anglo-american literature

LiteratureAnglo-American

Ignatius Joseph N Estroga MA-EngLiceo de Cagayan University, Philippines

ignatius joseph n estroga

•The name "England" is derived from the Old English name ENGLALAND, which means

“LAND OF THE ANGLES"


Old English(or Anglo-Saxon) 450-1066

•Few surviving texts with little in common.•Language closer to modern German than modern English.•Frequently reflect non-English influence.•Beowulf, “The Wanderer”


I. The Anglo – Saxon Period:

Britain before the Anglo- Saxons

The Germanic InvasionsAnglo- Saxon SocietyAnglo – Saxon Literature

England before the English

• When the Romans arrived, they found the land inhabited by “Britons.”

• known as the Celts• Stonehenge• no written language• absorbed into the

Latin speaking Roman society

Romans withdraw, leaving the Britons/Celts behindInvasions from the Northern Europe

Anglo-Saxon bring Germanic languagesignatius joseph n estroga

• By 600, Anglo-Saxons conquer the Britons• language

becomes more Germanic

• still retains some Latin

• The Anglo-Saxons’ two urgings--war and wandering become part of the oral tradition• Beowulf is an

example of an Anglo-Saxon hero tale

Beowulf battles Grendel’s mother



•Literature: Beowulf , the earliest literature, the national epic of the Anglo-Saxon, one of the striking features - the use of alliteration

•Alliteration

• By 700, Christian missionaries arrive to convert the pagans• Latin (the

language of the Church) returns

• King Alfred• the Britons

become organized

• first true king of the Britons

• period of prosperity

King Alfred brings an age of prosperityignatius joseph n estroga


Middle English (1066-1500)

•Works frequently of a religiously didactic content.•Written for performance at court or for festivals.


TriviaWho is the Father of

English Literature?

Geoffrey Chaucer

His family name derives from the French chausseur, meaning

"shoemaker".


• known as the Father of English literature

• is widely considered the greatest English poet of the middle Ages

• was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.


• Social background: the Norman conquest under William, Duke of Normandy, the battle of Hastings in 1066; the mark of establishment of feudalism

• Literature: Langland; Chaucer

• Allegory

• Ballad

• Romance

The 3 Estates in the Middle Ages• The idea of estates, or

orders, was encouraged during the Age, but this ordering was breaking down.

• Clergy

• Latin chiefly spoken, those who pray, purpose was to save everyone’s soul

• Nobles

• French chiefly spoken, those who fight, purpose was to protect—allow for all to work in peace—and provide justice

• Commoners

• English spoken, those who work, purpose was to feed and clothe all above them


http://wwnorton.com/nael/nto/middle/estates/imestates.htm

feudalism • The economic system of much of the Middle Ages (800-1100)

• Commoners (peasants) lived on a feudal manor. The lord of the manor gave his vassals (the peasants) land to farm.

• In return, the vassals received protection from roving bandits. Yet they were taxed and had to surrender a portion of their crops to the lord.

• it was better to be a lord than a vassal!

• Feudalism is important as it created ties of obedience and fostered a sense of loyalty between the vassals and their lord.

A tenant (vassal) renews his oath of fealty to his lordignatius joseph n estroga

Chivalry • A product of feudalism,

chivalry was an idealized system of manners and morals

• Restricted to nobility

• The Medieval knight was bound to the chivalric code to be loyal to…

• God

• his lord

• his lady

• Chivalric ideals include...• benevolence

• brotherly love

• politeness

• Sir Gawain is an example ignatius joseph n estroga


Characteristics of Medieval Literature

• Heroism• from both Germanic and Christian traditions,

sometimes mingled• Presentations of idealized behavior

• literature as moral- loyalty to king -Chivalry• Romance

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight• A narrative in prose or verse that tells of the adventures

and heroic exploits of chivalric heroes• exploits of knights- often a supernatural element

involved• Christian message

• concern with salvation and the world to come• no interest in social change

• until the late 14th century• Chaucer signals new thinking, up-ending social

order


The High Middle Ages

• These people wrote music, but they also wrote poetry. Cretien de Troyes, Walter von der Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Marie de France are examples.

a.Arthur and his knights, the Song of Roland, the Niebelungenlied,

b.and literary material based on the lives of Alexander the Great and Charlemagne.

c.The movement was important in promoting the idea of a code of chivalry.


The High Middle Ages

d. During the High Middle Ages, other works became important, such as ancient Greek philosophy, translated into Latin from Arabic. This brought about a new interest in philosophy, religion, and science.

e. Religion remained important. One example was the works of Thomas Aquinas. Another was Bonaventure's Life of Francis of Assisi.


The Late Middle Ages • This had truly great products

with

a.the Divine Comedy, by Dante, and

b.The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Interest in Arthurian legends also continued, and both Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur were products of this time.


English Renaissance (1500-1660)

•Influence of Aristotle, Ovid, and other Greco-Roman thinkers, as well as science and exploration.•Primarily texts for public performance (plays, masques) and some books of poetry.•William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont.


• Renaissance- marks the transition from the medieval to the modern world;

• It means rebirth or revival of letters; a historical period in which thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas, to introduce new ideas that expressed the interest of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.

• Two features are striking of this movement: thirsting curiosity for the classical literature and the keen interest in the activities of humanity.


• Humanism-key-note of the Renaissance; emphasis on the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life; belief in the right to enjoy the beauty of this life and the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders.

• Thomas Moore- Utopia

• Francis Bacon- Of Studies


Francis Bacon (22 January 1561 – 9 April

1626),

an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, essayist, and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. After his death, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution.

Francis Bacon


TriviaWhat are the three important uses of studies according to Francis Bacon?

• A. for happiness, for truth, and for knowledge

• B. for delight, for ornament, and for ability

• C. for judgment, for disposition, and for wisdom

• D. for personal, social, and transcendental inclinations


• Drama---the highest glory of the English Renaissance with Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson


Christopher Marlowe-

• --the most gifted of the “university wits”, Doctor Faustus, blank verse first used in his drama.


*Shakespeare---his life, his works, his status

*His life---born in 1564 in Stratford-on Avon, died in 1616

*His works---38 plays, 154 sonnets


TRIVIAWhat phrase appears on William

Shakespeare’s gravestone?

A. “May the great author rest in peace”

B. “He wrote so much that man will take years to understand everything.”

C. “He arrived on this earth with nothing. When he died, he left everything to us.”

D. “…curst be he that moves my bones.”


Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here.

Blessed be the man that spares these stones,

And cursed be he that moves my bones.


V. The Restoration Period:(17th Century)


• Social background: the clash between the King and Parliament; the Civil War between 1642-1649; Charles I was executed in 1649; the declining of Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the compromise with the feudal remnants.


John Milton-

• --a revolutionary poet, political both in his life and his art; Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes


• John Bunyan---The Pilgrim’s Progress, a religious allegory, the spiritual pilgrimage of Christian

• John Dryden---the most distinguished literary figure of the Restoration period; use of heroic couplet in his writing

• *heroic couplet---two successive lines of verse, equal in length and with rhyme.


• Metaphysical school of poetry------break away from the convention; simple diction, common speech words and cadences, actual life imagery, argument with the poet’s beloved, with god, or with himself; John Donne and Andrew Marvell.

• *John Donne---leading figure of the Metaphysical school of poetry,

• *Marvel---“To his Coy Mistress”


Neoclassical Period(Enlightenment/Age of

Reason)England 1660-1785 America 1750-1800•Reaction to the expansiveness of the Renaissance in the direction of order and restraint.•Developed in France (Moliere, Rousseau, Voltaire).


•Emphasized classical ideals of rationality and control (human nature is constant through time).•Art should reflect the universal commonality of human nature. (“All men are created equal.”)•Reason is emphasized as the highest faculty (Deism).

Neoclassical Period(Enlightenment/Age of

Reason)


Neoclassical Period•Writing should be well structured, emotion should be controlled, and emphasize qualities like wit.•England: John Locke,, Alexander Pope (Essay on Man), Jonathon Swift (Gulliver’s Travels), Henry Fielding (Tom Jones), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Pride and Prejudice).


DANIEL DEFOE: 1660-1731

was born in London, England. His real name was Daniel Foe, later changed his name to Daniel Defoe, wanting to sound more gentlemanly. He went into business, having given up an earlier intent on becoming a dissenting minister. He traveled often, selling such goods as wine and wool, but was rarely out of debt. He went bankrupt.

He wrote his world famous novel “The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe”.


•America: Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richard’s Almanac, autobiography), Thomas Paine (“Common Sense”), Thomas Jefferson (“The Declaration of Independence”), James Madison (“The Constitution of the United States”).


Romantic PeriodEngland 1785-1830America 1800-1860•Reaction against the scientific rationality of Neoclassicism and the Industrial Revolution.•Developed in Germany (Kant, Goethe).•Emphasized individuality, intuition, imagination, idealism, nature (as opposed to society & social order).


• *Romanticism---It designates a literary and philosophical theory which tends to see the individual as the very center of all life and all experience.

• It also places the individual at the center of art, making literature most valuable as an expression of his or her unique feelings and particular attitudes;

• Nature is not only the major source of poetic imagery, but also provides the dominant subject matter; Romantics also tend to be nationalistic.


Trivia

•Who is the Father of Romanticism?


William Wordsworth


•Elevation of the common man (folklore, myth).•Mystery and the supernatural.

Romantic Period

•England: Robert Burns (“To a Mouse”), William Blake (Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience), William Wordsworth (Lyrical Ballads, “Tintern Abbey,” “Intimations of Immortality,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Kahn”), Lord Byron (“Don Juan”), Percy Bysshe Shelley (“Ozymandias”), Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein), John Keats (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”), Sir Walter Scott (Ivanhoe).


Romantic PeriodAmerica: • Washington Irving (“Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of

Sleepy Hollow”), • Edgar Allan Poe (“The Raven,” Tales of the Grotesque

and Arabesque, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Philosophy of Composition”),

• James Fennimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans),• Herman Melville (Moby-Dick, Billy Budd), • Nathaniel Hawthorne (Twice-Told Tales, The Scarlet

Letter), • William Cullen Bryant (“To a Waterfowl”), • Oliver Wendell Holmes (“The Chambered Nautilus”),• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (“Paul Revere’s Ride”),• James Russell Lowell (“The First Snowfall”).


Trivia

Who is the Father of

Short Stories?


• American writer, known as a poet and critic but most famous as the first master of the short-story form, especially tales of the mystery.

• The literary merits of Poe's writings have been debated since his death, but his works have remained popular and many major American and European writers have professed their artistic debt to him.

• El Dorado video


WASHINGTON IRVING:1783-1859

was born to a wealthy New York family and received an excellent education. He was the first American writer to gain international attention. He began his writing career by creating satires about New York society. He later wrote about the Dutch influences upon the city in its early days. He attempted to give America a sense of a romantic past like that found in Europe.

His most popular work by far was “The Sketch Book”, which contains two of his most beloved stories: “The legend of Sleepy Hollow: and “ Rip van Winkle”.


HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW: 1807-1882

was one of the most widely read American poets of the 19th century. From 1835 to 1854 he was Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard. In 1884, 2 years after his death, he became the first American to be honoured with a bust in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, London.

He is best remembered for poems such as “The Song of Hiawatha” and “Paul Revere’s Ride”.


American Transcendentalism (Romantic philosophy)Named for the core belief that our spiritual nature transcends rationality and religious doctrine; thus, it is found in intuition.Developed in New England, influenced by Eastern philosophy.Pro-suffrage & abolitionist.• Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature, “The

American Scholar”), • Henry David Thoreau (Walden, “Civil

Disobedience”), • Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass).


Romantic Period video


Victorian Period (England 1832-1901)

•Named for the reign of Queen Victoria, Britain’s longest reigning monarch.•Period of stability and prosperity for Britain.•British society extremely class conscious.•Literature seen as a bridge between Romanticism and Modernism.•Generally emphasized realistic portrayals of common people, sometimes to promote social change.•Some writers continue to explore gothic themes begun in Romantic Period.


Victorian Period• Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Great

Expectations), • George Eliot (Middlemarch),• Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D’Ubervilles), • Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll

and Mr. Hyde), • Rudyard Kipling (Jungle Book), • Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland),• Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre), Emily Brontë (Wuthering

Heights), • Alfred, Lord Tennyson (In Memoriam), • Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets from the

Portuguese), • Robert Browning (“My Last Duchess”), Matthew Arnold

(“Dover Beach”), Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest).


CHARLES DICKENS: 1812-1870was a novelist who provided Victorian England with one of its greatest champions of reform.

Dickens used his novels to identify and address many problems of the nineteenth century, such as child abuse, unfair labour practices, injustices in the legal system, and weaknesses in education.

Dickens had experienced many of these problems in his own childhood, and so on. He dedicated his life to brining about social reform.

Some of his most popular novels include: “David Copperfield”, “Oliver Twist”, “A Tale of two Cities”, Christmas Carol and “Great Expectations”.


Trivia

In Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, who were the visitors

of Scrooge?


1.Ghost of Christmas Past

2.Ghost of Christmas Present

3.Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come


RUDYARD KIPLING: 1865-1936was born in Bombay, India, but attended school in England. He was an English novelist, shot-story writer and poet. After completing his education, he returned to India where he worked as a newspaper reporter for several years.

Many of Kipling’s stories and novels reflect his experiences in India and convey the importance of duty and unselfishness.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Kipling is most widely known for his works for children, especially the “Jungle Book”.


Alfred Tennyson(6 August 1809 – 6

October 1892)

• was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets.

• Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as "Break, Break, Break", "The Charge of the Light Brigade", "Tears, Idle Tears" and "Crossing the Bar".


Elizabeth Barrett Browning (6

March 1806 – 29 June 1861) • was one of the most prominent English

poets of the Victorian Era. Her poetry was widely popular in both Britain and the United States during her lifetime

• At 15 Browning became ill, suffering from intense head and spinal pain for the rest of her life, rendering her frail.

• During this time she contracted a disease, possibly tuberculosis, which weakened her further.

• They had one son, Robert Barrett Browning, whom they called Pen. Towards the end of her life, her lung function worsened, and she died in Florence in 1861


Realistic Period America 1860-1914

•Reaction against Romantic values (Civil War).•Developed in France (Balzac, Flaubert, Zola).•Emphasized the commonplace and ordinary (as opposed to the romanticized individual).•Sought to depict life as it was, not idealized.•Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), •Ambrose Bierce (“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), •William Dean Howells (A Modern Instance), •Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie).


MARK TWAIN: 1835-1910was born in a small village of Florida. His real name was Samuel Clemens, but he took his penname from a term used by the men who operated the river boats. They would call, “By the mark, twain!” This meant that the river was two (twain) feet deep.

Samuel Clemens left his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri at the age of eighteen. He began his carrier as a newspaper writer. Later in life he used memories from his childhood to create some of his most popular novels, including “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.

Mark Twain used humor to develop many serious themes in his novels and to help society see itself more clearly.


O’HENRY: 1862-1910was a well-known American short –story writer. He had to jam his living from age of fifteen and he educated himself with the help of friends.

O’Henry knew people very well., especially the ordinary people of New York. In his stories you can feel satirical criticism of the American way of life. Most of his short stories are full of warm sympathy for ordinary American people. O’Henry was the penname used by author William Sydney Porter.

O’Henry wrote many popular stories and earned a reputation as the master of surprise endings. He was especially talented at developing his characters, and at portraying city life accurately. He wrote over 600 stories, the most famous of them “The Ransom of Red Chief”, “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Furnished Room”.


Realistic Period •Naturalism – hyper-realism•Named for the belief that man is simply a higher order animal, and thus under the same natural constraints and limitations as other animals.•Controlled by heredity and environment.•Stephen Crane (Maggie: A Girl of the Street, The Red Badge of Courage), Jack London (“To Build a Fire”), Upton Sinclair (The Jungle).


•Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness), H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds), E.M. Forster (A Room with a View, A Passage to India), George Bernard Shaw (Major Barbara), A.C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy).

Edwardian Period (England 1901-1914)


Modern Period (1914-1945)•Reaction against the values which led to WWI.•Influenced by Schopenhauer (“negation of the will”), Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil), Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling), as well as Darwin and Marx.•If previous values are invalid, art is a tool to establish new values (Pound: “Make it new”).•Writers experiment with form.•Form and content reflect the confusion and vicissitudes of modern life.•Expositions and resolutions are omitted; themes are implied rather than stated.


Modern Period (1914-1945)Poetry:Ezra Pound (The Fourth Canto), T.S. Eliot (Prufrock and other Observations, The Waste Land, “The Hollow Men”), W.B. Yeats (The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, The Swans at Coole), H.D. (“Pear Tree”), Wallace Stevens (Harmonium), William Carlos Williams (“The Red Wheelbarrow,” “This Is Just to Say”), Robert Frost (Mending Wall, The Road Not Taken).


To whom did Frost dedicate his poem The Road Not Taken?


Edward Thomas


Modern Period (1914-1945)Fiction:James Joyce (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle), Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises), William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath), Thornton Wilder (Our Town, The Bridge at San Luis Rey), D.H. Lawrence (The Rainbow), Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse).


Post-Modern Period (1945-?) •Critical dispute over whether an actual period or a renewal and continuation Modernism post-WWII.•Influenced by Freud, Sartre, Camus, Derrida, and Foucault.•Deconstruction: Text has no inherent meaning; meaning derives from the tension between the text’s ambiguities and contradictions revealed upon close reading.•Some believe it leads directly to the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s.


Post-Modern Period (1945-?) Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Gabriel Garcia Marques (One Hundred Years of Solitude), William Burroughs (Naked Lunch), J.D. Salinger (A Catcher in the Rye), Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five), Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow), John Updike (Rabbit Run), Phillip Roth (Portnoy’s Complaint, American Pastoral), J.M. Coetzee (Life & Times of Michael K), Joyce Carol Oates (“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”), Margaret Atwood (The Handmaiden’s Tale), Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian), Allen Ginsberg (Howl and Other Poems), Charles Bukowski (The Last Night of the Earth Poems).


FAMOUS LANDMARKS

INENGLAND


White Cliffs of Dover


BUCKINGHAM PALACE


ST. PAUL CATHEDRAL


Kings College, Cambridge


BEN CLOCK


COAST OF CORNWALL


NATIONAL GALLERY OF LONDON


BRITISH MUSEUM


CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL


IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM


LAKE DISTRICT

ignatius joseph n estrogaSTONE HENGE


YORK MINISTER


HOUSE OF PARLIAMENT

ignatius joseph n estrogaSALISBURY CATHEDRAL


WINDSOR CASTLE


STRATFORD UPON AVON


TATE MODERN


WESTMINSTER ABBEY


TOWER BRIDGE


LONDON EYE

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