- •Lecture 1. Period I. The Anglo-Saxons. To a.D. 1066
- •Period II. The Norman-French Period. A.D. 1066 To About 1350
- •Lecture 2. Period III. The end of the middle ages (about 1350 to about 1500). The medieval drama.
- •The medieval drama
- •The reformation.
- •Sir thomas more and his 'utopia.'
- •The elizabethan period.
- •Prose fiction.
- •Edmund spenser, 1552-1599.
- •In general style and spirit, it should be added, Spenser has been one of the most powerful influences on all succeeding English romantic poetry.
- •Christopher marlowe, 1564-1593.
- •Shakespeare, 1564-1616.
- •Ben jonson.
- •Lecture 4. The Seventeenth Century (1603-1660). Prose and Poetry. The Restoration (1660-1700).
- •Lecture 5. The Eighteenth Century, Pseudo-Classicism And The Beginnings Of Modern Romanticism
- •Samuel taylor coleridge.
- •William wordsworth (1770-1850).
- •Robert southey.
- •Walter scott.
- •The last group of romantic poets.
- •Percy bysshe shelley (1792-1832).
- •John keats (1795-1821).
- •Lord macaulay.
- •Thomas carlyle.
- •It will probably be evident that the mainspring of the undeniable and volcanic power of 'Sartor Resartus' is a tremendous moral conviction and fervor.
- •John ruskin.
- •Matthew arnold.
- •Alfred tennyson.
- •Elizabeth barrett browning and robert browning.
- •The novel. The earlier secondary novelists.
- •Charles dickens.
- •William m. Thackeray.
- •George eliot.
- •George meredith (1828-1910).
- •Thomas hardy.
- •Stevenson.
- •Rudyard kipling.
- •Lecture 8. The 20th century english literature
- •William Strachey (1609-1618).
- •George Sandys (1578-1644).
- •John Winthrop (1588-1649).
- •Early Descriptive Writers.
- •Roger Williams, 1606-83.
- •Increase Mather, 1639-1723.
- •Cotton Mather, 1663-1728.
- •The Bay Psalm Book
- •Michael Wigglesworth, 1631-1705.
- •Sarah Kemble Knight, 1666-1727.
- •William Byrd, 1674-1744.
- •Other historical books.
- •Jonathan Edwards, 1703-58.
- •Benjamin franklin: 1706-1790.
- •Second half of the eighteenth century. The revolutionary period: speeches, argumentative essays, state papers.
- •The Declaration and the Constitution.
- •Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817.
- •Revolutionary Songs and Ballads.
- •Francis Hopkinson, 1737-91.
- •Charles Brockden Brown, 1771-1810.
- •James fenimore cooper: 1789-1851.
- •The literary development of new england in the 19th century.
- •Ralph waldo emerson: 1803-82.
- •Henry d. Thoreau: 1817-1862.
- •Nathaniel hawthorne: 1804-1864.
- •In 1849, following his enforced retirement from surveyorship at the custom-house in Salem office, -- the result of political schemes, -- Hawthorne wrote “The Scarlet Letter”.
- •Edgar allan poe: 1809-1849.
- •Lecture 11. Poetry and prose of the 19th century.
- •John greenleaf whittier (1807-1892).
- •James russell lowell (1819-1891).
- •Oliver wendell holmes: 1809-1894.
- •Walt Whitman (1819-1892).
- •Novelists and humorists. Southern Romancers and realistic fiction.
- •W.G. Simms, 1806-1870.
- •Realistic Fiction.
- •Lecture 12. Literature of the new spirit. Fiction at the turn of the 20th century.
- •Fiction since 1870.
- •W. D. Howells (1837-1920).
- •Henry James (1843-1916).
- •Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
- •Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
- •Ezra Pound
- •Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
- •F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American Dream
- •Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
- •Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
- •William Faulkner (1897-1962)
- •John Hoyer Updike
The novel. The earlier secondary novelists.
Certain secondary early Victorian novelists may be considered Bulwer-Lytton and Benjamin Disraeli. Edward Bulwer, later created Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton was almost incredibly fluent and versatile. His sixty or more really literary works are of great variety; perhaps the best known of them are his second novel, the trifling 'Pelham' (1828), which inaugurated a class of so-called 'dandy' novels, giving sympathetic presentation to the more frivolous social life of the 'upper' class, and the historical romances 'The Last Days of Pompeii' (1834) and 'Harold' (1843). Benjamin Disraeli’s immature earliest novel 'Vivian Grey' (1826), deals, somewhat more sensibly, with the same social class as Bulwer's 'Pelham.'
Vastly different was the life and work of Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855). In 1847 Charlotte's novel 'Jane Eyre' won a great success. The significance of 'Jane Eyre' can be suggested by calling it the last striking expression of extravagant Romanticism, partly Byronic, but grafted on the stern Bronte moral sense. One of its two main theses is the assertion of the supreme authority of religious duty, but it vehemently insists also on the right of the individual conscience to judge of duty for itself, in spite of conventional opinion, and, difficult as this may be to understand to-day, it was denounced at the time as irreligious. The Romanticism appears further in the volcanic but sometimes melodramatic power of the love story, where the heroine is a somewhat idealized double of the authoress and where the imperfect portrayal of the hero reflects the limitations of Miss Bronte's own experience.
Charles dickens.
The most popular of all English novelists, Charles Dickens, was born in 1812, the son of an unpractical and improvident government navy clerk whom, with questionable taste, he later caricatured in 'David Copperfield' as Mr. Micawber. Obliged from the age of fifteen to earn his own living, for the most part, he was for a while a clerk in a London lawyer's office, where he observed all sorts and conditions of people with characteristic keenness. Still more valuable was his five or six years' experience in the very congenial and very active work of a newspaper reporter, where his special department was political affairs. This led up naturally to his permanent work. The successful series of lively 'Sketches by Boz' dealing with people and scenes about London was preliminary to 'The Pickwick Papers,' which made the author famous at the age of twenty-four.
During the remaining thirty-three years of his life Dickens produced novels at the rate of rather more than one in two years. He composed slowly and carefully but did not revise greatly, and generally published by monthly installments in periodicals which, latterly, he himself established and edited. Next after 'The Pickwick Papers' came 'Oliver Twist,' and 'David Copperfield' ten years later. Of the others, 'Martin Chuzzlewit,' 'Dombey and Son,' 'Bleak House,' and 'A Tale of Two Cities,' are among the best. For some years Dickens also published an annual Christmas story, of which the first two, 'A Christmas Carol' and 'The Chimes,' rank highest.
Dickens' popularity, in his own day and since, is due chiefly: (1) to his intense human sympathy; (2) to his unsurpassed emotional and dramatic power; and (3) to his aggressive humanitarian zeal for the reform of all evils and abuses, whether they weigh upon the oppressed classes or upon helpless individuals. In almost all his books a definite humanitarian aim, an attack on some time-consecrated evil--the poor-house system, the cruelties practised in private schools, or the miscarriage of justice in the Court of Chancery are present.
Dickens' magnificent emotional power is not balanced, however, by a corresponding intellectual quality; in his work, as in his temperament and bearing, emotion is always in danger of running to excess. One of his great elements of strength is his sense of humor, which has created an almost unlimited number of delightful scenes and characters; but it very generally becomes riotous and so ends in sheer farce and caricature, as the names of many of the characters suggest at the outset. Similarly his pathos is often exaggerated until it passes into mawkish sentimentality.
No other English author has approached Dickens in the number of characters whom he has created; his twenty novels present literally thousands of persons, almost all thoroughly human, except for the limitations that we have already noted. Their range is of course very great, though it never extends successfully into the 'upper' social classes. For Dickens was violently prejudiced against the nobility and against all persons of high social standing, and when he attempted to introduce them created only pitifully wooden automatons.
Dickens' inexhaustible fertility in characters and scenes is a main cause of the rather extravagant lack of unity which is another conspicuous feature of his books. He always introduces many characters and sub-actions not necessary to the main story, and develops them quite beyond their real artistic importance. Dickens often follows the eighteenth-century picaresque habit of tracing the histories of his heroes from birth to marriage. Not least striking among Dickens' traits is his power of description. His observation is very quick and keen, though not fine; his sense for the characteristic features, whether of scenes in Nature or of human personality and appearance, is unerring; and he has never had a superior in picturing and conveying the atmosphere both of interiors and of all kinds of scenes of human life. London, where most of his novels are wholly or chiefly located, has in him its chief and most comprehensive portrayer.
Worthy of special praise, lastly, is the moral soundness of all Dickens' work, praise which is not seriously affected by present-day sneers at his 'middle-class' and 'mid-Victorian' point of view. Dickens' books, however, like his character, are destitute of the deeper spiritual quality, of poetic and philosophic idealism. His stories are all admirable demonstrations of the power and beauty of the nobler practical virtues, of kindness, courage, humility, and all the other forms of unselfishness.