1. Illustrate the basic concept of literature as you understand it!
Answer :
According to Hudson, “literature is a vital record of what men have seen in life, what they have experienced of it, what they have thought and felt about those aspects of it which have the most immediate and enduring interest for all of us. It is thus fundamentally an expression of life through the medium of language.
My opinion about literature is according to Hudson above, people feelings expression that always happened anytime, in their aspects of life such as sadness, happiness, all of aspects in their life will be represent by their on way, in this condition on Literature we use words. Language that have a meaningful effect that express their feelings at all we conclude as literature. So literature is very useful in our life, not only for formal literature, lecture study, but also in daily life, conversation, or everything we use it, for refreshing our mind, or to make the situation be a comfortable time in life, sometimes we use it, and very recommended to use, because literature is the important thing in our life, it can change our life to make our life more colourful than before.
Somebody will be happy if we creative with a word, beside we can easily express ourselves, the literature make us comfortable to make somebody else happy, and losing his depression,and decreasing a boredom. At the same time we can do two things : express feelings, and entertain people. Like in Indonesia we will see a new word “cius miapa” means serius demi apa, and in American “I’m gonna” means I’m going to, very simple but very useful.
Question :
1. Review the characteristics of each
periods illustrated above!
Answer :
1. The characteristics of The Old English Period (-1066)
The
characteristics of The Old English Period (-1066) are The pronunciation of Old
English words differs somewhat from that of Modern English words. Especially
the long vowels have changed a great deal. Take the Old English word stān for
example. The word stān is the same word as the Modern English word stone, but the
vowel is different, The a sound has shifted to the sound of o in Modern
English.
Other vowels have also undergone
changes, e.g.
fōt (Old English ) —— foot (Modern
English)
cēne (Old English ) —— keen (Modern
English)
hū (Old English ) —— how (Modern English)
Old
English represented the sound of th by p and ð as in the word wiρ (O. E.) ——
with (Mod. E.), and the word ðā (O. E.) —— then (Mod. E.), the sound of sh by
sc as in scēap (O. E.) —— sheep (Mod. E.) or scēotan (O. E.) —— shoot (Mod.
E.), and the sound of k by c as in cynn (O. E.) —— kin (Mod. E.) or nacod (O.
E.) —— naked (Mod. E.).
The
vocabulary of Old English consisted mainly of Anglo-Saxon words. But when the
Norman Conquest in 1066 brought French to England much of the English
vocabulary was replaced by words borrowed from French and Latin. If we open any
Old English dictionary, we find that about 85 percent of the Old English
vocabulary was no longer in use during this period. Of course, the basic
elements of the vocabulary have remained. They express fundamental concepts of
human life, such as: mann (man); wīf (wife), cild (child), hūs (house), bern
(bench), mete (meat , food) , gærs (grass), lēaf (leaf) , fugol (fowl, bird),
gōd (good), hēah (high), strang (strong), etan (eat), drincan ( drink ), slæpan
(sleep ), libban (live ) . feohtan (fight), etc.
Old
English was a highly inflected language. It had a complete system of
declensions with four cases and conjugations. So Old English grammar differs
from Modern English grammar in declensions and conjugations.
There
are two classes of languages in the world: synthetic and analytic. A synthetic
language is one which shows the relation of words in a sentence largely by
means of inflections. An analytic language is one which indicates the relation
of words in a sentence by means of word order, prepositions or auxiliary verbs,
rather than by inflections.
Old
English is a synthetic language. Old English nouns and adjectives have four
cases: the nominative case, the genitive case, the dative case and the
accusative case. Apart from these four cases, Latin nouns have the ablative and
the locative cases. That is to say, Latin nouns have six cases just like Modern
Russian nouns.
Take a Latin sentence for example.
The sentence “Nero interfecit
Agrippinam.” (Nero killed Agrippina.) has the same meaning as the sentence
“Agrippinam interfecit Nero.” This is because the word Nero is in the
nominative case, and the word Agrippinain is in the accusative case. Therefore
no matter where these words stand, they express the same meaning.
In
Modern English, a noun used as a subject and object does not have different
forms. There remain today only two case forms: those of the nominative case and
the possessive case: man, man’s. Modern English depends upon word order to show
the relation of words in a sentence. Different word order may result in
different meaning. The sentence “Nero killed Agrippina.” is completely opposite
to the sentence “Agrippina killed Nero.” in meaning.
Old
English poems are more lengthy than necessary, because the poetry fad in that
time were epics. The idea of "chivalry" became popular here too. The
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries
brought with them the common Germanic metre; but of their earliest oral poetry,
probably used for panegyric, magic, and short narrative, little or none
survives. The earliest English prose work, the law code of King Aethelberht I
of Kent, was written within a few years of the arrival in England (597) of St.
Augustine of Canterbury. Other 7th- and 8th-century prose, similarly practical
in character, includes more laws, wills, and charters.
Poetry
The
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries
brought with them the common Germanic metre; but of their earliest oral poetry,
probably used for panegyric, magic, and short narrative, little or none
survives. For nearly a century after the conversion of King Aethelberht I of
Kent to Christianity about 600, there is no evidence that the English wrote poetry
in their own language.
Prose
The
earliest English prose work, the law code of King Aethelberht I of Kent, was
written within a few years of the arrival in England (597) of St. Augustine of
Canterbury. Other 7th- and 8th-century prose, similarly practical in character,
includes more laws, wills, and charters. According to Cuthbert, who was a monk
at Jarrow, Bede at the time of his death had just finished a translation of the
Gospel of St. John, though this does not survive.
2. The Middle English Period (10th
- 15th century)
Influence of French poetry
By
the end of the 12th century, English poetry had been so heavily influenced by
French models that such a work as the long epic Brut (c. 1200) by Lawamon, a
Worcestershire priest, seems archaic for mixing alliterative lines with rhyming
couplets while generally eschewing French vocabulary. The Brut draws mainly
upon Wace’s Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut (1155; based in turn upon Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae [History of the Kings of Britain]), but in
Lawamon’s hands the Arthurian story takes on a Germanic and heroic flavour
largely missing in Wace.
Didactic poetry
The
13th century saw a rise in the popularity of long didactic poems presenting
biblical narrative, saints’ lives, or moral instruction for those untutored in
Latin or French. The most idiosyncratic of these is the Ormulum by Orm, an
Augustinian canon in the north of England. Written in some 20,000 lines
arranged in unrhymed but metrically rigid couplets, the work is interesting
mainly in that the manuscript that preserves it is Orm’s autograph and shows
his somewhat fussy efforts to reform and regularize English spelling. Other
biblical paraphrases are Genesis and Exodus, Jacob and Joseph
Verse romance
The
earliest examples of verse romance, a genre that would remain popular through
the Middle Ages, appeared in the 13th century. King Horn and Floris and
Blauncheflour both are preserved in a manuscript of about 1250. King Horn,
oddly written in short two- and three-stress lines, is a vigorous tale of a
kingdom lost and regained, with a subplot concerning Horn’s love for Princess
Rymenhild. Floris and Blauncheflour is more exotic, being the tale of a pair of
royal lovers who become separated and, after various adventures in eastern
lands, reunited
The lyric
The
lyric was virtually unknown to Old English poets. Poems such as “Deor” and
“Wulf and Eadwacer,” which have been called lyrics, are thematically different
from those that began to circulate orally in the 12th century and to be written
down in great numbers in the 13th; these Old English poems also have a stronger
narrative component than the later productions. The most frequent topics in the
Middle English secular lyric are springtime and romantic love; many rework such
themes tediously, but some, such as “Foweles in the frith” (13th century) and
“Ich am of Irlaunde” (14th century).
Prose
Old English prose texts were copied
for more than a century after the Norman Conquest; the homilies of Aelfric were
especially popular, and King Alfred’s translations of Boethius and Augustine
survive only in 12th-century manuscripts. In the early 13th century an
anonymous worker at Worcester supplied glosses to certain words in a number of
Old English manuscripts, which demonstrates that by this time the older
language was beginning to pose difficulties for readers.
3. The Renaissance period (16th century)
Social conditions
In
this period England’s population doubled; prices rocketed, rents followed, old
social loyalties dissolved, and new industrial, agricultural, and commercial
veins were first tapped. Real wages hit an all-time low in the 1620s, and
social relations were plunged into a state of fluidity from which the merchant
and the ambitious lesser gentleman profited at the expense of the aristocrat
and the labourer, as satires and comedies current from the 1590s complain
The race for cultural development
The
third complicating factor was the race to catch up with Continental
developments in arts and philosophy. The Tudors needed to create a class of
educated diplomats, statesmen, and officials and to dignify their court by
making it a fount of cultural as well as political patronage. The new learning,
widely disseminated through the Erasmian (after the humanist Desiderius
Erasmus) educational programs of such men as John Colet and Sir Thomas Elyot
Development of the English language
The
prevailing opinion of the language’s inadequacy, its lack of “terms” and innate
inferiority to the eloquent Classical tongues, was combated in the work of the
humanists Thomas Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke, whose treatises on
rhetoric, education, and even archery argued in favour of an unaffected
vernacular prose and a judicious attitude toward linguistic borrowings.
Sidney and Spenser
With
the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s contributors
suddenly began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new Renaissance
“universal man”: a courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose Defence of
Poesie includes the first considered account of the state of English letters.
Sidney’s treatise defends literature on the ground of its unique power to
teach, but his real emphasis is on its delight, its ability to depict the world
not as it is but as it ought to be.
Elizabethan lyric
Virtually
every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few, if any, failed to
write one that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing
prose fiction with lyric interludes, begun in the Arcadia, was continued by
Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably in the latter’s Rosalynde [1590], the
source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It [c. 1598–1600]), and in the theatres
plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly.
The sonnet sequence
The
publication of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella in 1591 generated an equally
extraordinary vogue for the sonnet sequence, Sidney’s principal imitators being
Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Fulke Greville, Spenser, and Shakespeare; his
lesser imitators were Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, Giles Fletcher the
Elder, Lodge, Richard Barnfield, and many more.
Other poetic styles
Sonnet
and lyric represent one tradition of verse within the period, that most
conventionally delineated as Elizabethan, but the picture is complicated by the
coexistence of other poetic styles in which ornament was distrusted or turned
to different purposes; the sonnet was even parodied by Sir John Davies in his
Gulling Sonnets (c. 1594) and by the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell.
Prose styles, 1550–1600
Prose
was easily the principal medium in the Elizabethan period, and, despite the
mid-century uncertainties over the language’s weaknesses and strengths—whether
coined and imported words should be admitted; whether the structural modeling
of English prose on Latin writing was beneficial or, as Bacon would complain, a
pursuit of “choiceness of phrase” at the expense of “soundness of argument”—the
general attainment of prose writing was uniformly high, as is often manifested
in contexts not conventionally imaginative or “literary,” such as tracts,
pamphlets, and treatises.
Shakespeare’s works
William
Shakespeare, a supreme genius whom it is impossible to characterize briefly.
Shakespeare is unequaled as poet and intellect, but he remains elusive. His
capacity for assimilation—what the poet John Keats called his “negative
capability”—means that his work is comprehensively accommodating; every
attitude or ideology finds its resemblance there yet also finds itself subject
to criticism and interrogation
4. The Restoration Period (17th century)
Literary reactions to the political climate
For
some, the restoration of King Charles II in 1660 led many to a painful
revaluation of the political hopes and millenarian expectations bred during two
decades of civil war and republican government. For others, it excited the
desire to celebrate kingship and even to turn the events of the new reign into
signs of a divinely ordained scheme of things.
The defeated republicans
The
greatest prose controversialist of the pre-1660 years, John Milton, did not
return to that mode but, in his enforced retirement from the public scene,
devoted himself to his great poems of religious struggle and conviction,
Paradise Lost (1667, revised 1674) and Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes
(both 1671).
Writings of the royalists
Royalists
also resorted to biography and autobiography to record their experiences of
defeat and restoration. Three of the most intriguing are by women: the life
written by Margaret, duchess of Newcastle, of her husband (1667) and the
memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, and of Anne, Lady Halkett. The latter two were
both written in the late 1670s but as private texts, with no apparent thought
of publication
Writings of the Nonconformists
John
Bunyan’s Grace Abounding (1666), written while he was imprisoned in Bedford
jail for nonconformity with the Church of England, similarly relates the
process of his own conversion for the encouragement of his local, dissenter
congregation. It testifies graphically to the force, both terrifying and
consolatory, with which the biblical word could work upon the consciousness of
a scantily educated, but overwhelmingly responsive, 17th-century believer.
Drama by Dryden and others
Dryden,
as dramatist, experimented vigorously in all the popular stage modes of the
day, producing some distinguished tragic writing in All for Love (1677) and Don
Sebastian (1689); but his greatest achievement, Amphitryon (1690), is a comedy.
In this he was typical of his age. Though there were individual successes in
tragedy (especially Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved [1682] and Nathaniel Lee’s
Lucius Junius Brutus [1680]), the splendour of the Restoration theatre lies in
its comic creativity.
Dryden
A
poetic accomplishment of quite another order is that of John Dryden. He was 29
years old when Charles II returned from exile, and little writing by him
survives from before that date. However, for the remaining 40 years of his
life, he was unwearyingly productive, responding to the challenges of an
unstable world with great formal originality and a mastery of many poetic
styles. Contemporaries perhaps saw his achievements differently from
21st-century readers.
The court wits
Among
the subjects for gossip in London, the group known as the court wits held a
special place. Their conduct of their lives provoked censure from many, but
among them were poets of some distinction who drew upon the example of
gentlemen-authors of the preceding generation (especially Sir John Suckling,
Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller, the last two of whom themselves survived
into the Restoration and continued to write impressive verse).
Diarists
Two
great diarists are among the most significant witnesses to the development of
the Restoration world. Both possessed formidably active and inquisitive
intelligences. John Evelyn was a man of some moral rectitude and therefore
often unenamoured of the conduct he observed in court circles; but his
curiosity was insatiable, whether the topic in question happened to be Tudor
architecture, contemporary horticulture, or the details of sermon rhetoric
Chroniclers
The
Restoration, in its turn, bred its own chroniclers. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford
antiquarian, made in his Athenae Oxonienses (1691–92) the first serious attempt
at an English biographical dictionary. His labours were aided by John Aubrey,
whose own unsystematic but enticing manuscript notes on the famous have been
published in modern times under the title Brief Lives.
Locke
The
greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton
and some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an
“underlabourer” to what today is called a “scientist.” The philosopher’s role,
according to Locke, was to clear up misunderstandings, purge language of its
mystifications, and call us to acknowledge the modesty of what we can know.
Major genres and major authors of the period
A
comparable preference for an unembellished and perspicuous use of language is
apparent in much of the nontheological literature of the age. Thomas Sprat, in
his propagandizing History of the Royal Society of London (1667), and with the
needs of scientific discovery in mind, also advocated “a close, naked natural
way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness.”
5. The Neo - Classical Period
(18th century)
Publication of political literature
The
expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press.
During the next 20 years there were to be 10 general elections. These two
factors combined to produce an enormous growth in the publication of political
literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert Harley, saw the potential
importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering electorate,
and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses.
Journalism
The
avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading
matter generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and
fictional maneuvers, assisted in preparing the way for the astonishing growth
in popularity of narrative fiction during the subsequent decades. It also
helped fuel the other great new genre of the 18th century: periodical
journalism.
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander
Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles;
but from about 1711 onward, his more-influential friendships were with Tory
intellectuals. His early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on
Criticism (1711) combining ambition of argument with great stylistic assurance
and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an ingenious, late-Stuart variation on the
17th-century mode of topographical poetry
Defoe
Such
ambitious debates on society and human nature ran parallel with the
explorations of a literary form finding new popularity with a large audience,
the novel. Daniel Defoe came to sustained prose fiction late in a career of
quite various, often disputatious writing. The variety of interests that he had
pursued in all his occasional work (much of which is not attributed to him with
any certainty) left its mark on his more-lasting achievements
Other novelists
The
work of these five giants was accompanied by experiments from a number of other
novelists. Sarah Fielding, for instance, Henry’s sister, wrote penetratingly
and gravely about friendship in The Adventures of David Simple (1744, with a
sequel in 1753). Charlotte Lennox in The Female Quixote (1752) and Richard
Graves in The Spiritual Quixote (1773) responded inventively to the influence
of Miguel de Cervantes, also discernible in the writing of Fielding, Smollett,
and Sterne.
Poets and poetry after Pope
Eighteenth-century
poetry after Pope produced nothing that can compete with achievements on the
scale of Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, but much that was vital was
accomplished. William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric
Subjects (1747), for instance, displays great technical ingenuity and a
resonant insistence on the imagination and the passions as poetry’s true realm.
The odes also mine vigorously the potentiality of personification as a medium
for poetic expression.
6. The Romantic period (19th
century)
The nature of Romanticism
As
a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years
of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, “Romantic” is indispensable
but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled “Romantic movement” at
the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves
Romantics. Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09
was a clear distinction established between the “organic,” “plastic” qualities
of Romantic art and the “mechanical” character of Classicism.
Poetry
Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
Useful
as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little
conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of
the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express their
feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the
age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state
of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary
thought.
The novel: from the Gothic novel to Austen and Scott
The
death of Tobias Smollett in 1771 brought an end to the first great period of
novel writing in English. Not until the appearance of Jane Austen’s Sense and
Sensibility in 1811 and Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley in 1814 would there again
be works of prose fiction that ranked with the masterpieces of Richardson,
Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett.
Discursive prose
The
French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political
principles, a debate conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical
prose. Richard Price’s Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) was answered
by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important
early statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next
century.
Drama
This
was a great era of English theatre, notable for the acting of John Philip
Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was
not a great period of playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed
by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”) theatres created a damaging split between high
and low art forms.
7. The Victorian Period (late 19th
century)
Early Victorian literature: the age of the novel
Several
major figures of English Romanticism lived on into this period. Coleridge died
in 1834, De Quincey in 1859. Wordsworth succeeded Southey as poet laureate in
1843 and held the post until his own death seven years later. Posthumous
publication caused some striking chronological anomalies. Percy Bysshe
Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry was not published until 1840. Keats’s letters
appeared in 1848 and Wordsworth’s Prelude in 1850.
Victorian literary comedy
Victorian
literature began with such humorous books as Sartor Resartus and The Pickwick
Papers. Despite the crisis of faith, the “Condition of England” question, and
the “ache of modernism,” this note was sustained throughout the century. The
comic novels of Dickens and Thackeray, the squibs, sketches, and light verse of
Thomas Hood and Douglas Jerrold, the nonsense of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll,
and the humorous light fiction of Jerome K. Jerome and George Grossmith and his
brother Weedon Grossmith are proof that this age
The Victorian theatre
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
Late Victorian literature
“The
modern spirit,” Matthew Arnold observed in 1865, “is now awake.” In 1859
Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection. Historians, philosophers, and scientists were all beginning to apply
the idea of evolution to new areas of study of the human experience.
Traditional conceptions of man’s nature and place in the world were, as a
consequence, under threat. Walter Pater summed up the process, in 1866, by
stating that “Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation
of the ‘relative’ spirit in place of the ‘absolute.’ ”
Early Victorian nonfiction prose
Carlyle
may be said to have initiated Victorian literature with Sartor Resartus. He continued
thereafter to have a powerful effect on its development. The French Revolution
(1837), the book that made him famous, spoke very directly to this consciously
postrevolutionary age. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
(1841) combined the Romantic idea of the genius with a further statement of
German transcendentalist philosophy, which Carlyle opposed to the influential
doctrines of empiricism and utilitarianism.
Early Victorian verse
Tennyson
Despite
the growing prestige and proliferation of fiction, this age of the novel was in
fact also an age of great poetry. Alfred Tennyson 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. A
decade later, in Poems (1842), Tennyson combined in two volumes the best of his
early work with a second volume of more-recent writing. The collection
established him as the outstanding poet of the era.
8. The Modern Period (20th
century)
From 1900 to 1945
The Edwardians
The
20th century opened with great hope but also with some apprehension, for the
new century marked the final approach to a new millennium. For many, humankind
was entering upon an unprecedented era. H.G. Wells’s utopian studies, the aptly
titled Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon
Human Life and Thought (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1905), both captured and
qualified this optimistic mood and gave expression to a common conviction that
science and technology would transform the world in the century ahead
Literature after 1945
Increased
attachment to religion most immediately characterized literature after World
War II. This was particularly perceptible in authors who had already established
themselves before the war. W.H. Auden turned from Marxist politics to Christian
commitment, expressed in poems that attractively combine classical form with
vernacular relaxedness. Christian belief suffused the verse plays of T.S. Eliot
and Christopher Fry. While Graham Greene continued the powerful merging of
thriller plots with studies of moral and psychological ambiguity that he had
developed through the 1930s
The 21st century
As
the 21st century got under way, history remained the outstanding concern of
English literature. Although contemporary issues such as global warming and
international conflicts (especially the Second Persian Gulf War and its
aftermath) received attention, writers were still more disposed to look back.
Bennett’s play The History Boys (filmed 2006) premiered in 2004; it portrayed
pupils in a school in the north of England during the 1980s.
Question :
2. List some outstanding figures,
along with their works, in every period!
Answer :
1. The Old English Period (-1066)
The
most famous Old English manuscript is the Beowulf manuscript, Cotton Vitellius
A.xv. Like the Vercelli and Exeter books, the Beowulf ms. is unique, surviving
in one copy now in the British Library. The Junius Manuscript, another unique
manuscript of Old English poetry, includes the sacred poems Genesis and Exodus
and others. The Junius ms. is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
2. The Middle English Period (10th
- 15th century)
Chaucer and Gower
Geoffrey
Chaucer, a Londoner of bourgeois origins, was at various times a courtier, a
diplomat, and a civil servant. His poetry frequently (but not always
unironically) reflects the views and values associated with the term courtly.
It is in some ways not easy to account for his decision to write in English,
and it is not surprising that his earliest substantial poems, the Book of the
Duchess (c. 1370) and the House of Fame (1370s), were heavily indebted to the
fashionable French courtly love poetry of the time.
3. The Renaissance period (16th century),
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliete. Sidney and
Spenser,With the work of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, Tottel’s
contributors suddenly began to look old-fashioned. Sidney epitomized the new
Renaissance “universal man”: a courtier, diplomat, soldier, and poet whose
Defence of Poesie includes the first considered account of the state of English
letters.
4. The Restoration Period (17th century)
Locke
The
greatest philosopher of the period, John Locke, explicitly acknowledges Newton
and some of his fellow “natural philosophers” in the opening of his An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke declared himself to be an
“underlabourer” to what today is called a “scientist.”
John Dryden
The
Conquest of Granada (1670). For the Preface to the printed version of the play,
Dryden argued that the drama was a species of epic poetry for the stage, that,
as the epic was to other poetry, so the heroic drama was to other plays.
Consequently, Dryden derived a series of rules for this type of play.
5. The Neo - Classical Period
(18th century)
Samuel Richardson
Samuel
Richardson was an 18th-century English writer and printer. He is best known for
his three epistolary novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, Clarissa: Or the
History of a Young Lady and The History of Sir Charles Grandison.
Daniel Defoe
Daniel
Defoe, born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer
and spy, now most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe.
6. The Romantic period (19th
century)
Jane
Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in 1811 and Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley in 1814
7. The Victorian Period (late 19th
century)
Hazlitt’s
essays in The Spirit of the Age (1825) were echoed by Mill’s articles of the
same title in 1831, by Thomas Carlyle’s essays Signs of the Times (1829) and
Characteristics (1831), and by Richard Henry Horne’s New Spirit of the Age in
1844.
8. The Modern Period (20th century)
“A
Retrospect” and “A Few Don'ts” by Ezra Pound, Bennett’s play The History Boys
(filmed 2006) premiered in 2004; it portrayed pupils in a school in the north
of England during the 1980s
1. Simile
When
you liken something to another thing by using like, as, etc.(definition)
1- I wandered
lonely as a cloud
The
poet likens himself as he was wandering alone to a cloud. This simile suggests
the loneliness of the poet which resembles the loneliness of the cloud that is
moving high in the sky far away from people. Also, the poet thinks of himself
as a cloud in the sense of being free.
2- Continuous as
the stars that shine
The
poet likens the daffodils to the stars that shine in the sky in their large
number and in the way they shine. This simile suggests the endless number of
the daffodils and their shining colors.
2. Metaphor
When
you liken something to another thing without using like, as, etc. (definition)
1- What wealth
the show to me had brought:
the
poet imagines the happiness that is brought to him by the beautiful scene of
the flowers as a wealth. The poet's choice of the word "wealth" suits
his description of the flowers , in the first stanza, as being golden. This
metaphor suggests the poet's high valuation to the effect of the wonderful
nature scene on him.
3. Personification
A
figure of speech in which human attributes are given to an animal, an object,
or a concept. (definition)
1- Fluttering
and dancing in the breeze
The
poet personifies the daffodils and gives them a human attribute which is
dancing. This image suggests their happiness.
In
the first line, the poet has used the simile ‘lonely as a cloud’. He has
compared himself to a solitary cloud. Just like a cloud floats over hills and
valleys( line 2), the poet too has been rambling across the countryside. He has
also used personification by using the word ‘dancing’ thus attributing to the daffodils, a quality which is
generally associated with humans.
In
line 12, personification (‘tossing their heads’ and ‘sprightly dance’) has been
used.The poet has tried to describe the way the daffodils were bobbing about,
using these two phrases.
The
poet has referred to the waves in the nearby bay (line 13). Personification has
been used here by using the term ‘dancing’ with reference to the waves. But he
has concluded that the waves of the rippling daffodils outshone the waves in
the water (line14).Here, ‘they’ refer to the daffodils. The waves in the bay
are called ‘sparkling’ to describe the reflection of sunlight on them.
In
lines 15 and 16, Wordsworth has remarked, that a poet could not help being
happy in such a cheerful company. By referring to the daffodils as ‘jocund
company’ he has used personification.
-Language is the medium of expression in literature
-literature engages both intelect and emotion, and literature is to have your emotion deepened by your understanding, and your understanding heightened by your feelings.
-literature make a varying appeal to people of other communities.
WORDSWORTH
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.
Wordsworth says that poetry is a matter of mood and inspiration. Poetry
evolves from the feelings of the poet. Poetry’s source is the feeling in
the heart, not the ideas of the intellect. A poet cannot write under
pressure. In this regard, poetry flows out of his heart in a natural and
fluent manner. Deep emotion is the basic condition of poetry; powerful
feelings and emotions are fundamental. Without them great poetry can
not be written.THE ASPECTS OF POEM
1. Sense, the subject matter of the poem, what is the poem about.
2. Feeling, the attitude of the writer towards the subject matter.
3. Tone, the attitude of the writer towards the readers, wheter the writer is good, pessimist, or optimist, sad or happy.
4. Intention, Undoubtedly the poet writes a certain poem for he has a certain intention, at least for himself.
5 ELEMENTS
A. THOUGH
B. MOOD
C. IMAGERY
D. MELODY
E.RHYTHM
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