Literature

The Renaissance (Elizabethan Age/Jacobean Age)---> historical period

1. Shakespeare
Humanism - literary movement
Historical context

Themes, style

-The system of patronage

-printing invention
-the discovery of hundreds of Latin and Greek
manuscripts from medieval time
-Platonic philosophy
-rediscovered Greek and Roman classical philosophy
-more and more become interested in drama, as
noblemen and monarchs, such as Elizabeth I and James
I, develop a habit of going to see plays and due to the
increase in life standards, people have more time and
money to go to theatres
-The revolt against the Roman Catholic Church called the
Reformation,the foundation of the protestant churches
- the Act of Supremacy in 1534 by which Henry VIII
became the Head of the Church of England, the closing of
all the monasteries.
-The publication of the first Bible in the English language
in 1539 and the Book of Common Prayer in 1584.
-Colonial expansion in America and Asia, the war between
England and Spain for the control of the seas.Sir Francis
Drake sails around the world, the destruction of the
Spanish Armada in 1588, colonial expansion in America,
the East India Company is set up. The arts, particularly

Romeo and Juliet:

tragedy
dramatic tension, irony

Hamlet:
suspense
soliloquy
A Midsummer Nights Dream
blank verse (iambic
pentameters)
comedy
humour
The Sonnets: 154 sonnets
- parody (in 130)
-pastiche
-Greek Mythology
-Love, marriage, sexual
desire, rivality, emotional
triangle, gender roles
-revise the convention
Macbeth
onomatopoeia
tone

Augustan Age/ The Enlightement / The age of reason/ Neoclasicism

2. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (first English novel)
-Neoclassical Period - literary movement
-Enlightenment-social context
-Augustan Age - historical context
-circumstantial realism
Historical context

Themes, style

Robinson Crusoe's journey takes place in

the context of 17th century European
imperialism and colonialism, as different
countries explored the Americas,
establishing colonies and exploiting
natives.
Defoe admired many of Oliver Cromwell's
projects, especially the Navigation Acts,
so it is not surprising that Crusoe is lost to
civilisation in 1659, the year Cromwell's
son lost political power.

Robinson Crusoe is a fictional autobiography

written from a first-person point of view,
apparently written by an old man looking back
on his life. The story also includes material
from an incomplete diary, which is integrated
into the novel.
RC can be viewed as a spiritual or religious
fable.Defoe was very concerned with religious
issues, and nearly became a Dissenter
( nonconformist) minister.
Robinson Crusoe may be read as a novel that

The Neoclassical period, Augustan agehistoric events. Charles I dissolves

Parliament and rules alone. He reopens
Parliament which demands control on the
army. Charles refusal led to Civil War.
Charles I is executed and Cromwell sets
about founding a Republic, the
Commonwealth. Under Charles II people
came back to monarchy- the Restoration.
The Glorious Revolution and the Bill of
Rights. The outbreak of Plague in 1665
and the Great Fire of London in 1666
destroyed London. The establishment of
two parties, the Tory and the Whigs. The
seven years war bet England and France,
Captain Cook discovers Australia. In 1776
the American Declaration of
Independence.

is the product of the economic individualism of

Puritanism.
It is also a narrative that clearly respects the
prescriptive realism that the novel was
supposed to entail.
Loneliness, a fundamental theme in the
novel, can be regarded as a metaphor for a
new type of human consciousness - the
individual robbed of the ties with his
community.
Colonization is yet another essential theme
in the novel. Even if the pattern of colonization
had existed in English literature
(Shakespeares The Tempest), the novel
endorsed the ideology of the time with regard
to Englands colonial expansion. The novel
advances the paradigm of the
colonizer/colonized (the redeemer, the
educator,
the illuminator vs. the savage, the brute, the
Other.

3. Jonathan Swift: Gullivers Travels

-Neoclassical Period - literary movement
-Enlightenment-social context
-Augustan Age - historical context

fantastic realism
Historical
context

Themes, style

-England in the
1720s
-the Restoration
-the Glorious
Revolution
-War of Spanish
Succession

-The Individual Versus Society

-The Limits of Human Understanding

-Might Versus Right

-Gullivers Travels is a fantastic account of a series of travels is the

vehicle for satirizing familiar English institutions, such as religion,
politics and law.

Romantic period
4. John Keats
-Romantic period
*Endymion
*Ode: e.g.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode to a Nightingale ..etc.
Historical context

Themes, style

George IIIs reign, great turbulences: wars with

Napoleon, French revolution, industrial revolution.

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http://lastromantics.weebly.com/johnkeats.html

Common Themes and Ideas

The natural process of transcience; life growing

to maturity, and then declining into death.
Fragile nature of the human existence
Use of personal experiences to stimulate a
universal message

Paradoxical relationships
- Good and evil
- Birth/Life and death
- Mortality and immortality
- Dreams/visions and reality
- Immersion in passion and the desire to escape
passion
The association of love and pain
Issues of identity
Nature
The contemplation of beauty
Adoration for the Ancient World

The inevitability of Death

Even before his diagnosis of terminal
tuberculosis , Keats focused on death.The
end of lovers embrace, the images of an
ancient urn , the reaping of a grain , all of

these are not just symbols of death, but

instances of it.
The contemplation of beauty
In his poetry, Keats proposed the
contemplation of beauty as a way of delaying
the inevitability of death. Although we must
die eventually, we can choose to spend our
time alive in aesthetic revelry, looking at
beautiful objects and landscapes. Keatss
speakers contemplate urns (Ode on a
Grecian Urn), books (On First Looking into
Chapmans Homer [1816], On Sitting Down
to Read King Lear Once Again [1818]), birds
(Ode to a Nightingale), and stars (Bright
star, would I were stedfast as thou art
[1819]).
5. S. T. Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
-Romantic period
Historical context

Themes, style

Themes

The transformative power of the imagination

The interplay of philosophy, religious piety and poetry

Nature and the development of the individual

Motifs

Conversation poems

Delight in the natural world

Prayer

Symbols

The Sun

The Moon

Dreams and dreaming

Childhood

Innocence

Happiness

Evening/Night

6. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice

-Romantic period
Historical context

Themes, style

-The French Revolution Themes:

and Napoleonic Wars
love/reputation (woman reputation)
-English Regency society
class (social position/related to position)
marriage/women economical freedom.
pride & prejudice & tolerance
Change and transformation
Motifs
:structures, contrast and literary devices that can help us to
develop are the major themes:courtship,Journeys.
Narrative:
3rd pers omniscient Elizabeths point of view. Indirect speech
Style
Romanticism
irony
Genre:
Comedy of manners

-Victorian Period
7. Charles Dickens:

Great Expectations
David Copperfield

Historical context

Themes, style

-a time of great change: Britain

became a major imperial power
-steam power
-first used to drive industries,
ships, printing presses
-poets and novelists: chronicle
their new exciting age

Themes:
Ambition, desire of self -improv. Guilt, innocence,
maturation, affection, loyalty, victim, victimization
Narrative:
1st person n
Setting:
Mid 19th c Kent and London
Style His writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic
creativity.Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature, is his forte.
His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism

8. Lewis Carroll : Alices Adventures in Wonderland - Victorian period

Historical context

Themes, style

-a time of great change:

Britain became a major
imperial power
-steam power
-first used to drive
industries, ships, printing
presses
-poets and novelists:
chronicle their new exciting
age

Fairy tale; childrens fiction; satire; allegory;

The narrator speaks in third person, though occasionally in
first and second person. The narrative follows Alice around
on her travels, voicing her thoughts and feelings.

Themes:
Tragic inevitable loss of childhood innocence, life as a meaningless
puzzle
Setting:
Victorian era, England, Wonderland
Motifs:
dream, subversion, curious, nonsense, confusing
Narrative:
3rd pers. occasionally 1st and 2nd pers, anonymou narrator

9. Thomas Hardy: Tess of the Urbervilles

-Victorian Period
Historical context

Themes, style

-a time of great change: Britain became a

major imperial power
-steam power
-first used to drive industries, ships,
printing presses
-poets and novelists: chronicle their new
exciting age
-The critical realism of the nineteenth
century drew to its end in the works of
Thomas Hardy. We call Hardys works the
Swan Song of critical realism, for he is
undoubtedly the greatest representative of
that literary movement.

tragic novel
TONE Realistic, pessimistic.
This is one of Hardys best-known and
best-constructed novels. It holds first
place among Hardys realistic writings
as a vivid protest against the urban
social order and civilization.
It is the story of an innocent country girl
whose happiness is ruined by a tragic
fate, which has its origin in the social,
economic, political and moral conditions,
in which she must live.
Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy
examines the social constraints on the lives of
those living inVictorian England, and criticises
those beliefs, especially those relating to
marriage, education and religion, that limited
people's lives and caused unhappiness
Fate or chance is another important
theme.Hardy's main characters often seem to
be held in fate's overwhelming grip.

10. G. B. Shaw: Caesar and Cleopatra

Pygmalion
- Edwardian Period
Historical context

Themes, style

The Edwardian age was also seen as a

mediocre period of pleasure between the great
achievements of the preceding Victorian age
and the catastrophe of the following war
Below the upper class, the era was marked by
significant shifts in politics among sections of
society that had been largely excluded from
wielding power in the past, such as common
labourers. Women became increasingly
politicised

-Modern Period
11. James Joyce: Ulysses

-anti romantic comedy

Style of writing
device and techniques: irony, comedy,
parody, colloquial language
- Nobel prize-winning Irish playwright
- pygmalion =Cloaked in witty humour, Shaw
examines the superficiality of class behaviour and
distinctions. It was claimed by Shaw to be a

didactic drama about phonetics, and its

antiheroic hero, Henry Higgins, is a
phonetician, but the play is a humane comedy
about love and the English class system.
Caesar and cleopatra =The plays outstanding
success rests upon its treatment of Caesar as
a credible study in magnanimity and original
morality rather than as a superhuman hero
on a stage pedestal

Historical
context

Themes, style
Ulysses' stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental
prose full of puns, parodies, and allusions as well as its rich characterisation and
broad humour, made the book a highly regarded novel in the modernist pantheon.

12.Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway

Historical context

Themes, style

-Jazz Age
-corruption
-Art Deco
-The flapper
-the new modern era
WW1

Themes:
-society and class
-suffering repression
-memory and the past
-madness
-isolation
-the lost generation after WW1
-stream of consciousness
-interior monologue
-fear of death
Motifs:
Time
Narrative
3rd pers omniscient n point of view

13. Joseph Conrad:

-Modern Period
Historical
context

Heart of Darkness; Lord Jim

Themes, style

While it addresses the timeless struggle of mans self-deception and inner conflicts,
influenced by Conrads own sense of isolation from his past, the story of Marlows
journey into the Congo also exposes the clashes, exploitation and barbarity between
European and African societies during 19th Century colonial expansionism.

14. T. S. Eliot: Waste Land

-Modern Period both american (because it was born there, but lived in London)

Historical context Themes, style

-Postmodern Period

15. William Golding: Lord of the Flies -Contemporary Age

Historical context

Themes, style

Themes:
Civilisation vs Barbarism
loss of innocence
Innate human evil
good and evil
reason and emotion
moral & morality
Motifs:
biblical parallels,
natural beauty
bullying of the weak by the strong
Narrative:
anonymous 3rd person, omniscient, characters inner thoughts
Setting:
Near future,a deserted tropical island

16. Kurt Vonnegut- Slaughterhouse- Five (DEFINITIVAT)

American Romanticism
17. Edgar Ellan Poe - The Tell Tale Heart (DEFINITIVAT)
18. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
-Transcendentalism??
Historical context

Themes, style

-The Transcendentalist Movement

-Abolitionism and Revolution
These in Hawthornes view were
episodes of threatening instability.
Abolitionism was the 19 c movement to
end slavery in the United States
-The puritan Colonies
the novel was written in the mid-19 c
,but it takes the mid-17 c for the events it
describes (1642-49)

- Hawthorne's novel is set in the early days

of America
-is very much concerned with exploring
American identity
-it's a historical novel: it's set in the early
days of Puritan settlement of America.
Symbol: red letter "A"

Narrator:
-the identity of the narrator is one of
the most obvious problems. This
difficulty is intentional. Use of ambiguity
is both a central theme and a central
technique of the novel
Themes:
Alienation
Appearance vs reality
Breaking societys rules
Individual vs society
Change and transformation
Ambiguity
Guilt and innocence
Irony
Literary allusion

18. Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass

-Romanticism
-Transcendentalism?
Historical context Themes, style

19. Emily Dickinson

American Romanticism
Transcendentalism
Historical context

Themes, style

Lincolns assassination
The Civil War
A social and religious
movement: Great Revival

Style: broken meter, unusual rhythmic patterns, assonance

-compact, forceful language characterized formally by long
disruptive dashes, heavy iambic meters and angular,
imprecise rhymes.

20. Herman Melville: Moby Dick

Historical context

Themes, style

America in the Mid-19 c

Themes:
America was in a tumultuous period, establishing its
Individual vs nature
national and international identity at the time of Moby
God and Religion
Dick was being written.
Good and Evil, Female and Masculine
Choices and Consequences
Self -reliance
Appearance and Reality

Symbol: white whale --is one of the most

important symbols in American literature
(albino)
-epic style

-Realism naturalism
21. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Historical
context

Themes, style

-slavery
-reconstruction
-Minstrel Show

Themes:
Freedom
Conscience
Race and racism
Style
Burlesque
-to critique the aristocratic pretensions of the King and Duke, and the
romantic fantasies of Tom Sawyer

22: Henry James: The portrait of a Lady

Historical
context

Themes, style

Themes:
American vs European character
this contrast is important, because most of its characters are
Americans who have been living in Europe for varying periods of time
Social and emotional maturation
Isabels social and emotional development is thrown into high relief by
James s contrast of American and European natures
Style:
Psychological realism

-Modernism
23: Eugene O'Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra
Historical context Themes, style

24: Ernest Hemingway: Short stories

Historical context Themes, style

25: F. S. Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

Historical context

Themes, style

-The Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties

Themes:
The Jazz Age began soon after WW1 and ended with the 1929
Culture Clash
stock market crash. Victorious, America experienced an economic
American Dream
expansion. After the war they pursued financial independence and
Appearance and
a freer lifestyle.
Reality
-New York City and the urban
Moral Corruption
-The Black Sox Fix of 1919
Style
Satire
Light/Dark
imagery

26: William Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom

-Modernism
Historical context :

Themes, style

The lose of the Civil War in the 19th century had

a profound impact on the south. The region not
only lost the war but also their hall way of life. The
aristocratic structure of slavery was destroyed.
black people were not at the rule of the white
Society. Only after 100 years black people were
legally free. The relationship of the blacks to
whites is depicted by Faulkner in The Sound and
the Fury Reflect that social and economic divide.
The blacks in the novel are servants. They are
role is expanded to that of a spiritual caretaker
The lost generation
A counterpoint to the bleakness that followed
1929 stock market crash and the depression In
1930 was the proliferation of the artistic
accomplishments. No other. was in America to
produce so many Important works in literature
music and art. The disillusionment inspired by the
war lead many creative artists to explore what it
meant to be American in the modern world and
what it meant to be human
a southern novel,W.Faulkner/American author,

The Sound and the Fury

Themes
Time- the central character of the four
sections of the novel cope time in a
different way. In the first section
Benjys sense of time is defective. His
thoughts move from present to past
without the ability to grasp the real
meaning of the events. Benjy is free
from time because he cannot
understand its impact in his feelings.
Quentin cannot accept the changes of
his life that time inevitably brings. His
sense of loss over innocence of his
childhood love of Caddy is
unbearable, that is why he commits
suicide. Jason, on the other hand lives
in time present, he reacts to events as
they occur, unlike Quentin who acts in
past.
In the last section of the book, Dilsey
represents another view of time, a
historical view. She embraces all of

Postmodernism
27. John Fowles - The Magus; The French Lieutenants Woman
Historical context

Themes, style, structure

Historical Context
Existentialism
Existentialism is a school of philosophical
and artistic attitudes that investigates the
nature of being. Its basic tenet is that
existence and experience rather than essence
should be emphasized. The beginnings of
existentialism can be traced to the
nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Sren
Kierkegaard and early twentieth-century
German
philosopher Martin Heidegger.
After World War II, existentialism reflected
on an absurd world devoid of a benevolent
creator/protector,
where humans must create meaning through

John Fowles was born on March 31, 1926, in a

suburb of London. was an English novelist of
international stature, critically positioned
between modernism and postmodernism.
His work reflects the influence of Jean-Paul
Sartre and Albert Camus, among others.
The story traces the relationship between a
woman, caught between the Victorian and
modern ages, and a man drawn to her
independent spirit. Charles Smithson, a young
English gentleman, becomes fascinated with
Sarah Woodruff, a social outcast in the coastal
town of Lyme Regis, who is known as
Tragedy, or in a more pejorative sense as the
French lieutenants woman. Rumors suggest
that she gazes continually at the sea, waiting for

their actions and take sole responsibility for

their fates. This freedom and responsibility
can, however, cause an overwhelming sense
of dread. Existentialism has been expressed
as a dominant theme in the literary works of
Franz Kafka, Dostoevsky, Camus, Jean-Paul
Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.
The New Woman
In the last half of the nineteenth century,
cracks began to appear in the Victorians
seemingly stable universe. In 1859, Charles
Darwins Origin of Species sparked debates
on religious ideology and the development of
the human. In 1867, Karl Marx published the
first volume of Das Kapital, which would
challenge notions of class structures and their
economic underpinnings. Robert Huffaker
writes, These eminent Victorians, steadily
and without any
violent action, helped to shatter the age in
which they livedits faith, morality,

the sailor who seduced her to return. Charles

eventually risks his own social ostracism when
he breaks off his engagement to a perfectly
respectable young woman to pursue Sarah.
Readers are never given a definite conclusion to
the story as they are left to choose among three
possible endings. Fowless innovative narrative
technique,
which allows readers to become an active part
in the creation of his novel, provides the
framework for a fascinating story of passion,
the constraints of class, and the struggle for
freedom.
Themes:
Social Constraints
Each character in the novel is constrained in
some way by Victorian society. Tina has never
been encouraged to explore her sexuality and so
she is afraid of any intimacy with Charles. As a
result, Charles gravitates to Sarah, who exhibits
a more sensual nature. Charles is caught up by

confidence. During this period, feminist

thinkers contributed to the shattering of
traditional social mores as they began to
engage in a rigorous investigation of female
identity as it related to all aspects of a
womans life.
The most radical thinkers supporting
feminism declared the institution of
marriage to be a form of slavery and thus
recommended its abolition. They rejected the
notion that motherhood should be the
ultimate goal of all women.

his comfortable position as an English

gentleman, which affords him the opportunity
to leisurely dabble in his scientific pursuits and
to be in control of his romantic relationships.
Yet, he risks banishment from his class if he
loses his wealth or behaves in a socially
unacceptable way.
Sarah has faced social constraints throughout
her life. Born into the working class but
educated as a lady, she fits into neither world.
She becomes a social pariah, however, when
rumors surface that she has been seduced by a
French lieutenant and are reinforced by her
daily position on the Cobb, gazing longingly
out to sea.
Freedom
Tina never experiences freedom since she does
not allow this evolution. Her nature is not
strong enough to stand up to the conventions of
her world and take a more active part in the
determination of her future. She is ultimately

controlled by Charles actionshis proposal of

marriage and later his breaking of their
engagement
From the beginning of the novel, Sarah resists
the restrictions of her age. She allows others to
believe that she has been seduced by her French
lieutenant, which pushes her outside the
boundaries of respectable society. Her search
for independence leads her to the bohemian
Pre-Raphaelites in London. She refuses to let
others dictate her future,
deciding when and if she wants to enter into a
relationship with Charles
Style
The novels narrative is postmodern in that it
focuses on the self-conscious act of the author
telling a story. Fowles discards the traditional,
omniscient, Victorian narrator who knows
everything about the characters and shares this
information with the readers. The narrator in
The French Lieutenants Woman, who identifies

himself as the author,

breaks into the story continuously, providing
background information, but also confounding
readers expectations about narrative continuity
and clarity. He often moves back and forth in
time. For example, he interrupts his description
of Lyme Regis by mentioning Jane Austens use
of the Cobb in her novel Persuasion, which was
written approximately fifty years before The
French Lieutenants Womans setting date.
The novels narrative is postmodern in that it
focuses on the self-conscious act of the author
telling a story. Fowles discards the traditional,
omniscient, Victorian narrator who knows
everything about the characters and shares this
information with the readers. The narrator in
The French Lieutenants Woman, who identifies
himself as the author,
breaks into the story continuously, providing
background information, but also confounding
readers expectations about narrative continuity

and clarity. He often moves back and forth in

time.
For example, he interrupts his description of
Lyme Regis by mentioning Jane Austens use of
the Cobb in her novel Persuasion, which was
written approximately fifty years before The
French Lieutenants Womans setting date.
He also refuses to give us a clear portrait of
Sarah, who remains enigmatic throughout the
novel. This more modern narrative sensibility
suggests that no one can ever know anyone
completely,
that some mystery always remains, and that
knowledge of others is based on individual
perceptions, not universal truths. As he
continually breaks into the narrative,
identifying himself in the role of storyteller, the
narrator interrupts the readers suspension of
disbelief by continually calling attention to the
fictional nature of the tale. This interruption is
heightened by the three endings he provides.

Structure
The first ending is a traditional Victorian
conclusion. Charles marries the sweetly
conservative
Tina, deciding that she would provide him with
more stability and thus he would retain a secure
position in society. He would have risked social
ostracism if he had pursued Sarah. The narrator,
however, refuses to end in such a conventional
way, and so has Charles only imagine this
ending. The narrator reappears after he discards
the first ending just as Charles begins his search
for Sarah. He sits with a dozing Charles on the
train, considering his characters fate and
eventually constructing two possible
conclusions. The second ending offers a more
modern, albeit still romantic, conclusion, as
Charles and Sarah reunite. Refusing to end
there, the narrator reappears, this time as an
impresario, sets his watch back fifteen minutes,
and constructs the final ending, in which

Charles is alone. The presentation of these

alternate endings forces the reader to recognize
the fictional nature of the work and also
ultimately to participate in its construction.