Appunti di English Literature 1

The English novel

What is the novel?

Genre: Fiction – Narrative

Style: Prose

Length: Extended

Purpose: Mimesis – Verisimilitude

Novel vs. romance

• A novel is a fiction or narrative, usually of a certain length written in prose. It has an extended length and its purpose is mimesis or verisimilitude. This idea of realism maybe seems in contrast with modernism. (The realism should be interpreted in an extensive way; it has some connections to reality, that can be also symbolic or abstract)
• Novel – real life and manners but can represent also a symbolic image of life or something that could happen. It is a recent invention of the 18th Century.

“The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the time in which it is written. The Romance, in lofty and elevated language, describes what never happened nor is likely to happen.”

Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 1785 (beginning of the novel)

Narrative precursors of the novel

• Heroic Epics: Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Beowulf…
• Oriental Frame Tales: A Thousand and One Nights (first English ed. 1706)
• Medieval European Romances: Arthurian tales culminating in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur (1485)
• Travel Adventures: Marco Polo, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
• Novellas: Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-53), Don Quixote (1605-15) by Miguel de Cervantes, Oroonoko (1688) by Aphra Behn

The birth of the novel: context

Rise of the novel / Rise of the middle classes. The middle class starts to become more powerful and educated. The novel is born as a more accessible form of literature.

• Social and economic changes
• Advances in printing. Books are cheaper.
• Changes in modes of distribution and literacy rates. Books start to circulate, bringing more readers (also women: we have the first women writers).

It is connected with social, economic, and political reasons, making texts available to more and more readers (middle classes, working classes, women…).

Fathers of the novel

• Daniel Defoe (1660-1731): Master of plain prose and powerful narrative
  • Reportorial: highly realistic detail
  • Robinson Crusoe, 1719; Journal of the Plague Year, 1722; Moll Flanders, 1722, and Roxana
  • The canon of the English novel was fixed by him
• Samuel Richardson (1689-1761): Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-48)
  • Epistolary
  • Sentimental
  • Morality tale: Servant resisting seduction by her employer
• Henry Fielding (1707-1754): Shamela (1741), Joseph Andrews (1742), and Tom Jones (1749)
  • Picaresque protagonists
  • Sentimental novels
  • “comic epic in prose”
  • Parody of Richardson
  • He wrote about more modern and less sentimental women

The birth of the English novel: main works

• Robinson Crusoe (England, 1719), Moll Flanders (1722), and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) by Daniel Defoe
• Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (England, 1740-1742) and Clarissa (1748) by Samuel Richardson
• Joseph Andrews (England, 1742) and Tom Jones (1746) by Henry Fielding
• Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-1767)
• Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Types of novels

• Picaresque
• Epistolary
• Sentimental
• Gothic
• Historical
• Psychological
• Realistic/Naturalistic
• Regional
• Social
• Adventure
• Mystery
• Science Fiction
• Magical Realism…

Jane Austen and the novel of manners

1775-1817: Novels dominated by the customs, manners, conventional behavior, and habits of a particular social class. Frequently the protagonists of the novels are people of the middle classes.

• Often concerned with courtship and marriage
• Realistic and sometimes satiric
• Focus on domestic society rather than the larger world. Topic is everyday life.

Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) was mainly inspired by Richardson.

Gothic novel

• Novels characterized by magic, mystery, and horror. Purpose: to comment on reality
• Settings: exotic (medieval, Oriental, etc.), castles
• Supernatural events
•  elements of romance

• 1765: Horace Walpole. The Castle of Otranto
• 1786: William Beckford. Vathek, An Arabian Tale
• 1794: Ann Radcliffe. The Mysteries of Udolpho
• 1796: Mathew Lewis. The Monk
• 1818: Mary Shelley. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus
• 1820: Charles Robert Maturin. Melmoth the Wanderer
• 1897: Bram Stoker. Dracula
• Contemporary Gothic novelists include Anne Rice and Stephen King

Novel of sentiment

• Novels in which the characters, and thus the readers, have a heightened emotional response to events. The focus is on emotional reactions, emotions, not on what happens or facts. Themes are love, pain, suffering.
• Connected to the emerging Romantic movement

• Laurence Sterne (1713-1768): Tristam Shandy (1760-67)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832): The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
• Richardson’s Pamela (1740)
• The Brontës: Anne Brontë Agnes Grey (1847), Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

Romanticism

In fiction: gothic (The Castle of Otranto), sentimental (Tristram Shandy)…

During the Romantic period (1800-1850): Austen, the Brontes, Mary Shelley…

German romanticism (Goethe, Novalis…): it is the precursor of Romanticism in general.

• In English literature, mainly Romantic poetry: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Percy B. Shelley, Blake…
• Novels are mainly gothic or sentimental – it is not connected to the romantic novel.
• During the Romantic period, we have novelists like Jane Austen, the Brontes, Mary Shelley…

Victorian Age

The end of the Romantic period

• Progress, Expansion, Mobility: progress in all aspects of society. The mobility is related to the possibility to move from one place to another (new culture of mobility). Example: book printed in London started to be read all over the country.
• Colonialism and imperialism: example ‘Heart of Darkness’: a racist novel that criticizes the attitude of the Victorian Age and the violence.
• Science, technology, and innovation: railway, telegraph, telephone…
• Despite the wars that were fought far away, there is hope for the future and progress.

Charles Dickens (1802-1870)

• By including varieties of poor people in all his novels, Dickens brought the problems of poverty to the attention of his readers:
• “It is scarcely conceivable that anyone should…exert a stronger social influence than Mr. Dickens has…. His sympathies are on the side of the suffering and the frail; and this makes him the idol of those who suffer, from whatever cause.” Harriet Martineau
• The London Times called him "pre-eminently a writer of the people and for the people . . . the 'Great Commoner' of English fiction."
• Dickens aimed at arousing the conscience of his age. He gave an idea of what Victorian Age was about: it was a very difficult time for the poor classes. He decided to write novels about working classes (it is a revolution) and so he had a strong social and political influence in announcing the poverty.

Other English Victorian novels

• Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847)
• Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847)
• The Brontes belong to the sentimental and Victorian Novel.
• William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848)
• Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836), Oliver Twist (1837), David Copperfield (1849-1850), Great Expectations (1860-1861)…
• George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872)
• Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

Romanticism: more poets

Victorian Age: more novelists

Modernism

“On or about December 1910, human character changed.” -- Virginia Woolf

1910: made-up date. There was something that was happening and changing in society.  the “arrival”, the birth of Modernism.

• Halley’s comet; First post-impressionist exhibition (Roger Fry and Clive Bell); changes after the death of Edward VII (May 1910); political instability; Freud; Cubism; Bergson, who is a philosopher that changed the perception of time (time as a form of duration)
• “Modernism” designates an international artistic movement, flourishing from the 1880s to the end of WW II (1945), known for radical experimentation and rejection of the old order of civilization and 19th-century optimism; a reaction against Realism and Naturalism
• “Modernism” implies historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, loss, and despair – angst -- a loss of confidence that there exists a reliable, knowable ground of value and identity. Absence of fixed values.

It is an experimental movement: it rejects realism and optimism. It implies a break with the past. Writers are detached from society, isolated.

• New sense of time and space, multiple personalities (present-past/different points of view/different places…)
• Horrors of WW I (1914-1918): with the war we have the climax of the crises (the concept of trauma is related to all of this). It brought feelings of fear and uncertainty.

Modernism: Authors

• T. S. Eliot: poems (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land) and essays (Tradition and Individual Talent). He is a mix of innovation and tradition. In fact, he has more consciousness of what came before him. On one hand, there is the importance of tradition, and on the other hand, we have the challenge to change.
• Ezra Pound: imagism
• James Joyce: he uses epiphanies (they represent deep insights that might be gained through incidents and circumstances). They are sudden discoveries of something.
• Virginia Woolf: moments of being (describes flashes of awareness that reveal a pattern hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life). Our daily life continues boring and in a routine and sometimes we experience these moments of being, which are flashes in which we get a revelation of some deeper meaning of life.

Stream of consciousness: James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

• James Joyce (1882-1941): The Dubliners, Portrait of an Artist, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake
• Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando
• Narration that mimics the ebb and flow of thoughts of the waking mind. In the Stream of Consciousness (SoC), we are inside the mind of the protagonists and we see their thoughts
• Association of ideas, thought processes… the writing is not coherent because our minds are not coherent. When you are inside the mind of someone, you can see the association that the mind creates, which sometimes may not be evident or logical to anyone.
• It is sometimes called ‘Interior monologue’ (refers to the form: we are inside the mind of the protagonists. Thoughts can be coherent) / Stream of consciousness (refers to the content: we are inside the mind of the protagonist and we are following his thought processes, his consciousness. Sudden thoughts)
• Uninhibited by grammar, syntax, or logical transitions: more in Joyce’s. no punctuation or grammatical coherence.
• A mixture of all levels of awareness – sensations, thoughts, memories, associations, reflections. What is important is not what happens outside, but what happens inside the mind of the protagonists. In Modernism, frequently most of the events happen inside the mind of the protagonists.
• Emphasis on how something is perceived rather than on what is perceived, the feelings of the protagonists.

Post-Modernism

• “Postmodernism” is widely used to define contemporary (post-1970s) culture, technology, and art – an age transformed by information technology, shaped by electronic images, and fascinated with popular art. We normally speak about the Post-Modern Age in general
• Rejects the elitism and difficulty of Modernism (style of writing was complex, the writers tried to detach themselves from everyday life). In Post-Modernism, we start to get a confusion and ambiguity between high culture and low culture, trying to create more popular forms of art.
• Postmodernism celebrates and focuses on the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence. Also, Modernism has this aspect of fragmentation, but it refuses it (it was new and writers can’t accept it), while post-modernism celebrates it, celebrating the impossibility of lack of coherence and meaning of the world (playing with nonsense: there is a deeper reflection on fiction and language itself).
• “The world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just play with nonsense.”
• Emphasis on reflexivity – fictions about fiction – metafiction: we realize that on a deeper level what writers want to say is something deeper about the meaning of language, what language can do (about the crises of the novel..). They write novels that are about novels.

What is literary theory?

Behind literature studies, there is a "Literary theory”: actually, it is the body, group, of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature.

• The ideas and methods that we use in literature are usually inspired by other disciplines (philosophy, art, ..)
• These theories reveal the meaning of a literary work: we can interpret a work of art in many different ways, as long as we have a theory that supports it.

• We can study things such:
  • Relationship between author and work: most traditional type of criticism. Studying the biography of the author and applying that to what it wrote (Conrad's experience as a sailor influences his text Heart of Darkness)
  • The significance of race, class, and gender (Heart of Darkness: distinctions between colonizers and colonized; feminist works, issues having to do with the situation of women; ex transsexual figure in Orlando
  • The role of context (is it still important? – see Roland Barthes’ “death of the author”)
  • The relevance of linguistic elements: usually used with poetry, but also in fiction.

Literary Theory as Cultural Theory

• A series of concepts and intellectual assumptions, ideas in general that we use
• Principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts: we can use literature proper, we read only the text
• as well as from knowledge external to the text: we will not only take into account what is inside the text, the content, but also what is outside the text, other disciplines

For example, Chinua Achebe (post-colonial critical period): perspective informed by a postcolonial literary theory (exploitation and racism)

Origins of literary theory

• History of philosophy (all the knowledge in the past was philosophy)
• Plato: arbitrary relationship between words and things  Structuralism and Post-structuralism (XX century)

History of modern literary theory

• Europe, XIX century
• Germany: "higher criticism” (based on the bible)
• France: Charles Augustin Saint Beuve. It gave origin to a more traditional literary theory. Biographic interpretation of the authors.
• Friedrich Nietzsche: facts are not facts until they have been interpreted. The work of art is nothing without the readers and the critics.

«THEORY»

• From the Greek «theoria»
  • Thea “a view” + horan “to see”
  • A view of the stage (in theater), it is the way in which we see something.

Major trends in XX-century literary theory

• Traditional literary criticism: studied the biography of the authors and applied it to what they wrote.
• Formalism (Roman Jakobson): the focus is on the form. It underlines the structure, the form, and the strategies. New Criticism: United States, 30s-40s; we have close reading, which is very precise and in its minimum detail.
• Marxism and Critical Theory (within we have the Frankfurt School: Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno)
• Marxism: political theory, social problems, class distinctions. Aesthetic aspects are not so important, but they focus on ethical, political, and philosophical theories.
• Critical theory: it focuses on problems of mass culture (cinema, advertising..), it is against consumer society.
• UK: Raymond Williams (Cultural Materialism and Cultural Studies – Movement), Terry Eagleton
• USA: Frank Lentricchia, Fredric Jameson – It is in this context that ‘Literature and Culture’ is born.
• Structuralism (Ferdinand de Saussure: Signifier/signified; Levi-Strauss; Todorov; Genette): it is another type of formalism, it brings literature to a more scientific level. Problems of representation  recreate the idea in language.
• Roland Barthes: anticipates the idea of post-structuralism. He said that the difficulty of language is to create the reality
• Poststructuralism: language can never be coherent. It develops into deconstruction (literally movement that destroys the text). It is no longer possible to speak about reality, because it is all a mental process.

Deconstruction (Derrida; Yale School: Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann, Paul de Man)

• Reader-response criticism (Stanley Fish): it focuses on the importance of reading
• Then it’s all CULTURAL STUDIES.
• Lacanian psychoanalysis: critical theories
• Michel Foucault: interpretation of literary texts in the content of power.
• Ethnic Studies and Postcolonial Criticism
• Frantz Fanon, Chinua Achebe, Appiah…
• Edward Said: Orientalism
• Homi Bhabha