary reputation: a second volume of tales, Mosses from an 01d Manse (1846), his greatest novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850) as well as two other novels, The House of Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithedale Romance (1852). The characters in his tales and romances are in effect symbolic (or allegorical) Adams

and Eves thrust into archetypal_ struggles between good and evil, reason and emotion, pride and humility, man and nature. Often they attain the threshold of salvation, rarely are they saved. Except for thoselike Ethan Brand, Rappacini, Hollingworth and Chillingworth guilty of want of love and reverence for the human soul (Hawthornes unpardonable sin), the fallen remain only obscurely conscious of why they have failed. This ambiguity suggests the mystery of Hawthornes power as a writer of deep psychological insight. Evading the platitude of moral statement with its apparent but unreal finality, Hawthorne encourages the possibility of continued analysis and interpretation. The emphasis that is being laid today on Hawthornes critical views is likely to

recommend him as a critical authority as well, concerned with the nature of fiction. He defines the status and claims a place equal to that of the novel for his type of fiction, described as romance. A romancer has a licence with regard to every-day probabillity typical of the novel, in view of the improved effects which he is bound to produce thereby (preface to Blithedale Romance). His argument is the reverse of that followed by George Eliot at the close of the same century which saw the publication of Adam Bede as well as of Hawthornes romances (Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, The Marble Faun, Blithedale Romance).

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His famous prefaces to these works appear as a counterpart to G. Eliots texts about British realism. Hawthorne understands the claims of this fiction as an attempt to balance both Imagination and Reality : It is a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and the fairy land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other . The favourite locations of the neutral territory are either the legendary mist of the past or a country such as Italy which has a long tradition and history behind it; the passage of time may also provide the writer with a perspective. The historical period to which he often resorted in his romances and tales was that of the colonial past of New England. According to Henry Jamess analysis, Puritanism and its moral percepts were for him only a point of view to be further explored , used for an artistic and literary purpose . Nevertheless, the exploration of the nature of evil, sin and guilt lies at the core of Hawthornes writings. The world that the writer seeks and builds is generated by contemplation of the symbol. The Puritan way of interpreting reality is allegory, in which anything may stand for something else. The Puritans believed that every occurrence was a sign to be translated. But the meaning of the allegory is fixed, there is only one correct translation. Although the allegorical mode was deeply engrained in him by his inheritance and readings, Hawthorne used allegory in the service of scepticism and search and in the process transformed it into a symbolic method. The characters appear as representatives, picturesquely imagined, of a moral type or as

phantasms, not endowed with the reality of life, pictures rather than persons. The Scarlet Letter is built upon the symbolism of the letter A which stands in close connection to all the four characters : Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale, Roger Chillingworth and Pearl. At a first reading, the theme of the romance seems to be sin, its consequences and retribution. But the American imagination seems less interested in the problems of good and evil than in the dramatization of the inner conflicts, of the tension implied. Sin (in this case, adultery) appears as a source of deepened understanding and development, as an initiation into moral awareness through evil. Probing deeper into the nature of sin, Hawthorne discloses a complexity which resists any attempt at a rigorous demarcation. The complete isolation to which the scarlet letter condemns her, made Hester more perceptive of the suffering of others, of the predicament of the human condition. Her life after the fall illustrates moral growth, as Hester is not overwhelmed by it. The initial concept is changed and the image acquires

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different interpretations : A starts to signify Able, Admirable, Angel, Abel, Artist, America, anything else than Adulteress. Hawthorne uses here the device of multiple choice ,

presenting a variety of symbolical connotations. Hawthornes narrative of the interaction of these different points of views is intended as a drama of ideas, interesting because the points of view represented comprise a kind of symbolic history of the American conscience. The truth of the heart pictured by romance acquires also a universal human significance. 8. Herman Melville (1819-1891) - A national literature and romantic individualism Before Melville kindled his alchemic fires aboard the Pequod (Moby Dick appeared in 1851), he had served a long apprenticeship as a sailor. His early booksTypee (1846), Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849), and While-Jacket (1850) - recount his adventures episodically but excitingly. Most of his readers enjoyed these tales chiefly as travel narratives, largely ignoring Melvilles pointed criticism of American civilization for its cruelty aboard naval vessels and its intolerant imposition of western civilization upon noble savages. His conversations with Hawthorne altered more than the plan of his next bookthey affected his entire creative work. Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul, he wrote. In fact, rather, Hawthorne helped those seeds to burgeon which had long since been planted: Melvilles Calvinist heritage (in Mardi he had already spoken of evil as the chronic malady of the universe) and his extensive reading - the Bible (especially Job and Ecclesiastes, Shakespeare- King Lear above all), the metaphysical poets, and Carlyles Sartor Resartus. Melvilles readers have discovered in his work a powerful sense of the tragedy of human experience, and, as well, a profound religiousness and a democratic spirit. Melvilles pronouncements on the status of the American writer and the lines along which it was developing at that time, expressed in his review of Hawthornes Mosses from an Old Manse (1850) or included in his last novel The Confidence-Man (1857) plainly state his opinion. His review of Hawthorne may be read as an expression of his overconfidence in the huge possibilities of the American writer as well as his rejection of the European tradition. He underlines the idea that the development of American literature claims that Americas cultural dependence on England should come to an end.

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Melvilles experience has left its impress upon his work, structured around the theme of the voyage as an exploratory act. Moby Dick is structured round the journey motif, implying the quest for the white whale. It is prefaced with several pages of Extracts about whales from the literature of the world, beginning with quotations from the Bible, namely references to the Book of Job. They express the manifold and mysterious aspects of the whale, immense and formidable, fabulous, real, intelligent, malignant, useful and dangerous to man at the same time. Establishing the legendary character of the whale, it also turns the story of a real whales chase into a symbolic one. Ishmael, the narrator of the story, is an Everyman-type who searches the world around him and whose function is to introduce the reader to this mysterious adventure. The book may be called a battle between the mad captain Ahab of the whaler Pequod and the mightiest of whales, the white monster Moby Dick. In a previous encounter, Ahab had been defeated and bears the symbol of his defeat in a false leg; swearing revenge, he sets out towards a second encounter in which he will allow only total victory or total destruction. His obsession draws all his crew into the orbit of his passion, some willingly, some passively, some reluctantly. Other characters are grouped around these three: Ishmael, Ahab, the Whale. The three mates of the Pequod represent three types of human intelligence and capability. The three harpooners are all primitives: the Indian Tashtego, the Negro Dagoo and the Polynesian Queequeg. Closer to Ahab are the mysterious Parsee Fedallah and the innocent Negro cabin boy Pip. The rest of the Pequods company are a polyglot crew from all countries and climates. Starbuck represents in the story conventional Christianity, Queequeg primitive pagan morality, but neither can overcome Ahabs will; nor can the warnings of passing ships that have encountered the object of his search or the numerous omens present in the narrative. Although saturated in the facts of whaling and an almost encyclopedic account of the whale in all its aspects, Melville made his work into an enquiry of the problem of man confronting his destiny. His captain appears as a titan who defies both God and Nature. Fact becomes symbol and incident acquires universal meaning. Ahab, then, appears as a

Promethean figure, a conception as grand as Miltons Satan, with both of whom he has affinities. Through him, Melville seems to warn of the consequences of Emersonian selfreliance when carried to its utmost limit. If Ishmael is self, Ahab is anti-self. He turns out

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to be totally incapable of readjusting his vision: to him, the whale invariably conveys one meaning the omnipresence of evil. He is the extreme case of the nineteenth century egoist or in its Hawthornesque variant, the Unpardonable Sinner who turns into a slave to will or intellect and abandons his potential for fellow feeling. Ahab denies his crew any identity of their own, considering them to be but instruments of his will, an extension of his own self. To Maurice Friedman, he is the most thoroughgoing example of the monological man, he can hear no no other human voice because his own is high lifted. However, despite his gigantic and Romantic stature resting entirely upon his will, Ahab seems to be lacking in a true Promethean dimension. But how are we to take Moby Dick ? For Starbuck, he is a mere dumb brute. Ahabs obsessive hatred seems to him blasphemous and mad. Moby Dick exploits myth in order to load the whale with all the attributes of mystery and power. Indeed, the ambiguity of

everything in the novel is insisted upon throughout the novel. Ishmaels symbolic vision enables him to ask questions of ontological and epistemological relevancy; and although he is tempted to give tentative answers, it is the questioning rather than the attempt to reach a definite conclusion that make his exploration meaningful. Ishmaels relation to it is defined by the great flexibility of his point of view. In chapter 42, The Whiteness of the whale, the narrator says that it was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. As R. Chase puts it, the meaning of whiteness, the paradoxical colour involves all the contradictions that Melville attributes to nature. Speculating on what the whale means for Ahab, Ishmael believes that the meaning(s) of the whale is but an outward

projection of a subjective consciousness. It is commonly assumed that several influences were at work upon Melville in 1850 when he was writing the book. Thomas Carlyles Sartor Resartus, On Heroes, German Romance helped determine the symbolic structure (as his device of multiple choice proves it). In several respects, the account might fit the pattern of an epic romance - the journey motif which reaches its climax in the attempt to kill the Leviathan is

certainly remindful of the mode of romance as described by Northrop Frye. Time in Moby Dick, comprising the months from Christmas (winter solstice) to summer solstice during which the journey is consumed, fits the time scheme in romance. But it can not be considered a romance proper. N. Frye considers it a blend of romance and anatomy. The form that it

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finally takes fits no clear classification; it is a hybrid it may be considered a symbolist poem, containing melodramatic if not fully tragic elements while the particulars of whaling give it a solidity of specification. The saga of the white whale essentially deals with a philosophic problem: it is the search for a true explanation of mans relationship with God in the universe and the white whale is the very embodiment of the ultimate mystery.

Posibile teme pentru examen: 1. The tenets of Augustan aesthetics. 2. Robinson Crusoe as Bildungsroman. 3. Satire and political realities in Jonathan Swifts work. 4. Swifts aesthetics in Gullivers Travels 5. Robinson Crusoe as paradigm of colonial reactions 6. An early exploration of feminine psychology: Samuel Richardsons prose. 7. Laurence Sternes challenge of mimetic conventions in Tristram Shandy. 8. Swifts use of the persona device. 9. Benjamin Franklin as the American Enlightenment man 10. The role of Thomas Paines Common Sense in the American Revolution. 11. The clash of two worlds; aristocracy vs. bourgeoisie in Richardsons novels. 12. The role of the reader in Sternes Tristram Shandy. 13. The use of digression in Tristram Shandy. 14. Victorian fiction, a blend of Romance and Realism. 15. Dickenss characterization techniques (plots, characters, narrative techniques, point of view) 16. Dickenss novels as fairy-tales 17. Sentimentalism and melodrama in Dickenss novels. 18. The significance of Fate in Hardys novels. 19. The impact of rural nature on Hardys characters. 20. The Mythic/archetypal/cosmic dimension of Hardys realism/vision 21. Victorian realism and narrative points of view (G.Eliot vs. Hardy). 22. The Victorian feminine paradigm in George Eliot/ Hardys novels. 23. The utilitarian vs. humanitarian ethos in George Eliots novels

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24. Comedy and satire in two Victorian novels 25. Demonic imagery in Victorian fiction. 26. The feminist perspective in George Eliots/Hardys novels. 27. Coincidence and accident in the Victorian novel 28. Pathetic vs. Intellectual Victorian novels. 29. The relationship author-reader and its impact on the fictional narrative (character, plot, discourse). 30. American literature and its relation to the British tradition 31. The multiple levels of significance suggested by the letter A in Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter . The allegorical vs. symbolical vision 32. Fiction as psychological and moral insight on a Puritan/Calvinist background in Hawthornes/Melvilles fiction 33. The motif of the voyage/initiation journey in Moby Dick 34. Civilization vs. primitiveness in Moby Dick 35. Moby Dick - Mythological, cetological, economical connotations 36. The shifting point of view /The multiple perspective device in Hawthornes/Melvilles fiction 37. Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter are generally called American romances. Define their main features

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