A SURVEY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE PART 2
Prepared by DR.NIKKHOO

Romanticism (1798-1832)


1- French Revolution
2- Nature
3- pessimistic
4- individual.
5- Inspiration
6- "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity" according to Wordsworth.
7- Industrial Revolution.
8- subjective ,nostalgic and melancholic, exotic.
9- strangeness in beauty.
10- Romantics believe in inspiration.
11- Keats says: if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.
12- strange fits of passion.
13- Loneliness: isolation.
14- language of the common people,

Some essayists of the Romantic period were Hazlitt and De Quincey.

William Blake (1757-1827)
Blake was a poet, mystic, artist, satirist, philosophical anarchist and engraver.
‘Milton without knowing it was on the side of Satan’.
All Religions Are One
There Is No Natural Religion,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,

America, A Prophecy,
Jerusalem
The Book of Thel.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is in prose and verse. It is a satiric attack on the dichotomy of religions.

The Book of Thel is pantheistic
‘London’

‘Chimney Sweeper’

‘An Island in the Moon’,
‘Jerusalem’,.

‘Garden of Love’ written against spiritual corruption.

‘The Divine Image’

‘Clod and the Pebble’, clod is selfless love and pebble is selfish love.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850).
Lyrical Ballads

Ode: Intimations of Immortality,
The Solitary Reaper,
Daffodils,
Strange Fits of Passion,
The Tables Turned
Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.
His master-piece is the Prelude, an autobiographical poem.
Ode: Intimations of Immortality
‘The World is So Much to Us’ .. anti-industrialization.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
He was a poet, critic, philosopher and dramatist.
collaborated with Wordsworth in ‘Lyrical Ballads’.
‘Biographia Literaria

Fancy= Mechanical
Primary Imagination
Secondary Imagination= Helps us understand the world.

‘Willing Suspension of Disbelief’:

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Kubla Khan.
Christobel

Lord Byron (1788-1842)
He was an atheist, cynic, debauchee (corrupt), womanizer.
His most famous work is Don Juan.
The themes are:
1. The vanity of ambition.

2. The absurdities of lady intellectuals
3. The hypocrisy of Platonic love.
4. The paradox of love and marriage.
5. The basic savagery of men who struggle for self -perseverance.
6. The beauty of natural love.
7. The hollowness of glory.
8. The frailty of woman.
9. Inconsistency of man.
10. Hypocrisy and boredom of English society.

Child Harold’s Pilgrimage. in four cantos written in specerian stanza.
Manfred, a Faustian tragedy.
The Giaour (a non-muslim) is an eastern narrative about Leila
Cain: A Mystery is a poetic drama. a tragedy.

The Vision of Judgement.

Beppo: A Venetian Story
Child Harold’s Pilgrimage


Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).
He was an atheist, a radical, an idealist, a philosopher,a reformer and a romantic poet.
The Necessity of Atheism,.
He married Marry Shelly, the writer of Frankenstein (a gothic novel).
The Reputation of Deism in which he attacked Christianity.
Alastor, a blank verse romance
The Revolt of Islam which is an allegorical narrative poem about reform.
Mon Blanc symbol of beauty.
Prometheus Unbound is a closet drama.

Ode to the West Wind is about French Revolution.
John Keats (1795-1821)
He was a Romantic poet and wrote pure poetry. His themes are:
1. Beauty in art and art.
2. death wish
3. Happy and unhappy love.
4. The glamour of the classical past.
5. Art for art’s sake.
He was a forerunner of ‘art for art’s sake’
‘Endymion’
Ode on a Grecian Urn
La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which is a ballad of disillusionment.
Eve of Saint Agnes
Hyperion, which is modelled on Paradise Lost.
To Autumn














Victorian Age (1832-1901)
Jane Austen (1775-1817)
She lived in the Romantic period but was rather Victorian.
She wrote novels of manners.
Pride and prejudice,
Persuasion,
Emma
Mansfield Park

The first title of Pride & Prejudice was First Impression.


Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
a historian, an essayist,a critic and a social pamphleteer.

Past and Present
On Hero Worship and the Heroic in History
Sartor Resartos is a philosophical satire.

The French Revolution is a prose-poem.
History of Fredrick the Great
Portraits of His Contemporaries


Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
A Victorian poet and poet-laureate of England.

In Memoriam is an elegy.
Ulysses, a dramatic monologue in blank verse, taken from Dante’s Inferno.

The Lady of Shallot

The Lotos-Eaters
The Idylls of the King … based on Arthurian legends.

Robert Browning (1812-1889)
He was called Mrs. Browning’s husband
My Last Duchess
The Bishop Orders His Tomb
Sordelo .

His wife, Elizabeth Barrette Browning (1806-1861) was Jamaican born
Sonnets from the Portuguese,
a novel in blank verse called Aurora Leigh.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
He is a critic of Victorian period, its corruption ..
Oliver Twist,
Great Expectations,
David Copperfield (autobiographical).
Great Expectations is the story of Pip and Estella.

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)
novelist
Jane Eyre,
Shirley,
Villette
The Professor.
Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte (1818-1848)
Wuthering Heights. It is about Heathcliff and Catherine It is a gothic novel,a ghost story and a romance. It is a sado-masocistic novel.

George Eliot (1819-1880)
She was the first serious female novelist; the first philosophical novelist.

an essay called Silly Novels by Lady Novelists
The Mill on the Floss is about Maggie and Tom,
Middle March is about Dorothea Brook and her rebellion. It is her masterpiece
Silas Marner

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
He was a poet and a critic. He is called the father of modern criticism
Touchstone Theory
‘literature is the criticism of life’.
called the Apostle of Culture.

Essays of Criticism. It is in 2 books.


‘Culture and Anarchy’
The Forsaken Merman is a poem in three parts.
Shakespeare

Empedocles on Etna

Tristram and Iseult
Sohrab and Rustum.
Dover Beach
Literature and Dogma

Merope, a Tragedy is a revenge tragedy.

Thyrsis is an elegy.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
He was a Naturalist and a Victorian novelist.

Far From the Meddling Crowd
The Mayor of Casterbridge is about Michael Hencher.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Jude the Obscure is about Jude
The Dynasts
Wessex Poems

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
art for art’s sake
The Picture of Dorian Gray.

‘The Importance of Being Ernest’.
comedies:
1- Lady Windermere's Fan
2- A Woman of No Importance
3- An Ideal Husband

Ballad of Reading Gaol
The Critic as an Artist …. an essay.






Modernism
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and Ulysses by James Joyce.
The Great novelists of this period were Woolf, Joyce and Marcel Proust.
French Symbolism
Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism
Carl Marx
Imagism (Ezra Pound)
G.M. Hopkins (a priest).

formalism and emphasis on form
Feminism (Virginia Woolf).
The role of psychology and sexual freedom especially in works of D.H. Lawrence
pessimistic
fragmentary.
Stresses and anxieties.
Nietzsche
Harold Bloom… the age of Kafka

Theatre of absurd..Eugene Ionesco …and Becket’s Waiting for Godot,
German Expressionism
Naturalism Existentialism, Symbolism, Expressionism, Absurdism, Surrealism
Imagism.
Metaphysical poetry was revived in this period.
McCarthyism,
Cold War
Vietnam War.

Henry James (1843-1916)
American
His brother, William James, was a psychologist and wrote The Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience …introduced stream of consciousness.

1- Early period: his thoughts as an American living in Europe.
2- Second period: French naturalism.
3- Third period: Mature period.

His masterpiece is The Portrait of a Lady

The American
Daisy Miller
The Beast in the Jungle

The Ambassadors.
The Death of the Lion
The Real Thing
The Turn of the Screw is a ghost story

What Maisie Knew

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Pygmalion.
He was influenced by Ibsen.
social reformer
The Quintessence of Ibsenism written in 1891 marks the beginning of modern British drama, in which he admires Ibsen
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
Saint Jone

Man and Superman
Arms and the Man.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
The Heart of Darkness.
Lord Jim
Nigger of Narcissus

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
He is the second greatest English poet in the 20th century.
The Second Coming.
wrote verse dramas
the Noble Prize in 1923.
Easter 1916.

Sailing to Byzantium
The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

Cast a cold Eye
On Life on Death
Horseman Pass by

E. M. Forster (1879-1970)
He was a novelist, short story writer and essayist. He wrote 5 novels and was a member of Bloomsbury group.
Aspects of the Novel essays
A Passage to India
Howard’s End.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Mrs. Dalloway,
To The Lighthouse
A Room of One’s Own
Modern Fiction which attacks conventions of reality.
poetic prose
‘The Hours’

Orlando
Room of One’s Own ……androgynous mind.
To the Lighthouse in 3 parts

Mrs. Dalloway
The Waves.

James Joyce (1882-1941)
very representative of modernism and a pioneer of modern novel,
Dubliners … short stories.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is about Stephen Dedalus. ….. semi-autobiographical.
Exiles.
Ulysses
Finnegan’s Wake.
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
He was a novelist, short story writer, critic, playwright and essayist.
‘Never trust the artist, trust the tale’.

Sons and Lovers
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(The Rocking Horse Winner)
Why the Novel Matters
Snake

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
He was a critic, poet, dramatist and one of the most influential 20th century writer.

Tradition and the Individual Talent.
The Waste Land is a symbol of modern world and the emptiness of modern life. The theme is spiritual dryness and the decay of western civilization.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
He even breaks the law of gravity.

Journey of the Magi spiritual death and rebirth.

Eliot was a dramatist as well. His plays had religious themes. His most famous play is Murder in the Cathedral.

His other plays are The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk.


The Hollow Men is an allusion to The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. …..to Kurtz.

He wrote two essays about metaphysical poetry: 1- Metaphysical Poets, 2- Tradition and the Individual Talent.
The Sacred Wood is his most important critical book.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
He was grandson of T. H. Huxley.
Point Counter Point,
Eyeless in Gaza,

Doors of Perception
Heaven and Hell

Brave New World is an allusion to Shakespeare’s The Tempest..

“Maybe this world is another planet’s Hell”.

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex”.

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
He was novelist, dramatist and short story writer.
Waiting for Godot. "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!”. The other important theme is lack of communication…… the phenomenology of nothingness. It says modern life is meaningless and that modern man has lost the meaning of life
Endgame
More Pricks than Kicks

W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
He was a poet and dramatist. He was British but became an American citizen.
In Memory of W. B. Yeats.

The Unknown Citizen
The Age of Anxiety

His plays are The Dance of Death, and On the Frontier.

Musée des Beaux Arts is about a painting by Brughel

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)
She was a philosopher and a novelist.
Under the Net,
The Sacred and Profane Love,
The Sea, the Sea

John Osborne (1929-1994)
Luther,
Damn You, England.
rebellion against institutions.

Look Back in Anger
‘There is no cause worth fighting for’.

Harold Pinter (1930- )
‘The drama of silence’
‘Between the Lines’.

His themes are 1- lack of communication, 2- mental disturbance, 3- Family hatred, 4- obsession and jealousy, 5- nameless menace, and 6- erotic fantasy.

His setting is usually a single room and the hero is usually threatened.

The Birthday Party

Tom Stoppard (1937- )
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Jumpers
Travesties
Arcadia
Hapgood
Every Good Boy Deserves a Favour is a criticism of communism.





William Blake (1757-1827)
1. All Religions Are One/There Is No Natural Religion
2. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
3. For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise
4. America
5. A Prophecy
6. Jerusalem
7. The Book of Thel
8. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
9. London
10. Chimney Sweeper
11. An Island in the Moon
12. Jerusalem
13. Garden of Love
14. The Divine Image
15. Clod and the Pebble

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
1. Ode: Intimations of Immortality
2. The Solitary Reaper
3. Daffodils
4. Strange Fits of Passion
5. The Tables Turned
6. Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
7. Prelude
8. The World is Too Much With Us
9. We Are Seven
10. Solitary Reaper
11. Michael, A Pastoral Poem

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
1. Lyrical Ballads
2. Biographia Literaria
3. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
4. Kubla Khan
5. Christobel
Lord Byron (1788-1842)
1. Don Juan
2. Child Harold’s Pilgrimage
3. Manfred
4. The Giaour
5. Cain: A Mystery
6. The Vision of Judgement
7. Beppo: A Venetian Story
8. Child Harold’s Pilgrimage
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
1. The Necessity of Atheism
2. The Reputation of Deism
3. Alastor
4. The Revolt of Islam
5. Mon Blanc
6. Prometheus Unbound
7. Ode to the West Wind
John Keats (1795-1821)
1. Endymion
2. Ode on a Grecian Urn
3. La Belle Dame Sans Merci
4. Eve of Saint Agnes
5. Hyperion
6. Autumn
Jane Austen (1775-1817)
1. Pride & Prejudice

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
1. Past and Present
2. On Hero Worship and the Heroic in History,
3. Sartor Resartos
4. The French Revolution
5. History of Fredrick the Great
6. Portraits of His Contemporaries

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
1. In Memoriam
2. Ulysses
3. The Lady of Shallot
4. The Lotos-Eaters
5. The Idylls of the King
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
1. My Last Duchess
2. The Bishop Orders His Tomb
3. Sordelo

Elizabeth Barrette Browning (1806-1861)
1. Sonnets from the Portuguese
2. Aurora Leigh

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
1. Great Expectations

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)
1. Jane Eyre
2. Shirley
3. Villette
4. The Professor
Emily Bronte (1818-1848)
1. Wuthering Heights

George Eliot (1819-1880)
1. Silly Novels by a Lady Novelist
2. The Mill on the Floss
3. Middle March
4. Silas Marner

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
1. Essays of Criticism
2. Culture and Anarchy
3. The Forsaken Merman
4. Shakespeare
5. Empedocles on Etna
6. Tristram and Iseult
7. Sohrab and Rustum
8. Dover Beach
9. Literature and Dogma
10. Merope, a Tragedy
11. Thyrsis

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
1. Far From the Meddling Crowd
2. The Mayor of Casterbridge
3. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
4. Jude the Obscure
5. The Dynasts
6. Wessex Poems

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
1. The Picture of Dorian Gray
2. The Importance of Being Ernest
3. Lady Windermere's Fan
4. A Woman of No Importance
5. An Ideal Husband
6. Ballad of Reading Gaol
7. The Critic as an Artist

Henry James (1843-1916)
1. The Portrait of a Lady
2. The American
3. Daisy Miller
4. The Beast in the Jungle
5. The Ambassadors
6. The Death of the Lion
7. The Real Thing
8. The Turn of the Screw
9. What Maisie Knew

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
1. The Quintessence of Ibsenism
2. Pygmalion
3. Mrs. Warren’s Profession
4. Saint Jone
5. Man and Superman
6. Arms and the Man

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
1. Heart of Darkness
2. Lord Jim
3. Nigger of Narcissus

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
1. Easter, 1916
2. Sailing to Byzantium
3. The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Robert Frost (1874-1963)
1. Fire and Ice
2. Road Not Taken

E. M. Forster (1879-1970)
1. A Passage to India
2. Howard’s End

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
1. Orlando
2. Room of One’s Own
3. To The Lighthouse
4. Mrs. Dalloway
5. The Waves

James Joyce (1882-1941)
1. Dubliners
2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
3. Exiles
4. Ulysses
5. Finnegan’s Wake

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
1. Lady Chatterley’s Lover
2. Sons and Lovers
3. Lady Chatterley’s Lover
4. The Rocking Horse Winner
5. Why The Novel Matters
6. Snake

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
1. Tradition and the Individual Talent
2. The Waste Land
3. The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
4. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
5. Journey of the Magi
6. Murder in the Cathedral
7. The Family Reunion
8. The Cocktail Party
9. The Confidential Clerk
10. The Hollow Men
11. Metaphysical Poets
12. The Sacred Wood
13. Four Quartets

Eugene O’Neil (1888-1953)
1. The Hairy Ape
2. The Emperor Jones
3. The Iceman Cometh
4. Desire Under the Elms
5. Mourning Becomes Electra

e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
1. anyone lived in pretty how town
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
1. Point Counter Point
2. Eyeless in Gaza
3. Doors of Perception
4. Heaven and Hell
5. Brave New World

Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
1. Tender is the Night
2. The Great Gatsby

William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897-1962)
1. The Bear
2. The Sound and The Fury
3. That Evening Sun
4. Absalom, Absalom
5. As I Lay Down, Light in August
6. Intruder in the Dust

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
1. Lolita
2. Pale Fire

John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
1. The Grapes of Wrath
2. Of Mice and Men
3. Cannery Row
4. East of Eden

Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-1989)
1. Waiting for Godot
2. Endgame
3. More Pricks Than Kicks

W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
1. In Memory of W B Yeats
2. The Unknown Citizen
3. The Age of Anxiety The Dance of Death,
4. On The Frontier
5. Musée des Beaux Arts

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
1. Glass Menagerie
2. Cat on the Hot Tin Roof
3. A Street Car Named Desire
Arthur Miller (1915-2005)
1. After the Fall
2. Death of a Salesman
3. The Tragedy and the Common Man
4. The Crucible

Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)
1. Under the Net,
2. The Sacred and Profane Love
3. The Sea, The Sea

John Osborne (1929-1994)
1. Luther
2. Damn You, England
3. Look Back in Anger

Harold Pinter (1930- )
1. Between the Lines
2. Birthday Party
3. Ashes to Ashes
4. Mountain Language
5. Remembrance of Things Past

Tom Stoppard (1937- )
1. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
2. Jumpers
3. Travesties
4. Arcadia
5. Hapgood
6. Every Good Boy Deserves A Favour