English Literature 2

ANGLICKÁ LITERATURA 2
Studijní opora
Opava 2011
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Course Description ............................................................................................................2

Course Schedule ................................................................................................................3
Course Prerequisites ..........................................................................................................4
Recommended Literature ..................................................................................................5
Communication with Tutor ...............................................................................................6
1. Romanticism: 1st generation ......................................................................................7

2. Romanticism: 2nd generation...................................................................................11
3. Victorian Fiction.......................................................................................................14
4. Victorian Poetry........................................................................................................20
5. Drama at the turn of the century...............................................................................24
6. Modernism: Joyce, Woolf ........................................................................................26
7. Modernism: Eliot, Lawrence……………………………………………………….31
8. Celtic Revival ...........................................................................................................34
9. Post-war British Fiction............................................................................................38
10. Post-war British Drama ............................................................................................42
11. Post-war British Poetry.............................................................................................46
12. Postcolonial Literature…………………………………………………………….. 50
Exam Topics ....................................................................................................................55
1
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course follows the English Literature 1 course. It concentrates on the development
of British literature from the period of Romanticism until today. The main emphasis is
laid on the poetic innovation of the British Romantic poets in the European context.
Special attention is also paid to the literature of the Victorian period and the
revolutionary work of British modernists.
The aim of the course is to encourage students to have an independent, critical and
rational capacity of analysis, to train students in an engaged, informed and perceptive
reading of a variety of literary and non-literary texts in English. To provide students
with the ability to compare texts of different kinds and different historical periods and
make use of theoretical tools and secondary sources in an independent and critical
fashion.
2
COURSE SCHEDULE
Session Homework
Name
Date* Due Date*
Unit 1 Romanticism: 1st generation
Unit 2 Romanticism: 2nd generation
Unit 3 Victorian Fiction
Unit 4 Victorian Poetry
Unit 5 Drama at the turn of the century
Unit 6 Modernism: Joyce, Woolf
Unit 7 Modernism: Joyce, D. H. Lawrence
Unit 8 Celtic Revival
Unit 9 Post-war British Fiction
Unit 10 Post-war British Drama
Unit 11 Post-war British Poetry
Unit 12 Postcolonial Literature
Test/Exam Exam
* to be announced
3
COURSE PREREQUISITES
This course follows the English Literature 1 course. The students are also expected to
pass the Introduction to Literature course.
LIST OF PREREQUISITES
Technical
1) MS Office
2) Internet Access
Non-Technical
• Active knowledge of literary terminology

• Active knowledge of the main features of British literature from the beginnings
to the 18th century
4
RECOMMENDED STUDY LITERATURE
Burgess, A.: English Literature, Harlow: Longman, 1991.

Hilský, Martin: Modernisté, Praha: Torst, 1995
Hilský, Martin: Současný britský román
Oliveriusová, E. a kol.: Dějiny anglické literatury, Praha: SPN, 1988.
Sanders, A.: The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994.
Stříbrný, Z.: Dějiny anglické literatury 2, Praha: Academia, 1988.
5
COMMUNICATION WITH TUTOR
The students will send the assigned homework to the tutor via e-mail. The students can
also consult the tutor during the office hours or arrange a personal consultation.
Channels of Communication
• E-mail: _______________________________
• Telephone: _______________________________
• WWW:
6
1. ROMANTICISM: 1ST GENERATION
Learning Objectives
The students will be acquainted with the innovative poetical features of the First
generation of Romantics. The new forms and subject matters they introduced into the
British literature.
Time Required for this Unit
• Theory: 50 minutes
• Tasks: 60 minutes
7
The Theory
The most famous representative of the 1st generation was William Wordsworth, who
was mainly a lyrical poet. His most famous poems were collected in the revolutionary
collection called Lyrical Ballads (1798). The volume began with Coleridge's “Rime of
the Ancient Mariner,” continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature
and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative “Lines
written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” an attempt to set out his mature faith in
nature and humanity.
His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in
the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later entitled The Prelude
(1805; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the
value for a poet of having been a child “fostered alike by beauty and by fear” (in true
Gothic style) by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The poem also makes much of
the work of memory, a theme that reaches its most memorable expression in the “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” In poems such as
“Michael” and “The Brothers,” by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical
Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives.
Coleridge's poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth's. Becoming

disillusioned with contemporary politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he
turned back to the relationship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as
“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Nightingale,” and “Frost at Midnight” (now
sometimes called the “conversation poems” but entitled more accurately by Coleridge
himself “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive descriptions of nature
with subtlety of psychological comment. “Kubla Khan” (1797, published 1816), a poem
that Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of Reverie,” opened a new vein of exotic
writing, which he exploited further in the supernaturalism of “The Ancient Mariner”
and the unfinished “Christabel.” After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, however,
renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human
psyche bore fruit in letters and notebooks; simultaneously, his poetic output became
sporadic. “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), another meditative poem.
The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the
rise of Napoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic
cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was serving as a sea captain, was a
grim reminder that while he had been living in retirement as a poet others had been
willing to sacrifice themselves for the public good. From this time the theme of duty
was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great
Britain, Spain and Portugal . . . as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed
with Coleridge's periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle
among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon's first
exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected
work, The Recluse. This work was to be “a philosophical Poem, containing views of
Man, Nature, and Society,” and Wordsworth hoped to complete it by adding
“meditations in the Author's own Person.” The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The
Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of consolation for those who had
been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals.
Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency,
which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare and
8
literature became fashionable, his plays were briefly produced, and he gained further
celebrity from the publication in 1816 of a volume of poems called Christabel, Kubla
Khan, and A Vision: The Pains of Sleep. Biographia Literaria (1817), the account of his
own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way; the
account was lastingly influential for the insights it contained. Coleridge settled at
Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as “the most impressive talker of his age” (in
the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a
considerable impact on the Victorians.
Minor poets:
Several of the lesser poets of this generation were more popular in their own time. The
somewhat insipid Fourteen Sonnets (1789) of William Lisle Bowles were received with
enthusiasm by Coleridge and Wordsworth. Thomas Campbell is now chiefly
remembered for his patriotic lyrics such as “Ye Mariners of England” and “The Battle
of Hohenlinden” (1807) and for the critical preface to his Specimens of the British Poets
(1819); Samuel Rogers has survived for his brilliant table talk (published 1856, after his
death, as Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers), rather than for his poetry.
One of the most popular poets of the day was Thomas Moore, whose Irish Melodies
began to appear in 1807. His highly coloured Oriental fantasy Lalla Rookh (1817) was
also immensely popular.
Robert Southey was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and was looked
upon as a prominent member, with them, of the “Lake School” of poetry. His grandiose
epic poems, such as Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810),
were successful in their own time, but his fame is based on his prose work—the
vigorous Life of Nelson (1813), the History of the Peninsular War (1823–32), and his
classic formulation of the children's tale “The Three Bears.”
George Crabbe wrote poetry of another kind: his sensibility, his values, much of his
diction, and his heroic couplet verse form belong very firmly to the 18th century. He
differs from the earlier Augustans, however, in his subject matter, concentrating on
realistic, unsentimental accounts of the life of the poor and the middle classes. He
shows considerable narrative gifts in his collections of verse tales (in which he
anticipates many short-story techniques) and great powers of description. His main
works, The Village (1783), The Borough (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and Tales of
the Hall (1819), gained him great popularity in the earlier 19th century; after a long
period of neglect he is widely recognized once more as a major poet.
Example
William Wordsworth: „We are seven“,

http://www.everypoet.com/Archive/Poetry/William_Wordsworth/w
illiam_wordsworth_124.htm
William Wordsworth: „I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud“,

http://www.everypoet.com/Archive/Poetry/William_Wordsworth/w
illiam_wordsworth_260.htm
William Wordsworth: „Tintern Abbey“,
9
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Poetry/WordsworthTinternAb
bey.htm
Study Questions
1) Characterize the difference between a child and an adult in „We are Seven“
2) Where is the poet and what happens to him in „I Wandered Lonely as a

Cloud“
3) Describe various forms of relationship between man and nature according to

„Tintern Abbey“
10
2. ROMANTICISM: 2ND GENERATION
Learning Objectives
The students will be acquainted with the most important representatives of the 2nd
generation of Romantics and see in what points they differ from the previous
generation.
11
The Theory
The poets of the next generation shared their predecessors' passion for liberty (now set
in a new perspective by the Napoleonic wars) and were in a position to learn from their
experiments. Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular was deeply interested in politics,
coming early under the spell of the anarchistic views of William Godwin, whose
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice had appeared in 1793. Shelley's revolutionary
ardour, coupled with a zeal for the liberation of mankind and a passion for poetry,
caused him to claim in his critical essay A Defence of Poetry (1821, published 1840)
that “the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great
people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry,” and that poets
are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This fervour burns throughout the
early Queen Mab (1813), the long Laon and Cythna (retitled The Revolt of Islam,
1818), and the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820).
John Keats, by contrast, was a poet so richly sensuous that his early work, such as
Endymion (1818)—“a trial of my Powers of Imagination” he called it—could produce a
cloying effect. He experimented with many kinds of poem: “Isabella” (published 1820),
an adaptation of a tale by Boccaccio, is a tour de force of craftsmanship in its attempt to
reproduce a medieval atmosphere. His epic fragment Hyperion (begun in 1818 and
abandoned, published 1820; later begun again and published as The Fall of Hyperion,
1856) has a new sparseness of imagery, but Keats soon found the style too Miltonic and
decided to give himself up to what he called “other sensations.” Some of these “other
sensations” are found in the poems of 1819, Keats's annus mirabilis: “The Eve of St.
Agnes” and the great odes, “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn.”
George Gordon, Lord Byron, who differed from Shelley and Keats in themes and
manner, was at one with them in reflecting their shift toward “Mediterranean” themes.
Having thrown down the gauntlet in his early poem English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers (1809), in which he directed particular scorn at poems and poets of
sensibility and sympathy and declared his own allegiance to Milton, Dryden, and Pope,
he developed poetry of dash and flair, in many cases with a striking hero. His two
longest poems, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Don Juan (1819–24), his
masterpiece, provided alternative personae for himself, the one a bitter and melancholy
exile among the historic sites of Europe, the other a picaresque adventurer enjoying a
series of amorous adventures. The gloomy and misanthropic vein was further mined in
dramatic poems such as Manfred (1817) and Cain (1821), which helped to secure his
reputation in Europe, but he is now remembered best for witty, ironic, and less
portentous writings, such as Beppo (1818), in which he first used the ottava rima form.
The easy, nonchalant, biting style developed there became a formidable device in Don
Juan and in his satire on Southey, The Vision of Judgment (1822).
12
Example
John Keats: „Ode on a Grecian Urn“,

http://www.online-literature.com/keats/477/
Study Questions
1) Identify and describe the form of the poem.
2) To what is the urn compared and why?
3) Describe and analyze the images on the urn. Identify the motifs and characters
from Greek mythology. Who is associated with piping?
4) Explain the first lines of the 2nd stanza.
5) What is relationship between life and art?
13
3. VICTORIAN FICTION
Learning Objectives
The students will be acquainted with literature of the Victorian period. This period
became mostly famous for its novellas and novels, special attention will therefore be
paid to the works of fiction writers.
14
The Theory
In February 1837 Charles Dickens published a novel that made him the famous writer
of his time, The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), one of the funniest novels in English
literature. It sold more than 40,000 copies. In the same year Victoria became the Queen
of England. She was on the throne for 64 years, this period is called Victorian. It was
marked by the peak of industrialism, rise of technology, spreading of the British empire
and recovery from the Napoleonic wars. Britain became the world power. The economic
success was marked by the materialism of the middle class. Their children were getting
good education, the time became famous for its social conventions, Puritanism.
Sexuality became social taboo. It was also the time of new technological inventions:
steam engine, phone, and railroad. All these inventions were made the business and the
production much faster, easier and profitable. On the other hand, many workers were
without work, poverty and unemployment were so great that it caught the attention of
other social groups. At the beginning of the Victoria era, there was a group of artists and
critics who protested against the inhuman treatment of the masses. The movement was
called Chartism. The term is derived from The Peoples Charter, 1837. This document
was the first demand for civil and social rights of the working class. The movement can
de dated till the revolutionary year 1848. The writers of the movement were trying to
capture the life of the working class people of that time therefore their work is mostly
outdated. The most important writers were: Thomas Hood (1799-1845) – a satirist and
humorist: Miss Kilmansegg and her precious Leg, 1844) describing the inhuman
conditions of seamstresses. Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) wrote the first proletarian
novel Sibyl, or the Two nations, 1845 though he later became conservative.
Elisabeth Gaskell (1810-65) wrote the best proletarian novel Mary Barton (1848) she
does not describe the workers as an uneducated, non-thinking mass but as a sensitive,
intelligent moral people.
Charles Kingsley (1819-75) saw the solution of all problems in religious revival. He
became more famous for his children’s books: Water-babies, 1863 is a classic of British
children’s literature, predecessor of Peter Pan by James Barrie.
The consequence of the Industrial revolution was the philosophy of utilitarism. Jeremy
Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The main idea is: the biggest profit for most people. It
was very rational, but it also gave rise to feminism: women formed a large proportion of
the population, Mill was one of the first defenders of women.
The Victorian are was also marked by the scientific research of Charles Darwin:, On the
Origin of Species, 1859, The Descent of Man 1871. Darwin’s theory questioned the
biblical version of creation and the whole church, and not only that, it undermined the
divine quality of the king. Man was not seen as an image of God, but as an animal.
Man is now insignificant in the endless universe.
Another important book changed the views and society: in 1867 Karl Marx published
his Das Kapital. He introduced a vision of new society based on equality. All men shall
contribute to the wealth and well being of the whole society. He became famous for his
ideals of classless society.
The mainstream literature could be defined as critical realism, the main representatives
being Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray or George Eliot.
15
Charles Dickens first attracted attention with the descriptive essays and tales originally
written for newspapers, beginning in 1833, and collected as Sketches by “Boz” (1836).
On the strength of this volume Dickens contracted to write a historical novel in the
tradition of Scott (eventually published as Barnaby Rudge in 1841). In February 1836
he started to publish The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), one of the funniest novels in
English literature. By July 1837 sales of the monthly instalments exceeded 40,000
copies.
His early novels have been attacked at times for sentimentality, melodrama, or
shapelessness. They are now increasingly appreciated for their comic or macabre zest
and their poetic fertility. Dombey and Son (1846–48) marks the beginning of Dickens'
later period. He thenceforth combined his gift for vivid caricature with a stronger sense
of personality, designed his plots more carefully, and used symbolism to give his books
greater thematic coherence. Of the masterpieces of the next decade, David Copperfield
(1849–50) uses the form of a fictional autobiography to explore the great Romantic
theme of the growth and comprehension of the self. Bleak House (1852–53) addresses
itself to law and litigiousness, Hard Times (1854) is a Carlylian defence of art in an age
of mechanism, and Little Dorrit (1855–57) dramatizes the idea of imprisonment, both
literal and spiritual. Two great novels, both involved with issues of social class and
human worth, appeared in the 1860s: Great Expectations (1860–61) and Our Mutual
Friend (1864–65). His final book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (published
posthumously, 1870), was left uncompleted.
William Makepeace Thackeray’s early fictions were published as serials in Fraser's

Magazine or as contributions to the great Victorian comic magazine Punch (founded
1841). For his masterpiece, Vanity Fair (1847–48), however, he adopted Dickens'
procedure of publication in monthly parts. It was subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero.”
Subsequently, it has been suggested, a more sentimental Thackeray wrote novels
without villains.
George Eliot, initially a critic and translator, was influenced, after the loss of her
Christian faith, by the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach and Auguste Comte. Her advanced
intellectual interests combined with her sophisticated sense of the novel form to shape
her remarkable fiction. Her early novels, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss
(1860), and Silas Marner (1861), are closely observed studies of English rural life that
offer, at the same time, complex contemporary ideas and a subtle tracing of moral
issues. Her masterpiece, Middlemarch (1871–72), is an unprecedentedly full study of
the life of a provincial town, focused on the thwarted idealism of her two principal
characters. George Eliot is a realist, but her realism involves a scientific analysis of the
interior processes of social and personal existence.
Her fellow realist Anthony Trollope published his first novel in 1847 but only
established his distinctive manner with The Warden (1855), the first of a series of six
novels set in the fictional county of Barsetshire and completed in 1867.
Another major novelist of the 1870s was George Meredith, who also worked as poet,
journalist, and publisher's reader. His prose style is eccentric and his achievement
uneven. His greatest work of fiction, The Egoist (1879), however, is an incisive comic
novel that embodies the distinctive theory of the corrective and therapeutic powers of
laughter expressed in his lecture “The Idea of Comedy” (1877).
16
Realism continued, however, to flourish, sometimes encouraged by the example of
European Realist and Naturalist novelists. Both George Moore and George Gissing
were influenced by Émile Zola, though both also reacted against him. The greatest
novelist of this generation, however, was Thomas Hardy. His first published novel,
Desperate Remedies, appeared in 1871 and was followed by 13 more before he
abandoned prose to publish (in the 20th century) only poetry. His major fiction consists
of the tragic novels of rural life, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the
D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). In these novels his brilliant
evocation of the landscape and people of his fictional Wessex is combined with a
sophisticated sense of “the ache of modernism.”
This flowering of realist fiction was accompanied, perhaps inevitably, by a revival of its
opposite, the romance. It was influenced by the Gothicism and Romanticism. The two
movements are connected chronologically, use many of the same themes, like the hero-
villain with a secret, and deal with psychological processes. The eighteenth century
Gothic writers are often described as precursors to Romanticism. And Gothic elements
appear in Romantic poetry like Samuel Coleridge's Christabel, " Lord Byron's "The
Giaour, " and John Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes."
Gothic novel is a literary genre established by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
(1764) and marked by mystery, violence, and horror. The gothic is best distinguished
from horror by Gothic’s inbuilt morality. Whilst there are macabre and violent acts, no
one dies unjustly in a true gothic novel. The vampire or creature unleashed is to test the
righteous. A plot requirement is one or two ordinary people, with whom the reader
identifies, who survive and record events (for example, Jonathan Harker in Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein, 1818). Evil is ultimately destroyed and has beneficial
consequences for the gothic novel in terms of character development.
The gothic became so popular in the 19th century that it was incorporated into works of
other genres. Wilkie Collins employed gothic conventions in his mystery novel The
Woman in White (1860) and Arthur Conan Doyle did likewise with his detective fiction
in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902). Jane Austen satirized the gothic novel in
Northanger Abbey (1818).
The first great practitioner of the Gothic novel, as well the most popular and best paid
novelist of the eighteenth century England, was Ann Radcliffe. Her best work is A
Sicilian Romance (1790), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797),
with evil monk.
In 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

introduced the theme of the dangers of science; created the obsessed scientist, who was
to develop into the mad scientist, and the archetypal Monster. Considered the
predecessor of science fiction. The novel is a combination of gothic elements and
scientific knowledge of that time. The novel consists of letters and diary of Capt.
Walton. Dr. Frankenstein created a creature that could feel and think. Yet he did not
foresee the consequences, the creature is hated and feared for its difference.
The publication of Charles' Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820 is the last of what
some critics have called the Classic Gothic novel and for others marks the end of the
true Gothic novel. His forte is showing character under extreme conditions, both
psychologically and physically; Melmoth has sold his soul to the devil to live another
one hundred fifty years, with an out, if he can only find someone else to take his place.
17
The novel is powerful and certainly one of the great tales of mystery and terror, despite
its loose structure.
Robert Louis Stevenson gained his first fame with the romantic adventure story
TREASURE ISLAND, which appeared first serialized in Young Folks 1881-82. The
central character is Jim Hawkins, a twelve years old boy. Inspired by Defoe and Poe.
The novel shows contrast between the naive world of a child and the corrupted world of
adults.
Among his other popular works are Kidnapped (1886), The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll
And Mr. Hyde (1886) based on a dream and written and printed in 10 weeks. The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The story has been considered a criticism of
Victorian double morality, but it can be read as a comment on Charles Darwin's book
The Origin of Species - Dr. Jekyll turns in his experiment the evolution backwards and
reveals the primitive background of a cultured human being. Modern readers have set
the story against Freudian sexual theories and the split in man's psyche between ego and
instinct, although the "split" takes the form of a physical change, rather than inner
dissociation. The conflict between Jekyll and Hyde reveals also era's class phobias. Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde has become an icon of popular culture and adapted among others
into screen over 20 times. The basic theme of true identity have attracted such writers as
Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, 1818), Hans Christian Andersen ('The Ugly Duckling',
1845), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment, 1866), Bram Stoker (Dracula,
1897), Franz Kafka ('Metamorphosis', 1915).
Bronte Sisters
In their novels they present the contrast between imagination and social convention,
between the will and passion of the individual and the norms of the society. Main theme
of all their novels are the description of the soul of the woman who lives in loneliness
and often also poverty but finds her dignity and is aware of her intellectual ability.
Charlotte Brontë was inspired by Walter Scott, Thackeray and Richardson. Her most
famous novel is Jane Eyre, 1847 the story of a poor orphan who becomes a governess
and falls in love with her master. She does not know that he is married to mad woman
he is hiding in the attic.
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights is a complex story of a relationship of two families:

Earnshaws and Lintons. It is narrated by a housekeeper and former servant of
Earnshaws and by a foreigner Lockwood who rents a room in that house. Linton family
represents the educated, civilized values, calm love based on tradition and social values
and Earnshaws represent the destructive, dark energy, passion without sense.
Least talented was Anne Brontë : Agnes Grey, 1847, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 1848
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is famous mainly for his detective stories. Most famous novel
The Hound of Baskerville, 1902. it is a combination of crime story and gothic novel.
Most popular is his detective series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs
of Sherlock Holmes.
Abraham "Bram" Stoker Irish writer, best known for his vampire novel Dracula(1897).
Dracula is an epistolary novel, written as collection of diary entries, telegrams, and
letters from the characters, as well as fictional clippings from the Whitby and London
newspapers.
18
Example
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and

Mr. Hyde, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/42
Study Questions
1) Who is the narrator of the story?
2) How does his point of view affect the story?
3) Describe Mr. Hyde
4) What is the relationship between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
5) What does their relationship represent?
6) What is the main theme of the novel?
19
4. VICTORIAN POETRY
Learning Objectives
Students will be acquainted with the formal and thematic developments in British
poetry in the Victorian period. Special attention will be paid to the poetry of Robert
Browning and Alfred Tennyson.
20
The Theory
Despite the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction (some 40,000 titles are said to
have been published in this period), this age of the novel was in fact also an age of great
poetry. Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) made his mark very early with Poems, Chiefly
Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1832; dated 1833), publications that led some critics to hail
him as the natural successor to Keats and Shelley. His early work Tennyson though
influenced by Keats, anticipates the French Symbolists of the 1880s. The second
volume of the Poems of 1842 contains the dramatic monologue, a technique developed
independently by both Tennyson and Browning in the 1830s and the greatest formal
innovation in Victorian poetry. Tennyson became poet laureate in 1850 and wrote some
memorable poems on patriotic themes. The chief work of his later period, however, was
Idylls of the King (1859, revised 1885). An Arthurian epic, it which offers a melancholic
vision of an idealistic community in decay.
The differences between Robert Browning (1812-89) and Tennyson underline the
creative diversity of the period. Browning was deeply influenced by Shelley, at first he
tried to be a playwright. The best work of that period is Pippa Passes (1841). Browning
found his individual and distinctively modern voice in 1842, with the volume Dramatic
Lyrics. As the title suggests, it was a collection of dramatic monologues, among them
“Porphyria's Lover,” “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” and “My Last Duchess.” The
monologues make clear the radical originality of Browning's new manner: they involve
the reader in sympathetic identification with the interior processes of criminal or
unconventional minds, requiring active rather than merely passive engagement in the
processes of moral judgment and self-discovery. In 1846 Browning married Elizabeth
Barrett (1806-61). Though now remembered chiefly for her love poems Sonnets from
the Portuguese (1850) and her experiment with the verse novel Aurora Leigh (1856;
dated 1857), she was in her own lifetime far better known than her husband. Only with
the publication of Dramatis Personae (1864) did Browning achieve the sort of fame that
Tennyson had enjoyed for more than 20 years.
The Ring and the Book (1868–69) gives the dramatic monologue format unprecedented
scope. Published in parts, like a Dickens novel, it tells a sordid murder story in a way
that both explores moral issues and suggests the problematic nature of human
knowledge. Browning's work after this date, though voluminous, is uneven.
Matthew Arnold (1822-88) critic and a poet. He criticizes the materialism and vulgarity,
the decline of traditional values and its consequences for culture. he was opponent of
the mass culture, seeing it as a great evil that would lead to cultural decline. His most
famous poem was "Dover Beach", "The Scholar-Gipsy". His most important collection
of essays is Culture and Anarchy, 1869.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848 was founded as a group of painters. It

is probably the only artistic group with a defined program. Its founder, Dante Gabriell
Rosetti believed that Raphael started a wrong way in art and it is necessary to go before
Raphael. Because he idealised nature and it did not present the truth. The medieval
artists were, according to Rosetti much closer to God and truth, they did not seek
individual fame but gods grace. Pre-Raphaelites believed that art became superficial and
21
it is necessary to return to religious faith, to the innocence. They did not want practical
art. Pre-raphaelism also functioned as a school of writers who linked the beginning
Aestheticism of Keats and De Quincey to the Decadent movement of the fin de siècle.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti collected his early writing in Poems (1870), a volume that led
the critic Robert Buchanan to attack him as the leader of “The Fleshly School of
Poetry.” The sensual aspect of his poetry was shocking and extraordinary in the
Victorian period. Rossetti combined descriptions of contemporary life with a new kind
of medievalism, seen also in The Defence of Guenevere (1858) by William Morris.
These writers also used medieval settings as a context that made possible an uninhibited
treatment of sex and violence. The shocking subject matter and vivid imagery of Morris'
first volume were further developed by Algernon Charles Swinburne, who published
Atlanta in Calydon (1865) and Poems and Ballads (1866). The latter collection became
a scandal for his open treatment of sexuality.
The religious poetry of Christina Rossetti, sister of Dante Gabriel is perhaps truer to the
original, pious purposes of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She wrote mainly
melancholic poems, allegoric poems, not as sensual as her brother. Most famous are:
Goblin Market, 1862. The Prince's Progress, 1866. She is compared to Emily
Dickinson. More interesting as a religious poet of this period, however, is Gerard
Manley Hopkins (1844-89), a Jesuit priest whose work was first collected as Poems in
1918, nearly 30 years after his death. His poetry cannot be considered Victorian but
formally it belongs to the experimental poetry of the 20th century. He uses so called
"sprung rhythm" (trhaný rytmus), which means that there is a given number of stresses
syllables in each verse but unlimited number of unstressed syllables. he also uses words
from old English, plays with pronunciation of words. Therefore it is extremely difficult
to read his poems.
Edward Lear (1812-88) Book of Nonsense, 1846., his work is similar to the work of
Lewis Caroll and became the classic of nonsense literature.
Example
Matthew Arnold: „Dover Beach“,

http://www.gober.net/victorian/dover.html
Tennyson: „The Lady of Shalott“,

http://charon.sfsu.edu/TENNYSON/TENNLADY.HTML
Charles Algernon Swinburne: „Dead Love“,

http://www.farid-
hajji.net/books/en/Swinburne_Algernon_Charles/po-dlove.html
Elizabeth Barret Browning: „The Soul's Expression“,

http://www.webterrace.com/browning/The%20Souls%20Expression.
htm
22
Study Questions
1) What is the theme and mood of Arnold’s poem?
2) What is the mood of Tennyson´s poem? To which myths does the poem refer
and why?
3) What is the theme and mood of Swinburne poem? How does the poem differ
from Arnold’s and Tennyson´s poems?
4) What is the theme and point of view of Browning’s poem? What kind of
sensibility does the poem display?
23
5. DRAMA AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
Learning Objectives
The students will be acquainted with the development of drama at the turn of the
century. Special attention will be paid to the realistic drama of G. B. Shaw and drama of
the aesthetic movement represented by Oscar Wilde.
The Theory
Early Victorian drama was a popular art form, appealing to an uneducated audience that
demanded emotional excitement rather than intellectual subtlety. Vivacious melodramas
did not, however, hold exclusive possession of the stage. The mid-century saw lively
comedies by Dion Boucicault and Tom Taylor. In the 1860s T.W. Robertson pioneered
a new realist drama, an achievement later celebrated by Arthur Wing Pinero in his
charming sentimental comedy Trelawny of the “Wells” (1898). The 1890s were,
however, the outstanding decade of dramatic innovation. Oscar Wilde crowned his brief
career as a playwright with one of the few great high comedies in English, The
Importance of Being Earnest (1895). At the same time the influence of Henrik Ibsen
was helping to produce a new genre of serious “problem plays,” such as Pinero's Second
Mrs. Tanqueray (1893). J.T. Grein founded the Independent Theatre in 1891 to foster
such work and staged there the first plays of George Bernard Shaw and translations of
Ibsen.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was influenced by Ibsen. All his play are not to say
didactic, but instructive, his arguments fuse elements of socialism, science and
philosophy. Shaw's early plays The Philanderer, and Mrs. Warren's Profession, both
written in 1893 were banned due to open expressions of immorality. Shaw complained
of official censorship in the introduction to the collection of Unpleasant Plays, 1898
where these two plays were eventually published. The latter confronts the future
professional careers of educated women and prostitution. Later he wrote a series of
comedies: Candida: A Mystery, 1897.
His other famous plays include: Man and Superman where he daringly put a motor car
on the stage., Major Barbara, 1905. His most influential play was Pygmalion, 1913. A
study of the relationship between the creator and the creation. In fact, writing the
screenplay for the film version of 1938 helped Shaw to become the first and only man
ever to win the much coveted Double: the Nobel Prize for literature and an Academy
Award. Pygmalion derives its name from the famous story in Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Aesthetic Movement: English artistic movement of the late 19th century, considered
decadent, dedicated to the doctrine of ‘art for art's sake’, coined by the philosopher
Victor Cousin and promoted by Théophile Gautier in France. Art exists for the sake of
its beauty alone. Art does not have to serve purposes taken from politics, religion,
24
economics, and so on. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde
argued for the doctrine of art for art's sake. Its philosophical foundations were laid by
Immanuel Kant, who proposed that aesthetic standards could be separated from
morality, utility, or pleasure. Aestheticism had affinities with French Symbolism and
was a precursor of Art Nouveau. The Aesthetic Movement was the avant-garde's
response to the social and cultural background of Victorian life including ornamentation
reflected by Japanism and Gothic revival. Generally speaking, it represents the same
tendencies that Symbolism or Decadence stood for in France, and may be considered
the English branch of the same movement. It belongs to the anti-Victorian reaction and
had post-Romantic roots. It took place in the late Victorian period from around 1868 to
1901, and is generally considered to have ended with the trial of Oscar Wilde.
The artists and writers of the Aesthetic movement tended to hold that the Arts should
provide sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. They
believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it need only be beautiful. The
Aesthetes developed the cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor in art.
Life should copy Art, they asserted. The main characteristics of the movement were:
suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, massive use of symbols, and synaesthetic
effects—that is, correspondence between words, colours and music.
Example
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest,

www.gutenberg.org/etext/844
Study Questions
1) Wilde originally subtitled The Importance of Being Earnest “A Serious

Comedy for Trivial People” but changed that to “A Trivial Comedy for
Serious People.” What is the difference between the two subtitles?
2) How does the text reflect the theory of the Aesthetic Movement?
3) In The Importance of Being Earnest, characters often use words such as bad
and wicked and make pronouncements about what is and isn’t acceptable
behaviour. Do true virtue or wickedness appear in the play?
4) What is the overall effect of the play’s references to death? How is death, as a
theme, dealt with in the play?
5) Is Cecily a more realistic character than Gwendolen? Why or why not?
25
6. MODERNISM: JOYCE, WOOLF
Learning Objectives
The students will be acquainted with the main features of modernism, especially with
the innovation of form. Main attention shall be paid to the work of James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf.
26
The Theory
The technological and social changes at the beginning of the 20th century are called the
modernity. Art that reacted to these changes From 1908 to 1914 there was a remarkably
productive period of artistic innovation and experiment. In the year 1908 Ford Madox
Ford (1873-1930) founded The English Review where he published Conrad, Wells,
Hardy but also main modernists: D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound. Ford was the
representative of literary impressionism. He was critical of the mass production that was
producing mediocre art. His most famous novel is The Good Soldier (1915)But only
after the WWI. We can speak of modernism is a new definition of time, space, human
consciousness, the new definition between the outer and inner self. Modernists
concentrate on the time of human mind, the difference between objective and subjective
time. This new vision of man was reflected also in the modernist painting – e.g. cubism.
At that time there were two important philosophers who were interested in the process
of human mind and strongly influenced the modernist aesthetics: Henri Bergson (1859-
1941) and William James. Bergson made a distinction between relative and absolute
knowledge. Relative knowledge is derived from words that cannot capture the essence
of the world. This can be reached only by intuition. Intuition is an intellectual sympathy
during which the mind becomes one with the object. Human identity is for Bergson not
fixed but it consists of flow of different states of mind.
William James, founder of American pragmatism coined the term „stream of

consciousness“, he believed that human mind is not static, but it is a constant flow of
states which include the past and foreshadow the future events. British modernism was
never a movement, it consisted of strictly individual artists.
James Joyce (1882-1941) is the most influential modernist in prose of the twenties and
thirties. Joyce grew up in nationalistic and orthodox Catholic family in poor Ireland. He
spent most of his life outside Ireland but never stopped writing about it. In his collection
of short stories, Dubliners (1914), and his largely autobiographical novel, A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man (1916), he described in a realist and symbolist way the
individual cost of the sexual and imaginative oppressiveness of life in Ireland.
Dubliners are his most realistic work, the stories are images of lives of young men
growing up in the bigot surroundings. Joyce is concentrating on their mental
development and their emotions rather than on a conventional action. Three stories deal
with childhood, three with adolescence and three with public life.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is already more complicated, Joyce for
the first time used different layers of language and different levels of self-awareness to
describe the growing up of the protagonist. The book starts with simple narration of
childhood, using very limited vocabulary and syntax to express the consciousness of
child, uses fairytale-like phrases, nursery rhyme rhythms and ends with symbolical and
complicated style of the young artist. The protagonist moves from passive observer,
hearer and seer to be the reader and maker. The protagonist, Stephen Dadalus is
studying to be a priest, after some time he starts to doubt his faith and wants to become
an artist. This novel focused on a single personality, whereas his next novel, Ulysses
(1922) is a panoramic novel of urban life. It was banned as pornography (Copies of the
first edition were burned by the New York postal authorities, and British customs
27
officials seized the second edition in 1923.) It is set in Dublin, 1904 and the whole
novel follows the single day in the lives of the characters. It consists of 18 episodes
based on Homer. Leopold Bloom is modern Ulysses/Odysseus, his wife Molly is a
modern Penelope and their son Stephen is a modern Telemachos. The novel follows
Leopold Bloom's mind as he shops, cooks, and desires sex. Stephen on the other hand is
tortured by his guilt and intellectual speculation. All the characters are differentiated by
the language they use, which reflects their consciousness.
Finnegan's Wake (1939) is his last work and it is complex that it is impossible to
understand it. It consists of a series of drunken dreams of Dublin pub owner Earwicker.
The language is full of symbolism, words from many languages, it is a mosaic of
associations, symbols and myths.
Virginia Woolf was a famous feminist essayist, critic in The Times Literary
Supplement, and a central figure of Bloomsbury group. Bloomsbury Group was a group
of painters, writers, political activists and philosophers. They were very liberal,
aristocratic, Most of them studied in Cambridge, where they met professor George
Moore and entered his debating society. From this society later emerged the
Bloomsbury Group. Moore emphasized the role of individual experience and
imagination, he believed that joy over beauty of man, art and nature are the highest
values of life.
Virginia Woolf's books were published by Hogart Press, which she founded with her
husband, the critic and writer Leonard Woolf. Among Leonard Woolf's works are
novels, non-fiction, and his five volume memoirs Sowing (1960), Growing (1961),
Beginning Again (1964), Downhill All the Way (1967), and The Journey Not the
Arrival Matters (1969).
Originally their printing machine was small enough to fit on a kitchen table, but their
publications later included T.S. Eliot's Waste Land (1922), fiction by Maxim Gorky,
E.M. Forster, and Katherine Mansfield, and the complete twenty-four-volume
translation of the works of Sigmund Freud.
With To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931)Woolf established herself as one
of the leading writers of modernism. In these works Woolf developed innovative
literary techniques in order to reveal women's experience and find an alternative to the
male-dominated views of reality. In her essay 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' Woolf
argued that John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and other realistic English novelist dealt in
surfaces but to get underneath these surfaces one must use less restricted presentation of
life, and such devices as stream of consciousness and interior monologue and abandon
linear narrative. Marital disappointments and frustrations she often dealt ironically. In
To the Lighthouse Woolf wrote: "So that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman
looking at a girl throwing a ball." Mrs. Dalloway (1925) formed a web of thoughts of
several groups of people during the course of a single day. There is little action, but
much movement in time from present to past and back again. The central figure,
Clarissa Dalloway, married to Richard Dalloway, is a wealthy London hostess. She
spends her day in London preparing for her evening party. She recalls her life before
World War I, her friendship with the unconventional Sally Seton, and her relationship
with Peter Walsh. At her party she never meets the shell-shocked veteran Septimus
Smith, one of the first Englishmen to enlist in the war. Sally returns as Lady Rossetter,
Peter Walsh is still enamoured with Mrs. Dalloway, the prime minister arrives, and
Smith commits suicide. To the Lighthouse had a tripartite structure: part 1 presented the
28
Victorian family life, the second part covers a ten-year period, and the third part is a
long account of a morning and reconciliation. Virginia Woolf's concern with feminist
themes are dominant in A Room Of One's Own (1929). In it she made her famous
statement: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction." Woolf examined the obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women
writers. She separated women as objects of representation and women as authors of
representation, and argued that a change in the forms of literature was necessary
because most literature had been "made by men out of their own needs for their own
uses." In the last chapter Woolf touched the possibility of an androgynous mind. Woolf
refers to Coleridge who said that a great mind is androgynous and states that when this
fusion takes place the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. "Perhaps a mind
that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine..."
Three Guineas (1938) urged women to make a claim for their own history and literature.
Orlando (1928), a fantasy novel, traced the career of the androgynous protagonist,
Orlando, from a masculine identity within the Elizabethan court to a feminine identity
in 1928. Chief model for the character was writer Vita Sackville-West.
Between the Acts (1941), her most sombre and moving work, some of the most daring
fiction produced in the 20th century. Her eminence as a literary critic and essayist did
much to foster an interest in the writing of other significant women novelists, such as
Katherine Mansfield and Dorothy Richardson.
Example
James Joyce: „The Dead“, http://www.online-

literature.com/james_joyce/958/
Virginia Woolf: „Kew Gardens“, http://www.online-

literature.com/virginia_woolf/862/
Study Questions
1) Describe the literary style of James Joyce’s short story.
2) Who is the narrator of the story?
3) Find and describe epiphanies in the story.
4) Explain the title of the story.
5) What is the theme of the story?
6) In what way does Virginia Woolf’s shory story differ from traditional short
story, e.g. by Charles Dickens?
7) Describe the groups of characters in the story.
8) In what way does the story resemble an impressionist painting?
29
9) Describe the literary style of Virginia Woolf.
30
7. MODERNISM: ELIOT, LAWRENCE
Learning Objectives
The students will be acquainted with the aesthetic and literary innovations of T. S. Eliot.
Attention will also be paid to the work of D. H. Lawrence.
31
The Theory
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Missouri on September 26, 1888. He lived in St.
Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In
1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and
masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. After a
year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to
Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-
Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank.
It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound,
who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in
a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry
in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in
1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the
publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most
influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to
nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most
dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world.
As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the 17th
century (most notably John Donne) and the 19th century French symbolist poets
(including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and
subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger
post-World-War-I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and
social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on
contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox
Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious
conservatism. His major later poems include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets
(1943); his books of literary and social criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The
Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes
Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot was also an important playwright,
whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The
Cocktail Party.
He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber
& Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm.
After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933,
and was remarried, to Valerie Fletcher, in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1948, and died in London in 1965.
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was a famous literary critic and novelist. In his essay „Why
the Novel Matters“ (1925) he claims that novelist is superior to saint, scientist,
philosopher and poet. These mainly analysed a part of experience, but the novelist deals
with whole life. Man alive, feeling, experiencing, learning was the central concern of
the novel. Lawrence was not experimental as Joyce or Proust.
32
In his first partly autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers (1913) Lawrence rewrote the
story of Oedipus set in mining area. The novel is based on contrast between love to
mother and love to lovers. Mrs Morel marries a man below her social class and soon
stops loving him, instead she takes her sons as her lovers. When the sons grow up they
realize that they are not able to love a woman, because they are emotionally tied to their
mother. The love to mother is even stronger than a love to young girls. Rainbow (1915)
and its sequel Women in Love (1920) stress a distinction between freedom and control,
instinct and will. Between sexual and natural desires and the civilized, restricted world.
In his two most innovative novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920),
D.H. Lawrence traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization in his view
only too eager to participate in the mass slaughter of the war—to the effects of
industrialization upon the human psyche. He is most famous for his last novel Mrs
Chatterley's Lover (1927). The novel as banned as pornographic and was published
thirty years later. It is set in the mining area and tells a story of Mrs Chatterley who
lives with her crippled husband. She finds a lover, a forester and with him she finds the
unity with nature and with her sexuality.
Example
T.S. Eliot: „The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“,

http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html
D.H. Lawrence: „The White Stocking“,

http://library.crisischronicles.com/2009/11/12/the-white-
stocking-by-dh-lawrence.aspx?ref=rss
Study Questions
1) What bearing does the title of Eliot’s poem have on the rest of the text?
2) Find examples of irony in the poem.
3) What connection can be established between the images in different parts of

the poem?
4) What is the prevalent mood and what are the main themes of the poem?
5) What is the theme of Lawrence’s short story?
6) Describe the characters and their mutual relationships.
7) How does the topic of class struggle enter the story?
8) What does the white stocking symbolize?
33
8. CELTIC REVIVAL
Learning Objectives
The students will be acquainted with the literary period known as the Celtic Revival and
its main representatives. Special attention will be paid to the dramatic output of the
authors associated with the movement.
34
The Theory
By the mid-1880s in Ireland the stirrings of a revival of literature had begun that was
part of the cultural, artistic, and political awakening that contributed to the creation of a
nation in the 1920s. Writers central to this revival tended to commit themselves
consciously to the project of recovering as well as creating a national literature. As
claimed by W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), the westward-moving Renaissance had been
stalled for three hundred years of repressive British rule. The failure of the Parnellites to
bring Home Rule to Ireland roughly coincided with the return from exile of the Fenian
John O'Leary (1830–1907), around whom rallied young disciples such as Yeats, Maud
Gonne (1866–1953), and T. W. Rolleston (1857–1920). Rolleston became editor of the
Dublin University Review in 1885 and, with Yeats, a founding member of the Rhymers'
Club in London and the Irish Literary Society. The Society developed a proposal for a
New Irish Library, a series of books to honor Irish culture, with Rolleston and Douglas
Hyde (1860–1949) as editors. Yeats' work in the press was particularly notable for
defining the "best Irish books" for a public whose appetite for reading was stimulated by
the mannerisms of his own richly symbolic, incantatory early poems. The lists featured
the translations and scholarship of Hyde, Standish O'Grady (1846–1928), and Sir
Samuel Ferguson (1810–1886), as well as poetry by close friends such as Katharine
Tynan Hinkson (1861–1931) and George Russell, or "AE" (1867–1935).
The Irish Literary Renaissance had two geographic centers in Dublin and in London. A
traveler between the two, Yeats acted as a synthesizing agent. As a member of the
Rhymers' Club, he propounded and adapted himself to the tenets of the primarily British
Decadent poets of the fin de siècle, including Anglo-Irish playwright Oscar Wilde
(1854–1900), Ernest Dowson (1867–1900), Lionel Johnson (1867–1902), Arthur
Symons (1865–1945) and others whom he dubbed "the tragic generation" (pp. 219–
266). He quarreled with fellow members of the Irish National Alliance on the politics
and poetry of Thomas Davis (1814–1845), particularly with friend-turned-enemy Frank
Hugh O'Donnell (1848–1916), and enlisted Lionel Johnson in the defense, later
publishing a collection of Johnson's poetry and the book Poetry and Ireland (1908),
with essays by Yeats and Johnson. In Ireland, Yeats's interest in magic brought him into
conflict with O'Leary, a Young Ireland Society member and the influential author of
Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism (1896), though Yeats's interests agreed with
those of his former art schoolmate, the visionary poet and editor, AE. The
amalgamation of competing interests led for a time to an idealized, nationalist-oriented
poetry of rarified senses and vague or fantastic symbolism named after the title of one
of Yeats's books, The Celtic Twilight (1893) and its culminating poem, "Into the
Twilight." The attempt to collect and define as a phenomenon the poetry of the Celtic
Revival helped to promote the work of like-minded individuals and define a "book of
the people." A Book of Irish Verse (1895), edited by Yeats and dedicated "To the
Members of the National Literary Society of Dublin and the Irish Literary Society of
London," featured poetry by Rolleston, Hyde, Tynan (Hinkson), Johnson, AE, several
other friends, and notes and an introduction by himself. The effort as publicist for a
cause was one with Yeats's prolific journalism and career as a self-made folklorist and
editor of Irish fairy tales at this time.
35
By the 1890s, Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory (1852–1932), inspired by The Celtic
Twilight, had begun collecting folktales of her own that would fill the five volumes of
"Kiltartin" stories that she published between 1906 and 1910 and the two-volume
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920), written in collaboration with Yeats.
Though she did not make his acquaintance until 1896 when he was visiting at the
country estate of Edward Martyn (1859–1923), she soon became an indispensible
partner in projects undertaken for the stage. Martyn's The Heather Field and Yeats's
verseplay The Countess Cathleen were performed in 1899 to celebrate the creation of
the Irish Literary Theatre, which they started with Lady Gregory. When public
disturbances occurred at the opening of Yeats's play, partly agitated by political
opponents such as O'Donnell in the press, the young James Joyce (1882–1941) was
there to take note, and in 1916 he would recreate the scene in A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, parodying the "Celtic Twilight" style, which Yeats himself tired of as he
rewrote the play. Less talented imitators such as Thomas MacDonagh (1878–1916), the
author of Literature in Ireland (1916), as well as disagreeable collaborators such as
George Moore (1852–1933), drove Yeats in another direction, aided by Lady Gregory.
Consequently in 1902 the first of a series of plays were performed in the name of the
Irish National Theatre: AE's poetic Deirdre and Yeats's patriotic Cathleen ni Houlihan
(written with Gregory). A restrictive crown patent was issued solely for production of
"plays in Irish and English languages, written by Irish writers on Irish subjects"
(Holloway 1967, p. 42); and thus the Abbey Theatre came into being on 27 December
1904, with the curtain rising on Yeats's heroic drama On Baile's Strand and Lady
Gregory's comedy Spreading the News. Yeats, Gregory, and John Millington Synge
(1871–1909) were the theater's co-directors and featured playwrights.
Saved from obscurity by following Yeats's advice to "go to the Aran Islands and find a
life that had never been expressed in literature" (p. 262), Synge became the pivotal
Abbey dramatist. From his notebooks he completed a book of observations called The
Aran Islands in 1901 with illustrations by Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957), but delayed
publication until just after the riotous first production of The Playboy of the Western
World in January 1907. Among his half dozen plays, two were produced posthumously
under Yeats's supervision as executor: Deirdre of the Sorrows and The Tinker's
Wedding. Somewhere between the antirealism of Yeats's poetic drama and the local
color of the one-act peasant plays Lady Gregory wrote in dialect (in a few instances
with Yeats), Synge's work anticipated the lively and satirical tragicomedies of Gregory's
protégé, Sean O'Casey (1880–1964). The grim beauty of Synge's west gave place to the
squalid working-class settings of O'Casey's "Dublin Trilogy," The Shadow of a Gunman
(1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926), plays that
dealt critically with the realities of culture and class in time of insurrection and civil war
between 1916 and 1923. Certainly, by then, the objective of reviving the literary
capacity of the Irish people had been achieved. In 1923, the Nobel Prize for Literature
was awarded to Yeats, and in 1926 to Ireland's great successor to Wilde in London,
George Bernard Shaw.
The literary renaissance in Ireland still continues if the Celtic Revival is only its
formative stage, precisely correspondent with the transitional, proto-modernist phase of
international literature in English. What is Irish literature? The question was answered
in 1904 by Justin McCarthy (1830–1912), editor in chief of a five-volume anthology
entitled, simply, Irish Literature. Like the combined advisory board and contributing
editors of the more recent Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), McCarthy and
associates—Gregory, O'Grady, Hyde, Russell (AE), Rolleston, Yeats, and many
others—answered the question with selections that exemplify thought at the time.
36
Consensus is negotiated. Since then, thought has shifted from the nationalist agenda of
the Celtic Revival to the global view of Ireland's place in literature as a whole. Lately,
the east-to-west migration of the renaissance in Europe seems to have shifted north in
Ireland.
Example
J.M. Synge: „The Playboy of the Western World“,

http://www.bartleby.com/1010/
Study Questions
1) Why do you think the play sparked off so much controversy when it was
premiered in Dublin in 1907?
2) Describe the play’s main conflicts.
3) How does the character of Christy evolve throughout the play?
4) Which virtues and vices of the Irish peasants are revealed in the play?
5) What are the main themes of the play?
37
9. POSTWAR BRITISH FICTION
Learning Objectives
The students will be acquainted with the main representatives of post-war British
fiction. Special attention will be paid to the authors of dystopian novels such as Huxley,
Orwell or Burgess.
38
The Theory
World War I created a profound sense of crisis in English culture, and this became even
more intense with the worldwide economic collapse of the late 1920s and early '30s, the
rise of Fascism, the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), and the approach of another full-
scale conflict in Europe. It is not surprising, therefore, that much of the writing of the
1930s was bleak and pessimistic.
Divisions of class and the burden of sexual repression became common and interrelated
themes in the fiction of the 1930s, a fiction that largely neglected the modernist
revolution in technique of the 1920s and returned to the realist modes of the first decade
of the century.
Graham Greene (1904-1991) English novelist, short-story writer, playwright and

journalist, whose novels treat moral issues in the context of political settings. Greene is
one of the most widely read novelist of the 20th-century. He is sometimes classified as
'Catholic novelist'. Greene's religious convictions did not become overtly apparent in his
fiction until The Brighton Rock (1938), which depicted a teenage gangster Pinkie with a
kind of demonic spirituality. Religious themes were explicit in the novels The Power
And The Glory (1940), The Heart Of The Matter (1948). The Quiet American (1955),
which was about American involvement in Indochina. The story focuses on the murder
of Alden Pyle (the American of the title). OUR MAN IN HAVANNA (1958) was born
after a journey to Cuba.
William Golding (1911-1993) - in full Sir Willam Gerald Golding English novelist, who
received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. The choice was unexpected, because the
internationally famous novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991) was considered the
strongest candidate from the English writers. In many novels Golding has revealed the
dark places of human heart, when isolated individuals or small groups are pushed into
extreme situations. His work is characterized by exploration of 'the darkness of man's
heart', deep spiritual and ethical questions. The main theme of his novels is the evil in
the world, the fall of man.
Lord of the Flies, an allegorical story set in the near future during wartime. The story
describes a group of children, who are evacuated from Britain because of a nuclear war.
Their airplane crashes on an uninhabited island, and all the adults are killed. The boys
create their own society, which gradually degenerates from democratic, rational, and
moral community to tyrannical and cruel.
George Orwell (1903-1950) - pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair. English novelist,

essayist and critic, famous for his political satires Animal Farm (1945), an anti-Soviet
tale, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which shows that the destruction of language is
an essential part of oppression.
1984 was a bitter protest against the nightmarish future and corruption of truth and free
speech of the modern world. In the story, Britannia has become Airstrip One in the
super state Oceania, which is controlled by Big Brother and the Party. The Party's
agents constantly rewrite history. The official language is Newspeak, and the society is
dominated by such slogans as "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", "Ignorance is
Strength." The hero, Winston Smith, a minor Party operative, rewrites the past at the
Ministry of Truth.
39
John Fowles (1926) one of the most popular writers, famous already for his first novel
The Collector (1963) which is a combination of thriller and allegory. The novel was
inspired by the opera of Béla Bartók Bluebeard's Castle. It is a story of young butterfly
collector Clegg who captures young girl Miranda and imprisons her in his cellar. The
novel consists of two parts, the first part is told from the point of view of the collector
and the other is told from the point of view of the girl. Clegg is not described only as a
criminal but also as a victim of his social position, his low self-esteem. For him Miranda
is not only sexual object but also the symbol of beauty and social status he never had.
A group of writers who became known as the Angry Young Men. From authors such as
John Braine, John Wain, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, and David Storey (also a
significant dramatist) came a spate of novels often ruggedly autobiographical in origin
and near documentary in approach. The predominant subject of these books was social
mobility, usually from the northern working class to the southern middle class. Social
mobility was also inspected, from an upper-class vantage point. Kingsley Amis, famous
British satirist and campus novel author is classified as an Angry Young Man. He
became famous for his first novel Lucky Jim (1954). To other campus novel writers
belong Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. These writers wrote satirical novels from
the universities.
Ian McEwan (1948): The Cement Garden, 1978. After the death of her husband, the
mother of Julie, Jack, Sue and Tom begins to suffer from a mysterious illness. Aware
that she is going to have to go into hospital she opens a bank account for the children, so
that they can be financially self-sufficient and will be able to avoid being taken into care
by the authorities. Unfortunately she also dies and Julie and Jack (the older, teenage
children) decide to hide her body in the basement so that they can have free reign of
their household. Soon Tom has taken to dressing as a girl whilst Sue has become
increasingly reticent, confiding only to her diary, meanwhile Jack and Julie sense an
attraction developing for each other. Other important novels: The Comfort of Strangers,
Black Dogs
Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) A Clockwork Orange is set in a future London and is

told in nadsat, a mixture of Russian, English and American slang, gypsy talk and, odd
bits of Jacobean prose. Alex, the main character, is a juvenile delinquent, who rapes and
kills people. He is captured, and brainwashed by authorities to change his murderous
aggressions. As an unexpected side effect he starts to hate Beethoven's music, his
unspoiled self. The central question of the story is a philosophical one: is an 'evil'
human being with free will preferable to a 'good' citizen without it? The character of
Alex, played in the film by Malcolm McDowell, gained cult status.
40
Example
George Orwell: Animal Farm,

http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/
Study Questions
1) Compare and contrast Napoleon and Snowball. What techniques do they use
in their struggle for power? Does Snowball represent a morally legitimate
political alternative to the corrupt leadership of Napoleon?
2) From whose perspective is Animal Farm told? Why would Orwell have
chosen such a perspective?
3) Why do you think Orwell chose to use a fable in his condemnation of Soviet
communism and totalitarianism? Fiction would seem a rather indirect method
of political commentary; if Orwell had written an academic essay, he could
have named names, pointed to details, and proven his case more
systematically. What different opportunities of expression does a fable offer
its author?
4) How does Orwell explore the problem of rhetoric in Animal Farm? Paying
particular attention to the character of Squealer, how is language used as an
instrument of social control? How do the pigs rewrite history?
41
10. POSTWAR BRITISH DRAMA
Learning Objectives
The students will be acquainted with the main types of British drama which emerged
after WWII. Special attention will be paid to the Theatre of the Absurd.
42
The Theory
Apart from the short-lived attempt by T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry to bring about a
renaissance of verse drama, theatre in the late 1940s and early 1950s was most notable
for the continuing supremacy of the “well-made” play, which focused upon, and mainly
attracted as its audience, the comfortable middle class. The most interesting playwright
working within this mode was Terence Rattigan, whose carefully crafted, conventional-
looking plays—in particular, The Winslow Boy (1946), The Browning Version (1948),
The Deep Blue Sea (1952), and Separate Tables (1954)—affectingly disclose
desperations, terrors, and emotional forlornness concealed behind reticence and
gentility. In 1956 John Osborne's Look Back in Anger forcefully signalled the start of a
very different dramatic tradition. Taking as its hero a furiously voluble working-class
man and replacing staid mannerliness on stage with emotional rawness, sexual candour,
and social rancour, Look Back in Anger initiated a move toward what critics called
“kitchen-sink” drama. Shelagh Delaney (with her one influential play, A Taste of Honey
[1958]) and Arnold Wesker (especially in his politically and socially engaged trilogy,
Chicken Soup with Barley [1958], Roots [1959], and I'm Talking About Jerusalem
[1960]) gave further impetus to this movement, as did Osborne in subsequent plays such
as The Entertainer (1957), his attack on what he saw as the tawdriness of post-war
Britain. Also working within this tradition was John Arden, whose dramas emulate
some of Bertold Brecht's theatrical devices. Arden wrote historical plays (Serjeant
Musgrave's Dance [1959], Armstrong's Last Goodnight [1964]) to advance radical
social and political views and in doing so provided a model that several later left-wing
dramatists followed.
An alternative reaction against drawing-room naturalism came from the Theatre of the
Absurd. The theatre of the absurd refers to tendencies in dramatic literature that
emerged in Paris during the late 1940s and early '50s in the plays of Arthur ADAMOV,
Fernando ARRABAL, Samuel BECKETT, Jean GENET, Eugene IONESCO, and Jean
TARDIEU. 'The Theatre of the Absurd' is a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin for
the work of a number of playwrights, mostly written in the 1950s and 1960s. The term
is derived from an essay by the French philosopher Albert Camus. In his 'Myth of
Sisyphus', written in 1942, he first defined the human situation as basically meaningless
and absurd. He argued that humanity had to resign itself to recognizing that a fully
satisfying rational explanation of the universe was beyond its reach; in that sense, the
world must ultimately be seen as absurd.
The 'absurd' plays by Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet,
Harold Pinter and others all share the view that man is inhabiting a universe with which
he is out of key. Its meaning is indecipherable and his place within it is without purpose.
He is bewildered, troubled and obscurely threatened.
The Theatre of the Absurd openly rebelled against conventional theatre. Indeed, it was
anti-theatre. It was surreal, illogical, conflictless and plotless.
One of the most important aspects of absurd drama was its distrust of language as a
means of communication.
43
Some of Beckett's themes and techniques are discernible in the drama of Harold Pinter.
Harold Pinter (1930) NB Price winner was inspired by Chekhov and Beckett but his
plays use more concrete action and language. His plays are based on common, banal
situations. The Room, 1957. In his later plays he uses a lot of erotic motifs and shocking
presentation of animalism: The Homecoming, 1965. His latest plays are: War, 2003,
Death etc., 2005
Western dramatists have gradually developed a need to defend basic human values.
They have been showing solidarity with their East European colleagues. Ionesco was
always deeply distrustful of politics and the clichéd language of the political
establishment. Harold Pinter, who took part in a radio production of one of Václav
Havel's plays from the 1970s several years ago, has frequently spoken in support of the
East European writers and playwrights. Samuel Beckett has written a short play
dedicated to Havel, which was staged in France in 1984 during a ceremony at the
University of Toulouse, which awarded Havel an honorary doctorate.
Joe Orton's anarchic black comedies—Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964), Loot (1967), and
What the Butler Saw (1969)—put theatrical procedures pioneered by Pinter at the
service of outrageous sexual farce. Orton's taste for dialogue in the epigrammatic style
of Oscar Wilde was shared by one of the wittiest dramatists to emerge in the 1960s,
Tom Stoppard. In plays from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead (1966) to later
triumphs such as Arcadia (1993), Stoppard sets intellectually challenging concepts
ricocheting in scenes glinting with the to-and-fro of polished repartee. The most prolific
comic playwright from the 1960s onward was Alan Ayckbourn, whose often virtuoso
feats of stagecraft and theatrical ingenuity made him one of Britain's most popular
dramatists. Ayckbourn's plays showed an increasing tendency to broach darker themes
and were especially scathing (for instance, in A Small Family Business [1987]) on the
topics of the greed and selfishness that he considered to have been promoted by
Thatcherism, the prevailing political philosophy in 1980s Britain.
Fringe or Alternative Theatre
John Arden (1930) was inspired by O'Casey, Shakespeare or American dramatist Arthur
Miller. He uses verse, or songs in his plays. Live Like Pigs, 1958 is a story of a gipsy
family that has to be protected by the police against the good British people.
Trevor Griffiths (1935) a Marxist playwright: The Party, Comedians, 1975 starring
Laurence Olivier. It is a play about the position of artist in capitalism. Examiner in art
school wants the students to write non-political plays and offers them work. Only three
of them refuse and retain their moral standards and identity.
New wave of British drama
Tom Stoppard was born in Gottwaldow, Tomáš Straussler, in 1939 he fled from the
Nazists. Since his first play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1966 he became
one of the most prominent British dramatists. Stoppard's next major play, Jumpers
(1972), is bringing the world of contemporary philosophy to the theatre. Throughout the
play, the protagonist, who shares the name of twentieth-century British philosopher G.
E. Moore, prepares for an academic debate on the nature of moral values. His
44
ruminations are frequently interrupted, however, by renegade gymnast/philosophers
who have seized the British government. Part of the background to these bizarre goings-
on is the 1969 landing on the moon, and the way that this event, so Stoppard suggests,
altered humanity's perception of itself.
Stoppard's first attempt to create historical drama was Travesties (1974), which uses as
a starting point the coincidence that novelist James Joyce, Russian revolutionary Lenin,
and Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara all lived in Zurich, Switzerland during World War I. The
text is complicated by the use of an elderly narrator, whose frazzled memory muddles
details of plot beyond description.
Arcadia, 1993 is about the contrast between the Classic disposition in style, taste and
temperament (“those who have particular respect for logic, geometry and pattern”), and
the Romantic temperament (“those with a much more spontaneous, unstructured
communion with nature”. The play takes place in two radically different time frames,
1809-12 and the present. The play turns into a detective story in which the two “time-
spaces” are set against one another to show the actual events of 1809-1812 and their
later reconstruction, which is full of creative, yet erroneous mental leaps.
Example
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot,

http://samuel-beckett.net/Waiting_for_Godot_Part1.html,
http://samuel-beckett.net/Waiting_for_Godot_Part2.html
Study Questions
1) Describe the relationship between Vladimir and Estragon. Why do you think
they stay together, despite their frequent suggestions of parting?
2) How does the relationship between Vladimir and Estragon compare with the
relationship between Pozzo and Lucky?
3) What is the effect created by the contrast between these two pairs of
characters? Is it significant that the characters appear in pairs, rather than
alone?
4) Who is Godot?
5) The stage directions of the play constitute nearly half of the text, suggesting
that the actions, expressions, and emotions of the actors are as important as the
dialogue. Examine the significance of the stage directions of one particular
scene; for example, why is Estragon always struggling with his boot?
6) What is the overall tone of the play? Is the reader left with a feeling of
resignation that Godot will never come, and Vladimir and Estragon will
continue to wait in vain, or is there some hope created?
45
11. POSTWAR BRITISH POETRY
Learning Objectives
Students will be acquainted with the post-war development of British poetry. They will
be able to differentiate between different poetic schools and approaches to poetry.
46
The Theory
After World War II. emerged a group of poets known as The Movement. Poets such as
D.J. Enright, Donald Davie, John Wain, Roy Fuller, Robert Conquest, and Elizabeth
Jennings produced urbane, formally disciplined verse in an anti-romantic vein
characterized by irony, understatement, and a sardonic refusal to strike attitudes or make
grand claims for the poet's role. The pre-eminent practitioner of this style was Philip
Larkin, who had earlier displayed some of its qualities in two novels: Jill (1946) and A
Girl in Winter (1947). In Larkin's poetry (The Less Deceived [1955], The Whitsun
Weddings [1964], High Windows [1974]) a melancholy sense of life's limitations throbs
through lines of elegiac elegance. Suffused with acute awareness of mortality and
transience, Larkin's poetry is also finely responsive to natural beauty, vistas of which
open up even in poems darkened by fear of death or sombre preoccupation with human
solitude. John Betjeman, poet laureate from 1972 to 1984, shared both Larkin's intense
consciousness of mortality and his gracefully versified nostalgia for 19th- and early
20th-century life.
In contrast to the rueful traditionalism of their work is the poetry of Ted Hughes, who
became the poet laureate in 1984. In extraordinarily vigorous verse, beginning with his
first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Hughes captures the ferocity, vitality, and
splendour of the natural world. In works such as Crow (1970) he adds a mythic
dimension to his fascination with savagery (a fascination also apparent in the poetry
Thom Gunn produced through the late 1950s and '60s). Much of Hughes's poetry is
rooted in his experiences as a farmer in Yorkshire and Devon (as in his collection
Moortown [1979]). It also shows a deep receptivity to the way the contemporary world
is underlain by strata of history. This realization, along with strong regional roots, is
something Hughes had in common with a number of poets writing in the second half of
the 20th century. The work of Geoffrey Hill (especially King Log [1968], Mercian
Hymns [1971], and Tenebrae [1978]) treats Britain as a palimpsest whose superimposed
layers of history are uncovered in poems, which are sometimes written in prose. Basil
Bunting's Briggflatts (1966) celebrates his native Northumbria.
Britain's industrial regions received attention in poetry, too. In collections such as Terry
Street (1969) Douglas Dunn wrote of working-class life in north-eastern England. Tony
Harrison, the most arresting English poet to find his voice in the later decades of the
20th century (The Loiners [1970], From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems
[1978], Continuous [1981]), came, as he stresses, from a working-class community in
industrial Yorkshire. Harrison's social and cultural journey away from that world by
means of a grammar school education and a degree in classics provoked responses in
him that his poetry conveys with imaginative vehemence and caustic wit: anger at the
deprivations and humiliations endured by the working class; guilt over the way his
talent had lifted him away from these. Combining colloquial ruggedness with classic
form, Harrison's poetry—sometimes innovatively written to accompany television
films—kept up a fiercely original and socially concerned commentary on such themes
as inner-city dereliction (V [1985]), the horrors of warfare (The Gaze of the Gorgon
[1992]), and the evils of censorship (The Blasphemers' Banquet [1989], a verse film
partly written in reaction to the fatwa on Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses).
47
Also from Yorkshire was Blake Morrison, whose finest work, The Ballad of the
Yorkshire Ripper (1987), was composed in taut, macabre stanzas thickened with dialect.
Morrison's work also displayed a growing development in late 20th-century British
poetry: the writing of narrative verse. Although there had been earlier instances of this
verse after 1945 (John Betjeman's blank-verse autobiography Summoned by Bells
[1960] proved the most popular), it was in the 1980s and '90s that the form was given
renewed prominence by poets such as the Kipling-influenced James Fenton. An
especially ambitious exercise in the narrative genre was Craig Raine's History: The
Home Movie (1994), a huge semi fictionalized saga, written in three-line stanzas,
chronicling several generations of his own and his wife's families. Before this, three
books of dazzling virtuosity (The Onion, Memory [1978], A Martian Sends a Postcard
Home [1979], and Rich [1984]) established Raine as the founder, and most inventive
exemplar, of what came to be called the Martian school of poetry. The defining
characteristic of this school was poetry rife with startling images, unexpected but
audaciously apt similes, and rapid, imaginative tricks of transformation that set the
reader looking at the world afresh.
From the late 1960s onward Northern Ireland, convulsed by sectarian violence, was
particularly prolific in poetry. From a cluster of considerable talents—Michael Longley,
Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon—Seamus Heaney soon stood out.
Born into a Roman Catholic farming family in County Derry, he began by publishing
verse—in his collections Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969)—
that combines a tangible, tough, sensuous response to rural and agricultural life,
reminiscent of that of Ted Hughes, with meditation about the relationship between the
taciturn world of his parents and his own communicative calling as a poet. Since then,
in increasingly magisterial books of poetry—Wintering Out (1972), North (1975), Field
Work (1979), Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991)—
Heaney became arguably the greatest poet Ireland has produced, eventually winning the
Nobel Prize for Literature (1995). Heaney's poems first came to public attention in the
mid-1960s when he was active as one of a group of poets who were subsequently
recognized as constituting something of a "Northern School" within Irish writing.
Although Heaney is stylistically and temperamentally different from such writers as
Michael Longley and Derek Mahon (his contemporaries), and Paul Muldoon, Medbh
McGuckian and Ciaran Carson (members of a younger Northern Irish generation), he
does share with all of them the fate of having been born into a society deeply divided
along religious and political lines, one which was doomed moreover to suffer a quarter-
century of violence, polarization and inner distrust. This had the effect not only of
darkening the mood of Heaney's work in the 1970s, but also of giving him a deep
preoccupation with the question of poetry's responsibilities and prerogatives in the
world, since poetry is poised between a need for creative freedom within itself and a
pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as citizen. He also
wrote essays The Government of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry (1995.
Heaney's work often deals with "the local", that is Northern Ireland.
Simon Armitage (1963) Poet and novelist. He wrote and presented Xanadu (1992), a
'poem film for television'. Book of Matches (1993) is a collection of poems without
titles. Each poem is meant to be read in the time it takes a match to burn down - about
twenty seconds, unless you want to burn your fingers. There is a pun in the title: we call
a packet from which we tear out the matches a book, but this is also a book in the
normal sense, with words for us to read. He often uses listing in his poetry. The Dead
Sea Poems (1995), Moon Country (1996), Travelling Songs and The Universal Home
Doctor (both 2002).
48
Paul Muldoon (1951) Until recently, Muldoon was often thought of as the second-most-
eminent living poet in Northern Ireland, living in the shadow of his friend Seamus
Heaney; but his reputation has grown since he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
Madoc: A Mystery, among Muldoon's most difficult works, is a book-length poem,
which some consider Muldoon's masterpiece. It narrates in fractured sections an
alternate history in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey come to
America in order to found a utopian community.
Example
Seamus Heaney: „The Railway Children“,

http://hilgemeier.gmxhome.de/poems/railwchl.htm
Philip Larkin: „Church Going“,

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/church-going/
Tony Harrison: „Marked with D.“,

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/marked-with-d/
Study Questions
1) Describe the role of landscape in Heaney´s poem.
2) Describe the mood of Heaney´s poem.
3) Describe the relationship between past and present in Heaney´s poem.
4) What is the central question of Larkin’s poem?
5) What is noticeable about Larkin’s poetic language and what bearing does it
have on your reception of the poem?
6) Describe the feelings of the speaker of Larkin’s poem.
7) Find examples of irony in Harrison’s poem.
8) Is social sensitivity in any sense inscribed in Harrison’ poem?
9) What does the ‘D.’ of the title stand for?
49
12. POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE
Learning Objectives
Students will be acquainted with the central premises and key representatives of
postcolonial literature. They will be able to distinguish this stream of writing from the
established canon of English literature, but also draw parallels between the two.
50
The Theory
The term “Postcolonialism” refers broadly to the ways in which race, ethnicity, culture,
and human identity itself are represented in the modern era, after many colonized
countries gained their independence. However, some critics use the term to refer to all
culture and cultural products influenced by imperialism from the moment of
colonization until today. Postcolonial literature seeks to describe the interactions
between European nations and the peoples they colonized. By the middle of the
twentieth century, the vast majority of the world was under the control of European
countries. At one time, Great Britain, for example, ruled almost 50 percent of the world.
During the twentieth century, countries such as India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Senegal, Sri
Lanka, Canada, and Australia won independence from their European colonizers. The
literature and art produced in these countries after independence has become the object
of “Postcolonial Studies,” a term coined in and for academia, initially in British
universities. This field gained prominence in the 1970s and has been developing ever
since. Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said’s critique of Western representations
of the Eastern culture in his 1978 book, Orientalism, is a seminal text for postcolonial
studies and has spawned a host of theories on the subject. However, as the currency of
the term “postcolonial” has gained wider use, its meaning has also expanded. Some
consider the United States itself a postcolonial country because of its former status as a
territory of Great Britain, but it is generally studied for its colonizing rather than its
colonized attributes. In another vein, Canada and Australia, though former colonies of
Britain, are often placed in a separate category because of their status as “settler”
countries and because of their continuing loyalty to their colonizer. Some of the major
voices and works of postcolonial literature include Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s
Children (1981), Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart (1958), Michael Ondaatje’s
novel The English Patient (1992), Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961),
Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988), Isabelle Allende’s The House of the Spirits
(1982), J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace (1990), Derek
Walcott’s Omeros (1990), and Eavan Boland’s Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980–
1990.
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on 19 June 1947. He went to
school in Bombay and at Rugby in England, and read History at King's College,
Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge Footlights theatre company. After
graduating, he lived with his family who had moved to Pakistan in 1964, and worked
briefly in television before returning to England, beginning work as a copywriter for an
advertising agency. His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975. His second novel,
the acclaimed Midnight's Children, was published in 1981. It won the Booker Prize for
Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), an Arts Council Writers'
Award and the English-Speaking Union Award, and in 1993 was judged to have been
the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the
award's 25-year history. The novel narrates key events in the history of India through
the story of pickle-factory worker Saleem Sinai, one of 1001 children born as India won
independence from Britain in 1947. The critic Malcolm Bradbury acclaimed the novel's
achievement in The Modern British Novel (Penguin, 1994): 'a new start for the late-
twentieth-century novel.' Rushdie's third novel, Shame (1983), which many critics saw
as an allegory of the political situation in Pakistan, won the Prix du Meilleur Livre
Etranger and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The publication in 1988 of
his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, lead to accusations of blasphemy against Islam
and demonstrations by Islamist groups in India and Pakistan. The orthodox Iranian
leadership issued a fatwa against Rushdie on 14 February 1989 - effectively a sentence
51
of death - and he was forced into hiding under the protection of the British government
and police. The book itself centres on the adventures of two Indian actors, Gibreel and
Saladin, who fall to earth in Britain when their Air India jet explodes. It won the
Whitbread Novel Award in 1988. Salman Rushdie continued to write and publish
books, including a children's book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a warning
about the dangers of story-telling that won the Writers' Guild Award (Best Children's
Book), and which he adapted for the stage (with Tim Supple and David Tushingham. It
was first staged at the Royal National Theatre, London.) There followed a book of
essays entitled Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991); East,
West (1994), a book of short stories; and a novel, The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), the
history of the wealthy Zogoiby family told through the story of Moraes Zogoiby, a
young man from Bombay descended from Sultan Muhammad XI, the last Muslim ruler
of Andalucía. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, published in 1999, re-works the myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice in the context of modern popular music. His most recent novel,
Fury, set in New York at the beginning of the third millennium, was published in 2001.
He is also the author of a travel narrative, The Jaguar Smile (1987), an account of a visit
to Nicaragua in 1986. Salman Rushdie is Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature. He was made Distinguished Fellow in Literature at the University of East
Anglia in 1995. He was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in
1993 and the Aristeion Literary Prize in 1996, and has received eight honorary
doctorates. He was elected to the Board of American PEN in 2002. The subjects in his
new book, Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992-2002 (2002), range from
popular culture and football to twentieth-century literature and politics. Salman Rushdie
is also co-author (with Tim Supple and Simon Reade) of the stage adaptation of
Midnight's Children, premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2002. Shalimar
The Clown, the story of Max Ophuls, his killer and daughter, and a fourth character who
links them all, was published in 2005. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Whitbread Novel
Award. Salman Rushdie became a KBE in 2007. In 2008, his latest novel, The
Enchantress of Florence (2008), was published and Midnight's Children won the 'Best
of the Booker' Prize. He also co-edited The Best American Short Stories (2008) with
Heidi Pitlor.
Playwright, screenwriter, novelist and film-maker Hanif Kureishi was born in Bromley,
Kent in 1954 and read philosophy at King's College, London. His first play, Soaking the
Heat, was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1976 and was followed in
1980 by The Mother Country, for which he won the Thames TV Playwright Award. In
1981 his play Outskirts won the George Devine Award and in 1982 he became Writer in
Residence at the Royal Court Theatre. His screenplay for the film My Beautiful
Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears, was nominated for an Academy Award. The
film was critically acclaimed for its sensitive depiction of a homosexual relationship
between a gay skinhead and a young Asian man. He also wrote the screenplays for
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and London Kills Me (1991), which he also directed. His
film My Son the Fanatic was adapted from his short story included in Love in a Blue
Time (1997). The film was first shown at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. His play Sleep
With Me (1999) was first performed at the National Theatre in London in 1999, and was
followed by When the Night Begins (2004), produced at the Hampstead Theatre in 2004.
Kureishi's first novel was the semi-autobiographical The Buddha of Suburbia, published
in 1990. Karim, the novel's young hero ('an Englishman born and bred - almost'), like
Kureishi, has a Pakistani father and an English mother. The novel describes Karim's
struggle for social and sexual identity, a comic coming-of-age novel and a satirical
portrait of race relations in Britain during the 1970s. It won the Whitbread First Novel
52
Award and was produced by the BBC in 1993 as a four-part television series.
His second novel, The Black Album (1995), explores some of the issues facing the
Muslim community living in Britain in the 1980s. Love in a Blue Time, his first
collection of short stories, focuses on a series of characters working in the media.
Intimacy (1998), a novella, is a painful account of a man's decision to leave his partner
and two young sons. It was produced as a film in 2001 starring Mark Rylance and Kerry
Fox. His second short story collection, Midnight All Day (1999), continues to explore
very personal issues about human relationships and sexual desire. Gabriel's Gift (2001)
tells the story of a 15-year-old schoolboy whose artistic skills enable him to survive the
trauma of his parents' separation. Dreaming and Scheming: Reflections on Writing and
Politics, a collection of Hanif Kureishi's non-fiction, including essays and diary
fragments, as well as a new collection of short fiction, The Body and Other Stories,
were both published in 2002. The Word and the Bomb (2005), is also a collection of
non-fictional writings. Hanif Kureishi's latest works are the play, Venus (2007), and the
novel, Something to Tell You (2008). In 2009, his own stage adaptation of his novel The
Black Album (2009), premiered at the National Theatre. He became a CBE in 2007, in
recognition of his services to literature and drama.
Romesh Gunesekera was born in 1954 in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He grew up in Sri Lanka
and the Philippines, moving to England in 1971. He gained an Arts Council
Writers' Award in 1991. His first book, Monkfish Moon, a collection of short stories
reflecting the ethnic and political tensions that have threatened Sri Lanka since
independence in 1948, was published in 1992. Reef (1994), his first novel, won a
Yorkshire Post Book Award (Best First Work) and was shortlisted for both the Booker
Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Fiction Prize. The book is narrated by a young Sri
Lankan boy named Triton who is sent to work for a marine biologist, Mister Salgado.
Forced to leave Sri Lanka by the worsening political situation, they move to London
where Triton opens a restaurant. The Sandglass (1998), his second novel, centres on the
character of Prins Ducal, a Sri Lankan businessman, and his search for the truth about
his father's death. It was awarded the inaugural BBC Asia Award for Achievement in
Writing and Literature. His novel, Heaven's Edge (2002), is set on an island in the near
future.Romesh Gunesekera lives in London, but travels widely for festivals, workshops
and British Council tours. In recent years he has held writing residencies in in Hong
Kong, Singapore and Denmark, and in 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Literature. His latest book is The Match (2006).
Example
Romesh Gunesekera: „A House in the Country“,

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/count
ry_text.pdf
Study Questions
1) What is the theme of the short story?
2) Describe the relationship between the two main characters.
53
3) How does the idea of building and re-building relate to the contemporary Sri
Lanka?
4) How significant is the incident of shop-burning for the development of the

plot?
5) Can the story be read as a political allegory? How?
54
EXAM TOPICS
1) Romanticism
2) Victorian Fiction
3) Victorian Poetry
4) Drama at the turn of the century
5) Modernism
6) Celtic Revival
7) Post-war British Prose
8) Post-war British Drama
9) Post-war British Poetry
10) Postcolonial Literature
Exam Requirements
Reasonable knowledge of all books required for this course is expected.
Every exam topic must be covered by at least one novel (the texts from the course are
included), or a selection of short stories (at least five, separately listed) or poems (at
least five, separately listed as well).
Bring your reading list.
55

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ANGLICKÁ LITERATURA 2

Course Description ............................................................................................................2

1. Romanticism: 1st generation ......................................................................................7

Exam Topics ....................................................................................................................55

Unit 1 Romanticism: 1st generation

Unit 2 Romanticism: 2nd generation

Unit 3 Victorian Fiction

Unit 4 Victorian Poetry

Unit 5 Drama at the turn of the century

Unit 6 Modernism: Joyce, Woolf

Unit 7 Modernism: Joyce, D. H. Lawrence

Unit 8 Celtic Revival

Unit 9 Post-war British Fiction

Unit 10 Post-war British Drama

Unit 11 Post-war British Poetry

Unit 12 Postcolonial Literature

• Active knowledge of literary terminology

Burgess, A.: English Literature, Harlow: Longman, 1991.

Time Required for this Unit

Coleridge's poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth's. Becoming

William Wordsworth: „We are seven“,

William Wordsworth: „I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud“,

William Wordsworth: „Tintern Abbey“,

2) Where is the poet and what happens to him in „I Wandered Lonely as a

3) Describe various forms of relationship between man and nature according to

Time Required for this Unit

John Keats: „Ode on a Grecian Urn“,

1) Identify and describe the form of the poem.

2) To what is the urn compared and why?

4) Explain the first lines of the 2nd stanza.

5) What is relationship between life and art?

Time Required for this Unit

William Makepeace Thackeray’s early fictions were published as serials in Fraser's

In 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights is a complex story of a relationship of two families:

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and

1) Who is the narrator of the story?

2) How does his point of view affect the story?

3) Describe Mr. Hyde

4) What is the relationship between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

5) What does their relationship represent?

6) What is the main theme of the novel?

Time Required for this Unit

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed in 1848 was founded as a group of painters. It

Matthew Arnold: „Dover Beach“,

Tennyson: „The Lady of Shalott“,

Charles Algernon Swinburne: „Dead Love“,

Elizabeth Barret Browning: „The Soul's Expression“,

1) What is the theme and mood of Arnold’s poem?

Time Required for this Unit

Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest,

1) Wilde originally subtitled The Importance of Being Earnest “A Serious

5) Is Cecily a more realistic character than Gwendolen? Why or why not?

Time Required for this Unit

William James, founder of American pragmatism coined the term „stream of

James Joyce: „The Dead“, http://www.online-

Virginia Woolf: „Kew Gardens“, http://www.online-

1) Describe the literary style of James Joyce’s short story.

2) Who is the narrator of the story?

3) Find and describe epiphanies in the story.

4) Explain the title of the story.

5) What is the theme of the story?

7) Describe the groups of characters in the story.

8) In what way does the story resemble an impressionist painting?