HISTORIA LITERATURY ANGIELSKIEJ – SWSPIZ II ROK
dr Ryszard Bartnik
Old English poetry: “The Wanderer”, “The Seafarer”, “Deor’s Lament”, “Charm for Unfruitful Land”
a) historical background (Anglo-Saxon conquest)
b) characteristic features of OE literature: formulaic language, alliteration, anonymity, oral literature, kennings
c) the reality of life in Anglo-Saxon England, the bond between the lord and his warriors, the motifs of exile, ruin, solitude, transitory nature of human splendour, the hardships of sea-life, the Anglo-Saxon values, loss and consolation
Beowulf and The Dream of the Rood
a) Beowulf as an example of courtly literature
b) Beowulf as a heroic and an epic poem (definition of an epic, the role of the genre in literature; protagonists and their actions, heroic society)
c) Christian and pagan elements
Middle English literature: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
a) historical background – the Norman Conquest, influences of Norman culture and literature
b) Social origins of romantic love (social position of women in the feudal aristocracy; courtly love).
c) the medieval romance (characteristic features of romance; most frequent motifs)
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
a) The Canterbury Tales as an encyclopaedia of literary genres: romances, exempla, fabliaux
b) low culture and high culture.
English medieval drama: Everyman
a) origins of the medieval theatre ( liturgical dramas)
b) characteristic features of morality plays (the most frequently appearing motifs: death, dance macabre, ars moriendi, memento mori, struggle between good and evil)
Christopher Marlowe: Dr Faustus
a) Renaissance theatre
b) Renaissance and medieval elements
c) central character (Faustus as a new man, an epitome of Renaissance aspirations and their deterioration)
English renaissance literature
Thomas Wyatt: selected sonnets; Henry Howard: selected sonnets; Shakespeare: selected sonnets;
a) Shakespeare’s sonnets:
- recurrent themes (love, time, death, begetting children, creating poetry, etc.)
- anti-Petrarchan tradition
Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream
a) the concept of comedy (the definition of romantic comedy)
b) metatheatrical character of the play-within-the play
c) nature vs. nurture
Shakespeare: The Tempest.
a) nature vs. culture.
b) the concept of ‘the other’ (Caliban – the native inhabitant); the problem of colonisation.
c) Shakespearean romance utopia.
Metaphysical poetry: John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell.
a) the origin of the term
b) characteristic features of metaphysical poetry (metaphysical conceits and the source of conceit, balance between reason and emotion, the tone of persuasion).
c) recurrent motifs ( images of sensual love, death, love, God)
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Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism, [The Rape of the Lock]
a) Augustan Age / Neoclassicism; historical and social background of the period.
b) Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism
- Pope’s understanding of Nature (Nature methodised)
- rules for writing poetry, influence of the poets of classical Antiquity.
- causes of bad criticism
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
a) early definitions of the novel – counter-distinction with romance
b) formal realism (the novel's assimilation of the forms of factual literature).
c) Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
- individualism, the rise of the middle class
- Robinson as homo economicus (personal relations viewed in terms of commodity value, ethos of work)
- colonialism and the attitude to ‘the other’ (Friday as ‘the other’, Robinson’s attitude to him; the island as a land to cultivate and civilise)
- religion (puritan doctrine, individual contact with God.)
Richardson: Pamela (fragments), Lawrence Sterne: Tristan Shandy (fragments), Henry Fielding: Tom Jones (fragments).
a) Pamela as a domestic novel; epistolary novel; interest in the psychological problems of characters in the social context
b) Tom Jones as a self-conscious novel; structure of the novel: the narrator (authorial intrusions); creating conventions; discussion of convention of fiction writing
c) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy as a self-conscious novel; a parody of the novel (anti-novel, anti-hero, plot based on digressions)
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
a) Gulliver’s Travels as a political and philosophical satire (relativity of truth, corruption of court life, critique of reason, irony)
William Blake: “The Lamb, “The Tyger”, [“Holy Thursday”, “The Chimney Sweeper”. William Wordsworth: “The Preface to Lyrical Ballads”, “We Are Seven”, “Tintern Abbey”]
a) William Blake
- innocence and experience,
- the philosophy of Blake – mysticism, idea of the universe, Swedenborg
b) William Wordsworth
- Romantic idea of poetry and its role – “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”
- Romantic attitude to Nature: contemplation of Nature, Nature as the source of morality, Man and his place in Nature
[Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “Kubla Khan”, Biografia Literaria – chapter XIV]
a) Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Biographia Literaria (roles of a poet and poetry, definition of poetry, form and subjects of poetry, approaches to nature, the supernatural)
- “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (the supernatural, the romantic hero, symbols, dreams, Nature)
a) Charles Dickens: Hard Times [fragments]
- realist novel: language, narration, imagery, aims
- Dickens’ social conscience
- utilitarianism
- dominant themes: education; industrialisation; social divisions
b) Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
- Victorian/Romantic novel
- themes: rebelion; social ladder
- the Byronic hero
- symbolic elements [The Houses]
- women in Victorian times
- social aspects: marriage, education, independence
CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Walter Pater – the father-figure to the Aesthetic Movement
- goals of English aestheticism
- fin de siècle: decadence; anxiety
- criticism of Victorianism and its ideals
- Patriotic verse
- Anti-war poetry [poetry of the trenches]
Virginia Woolf: To the lighthouse, A room of one's own [fragments]
- modernist novel: psychology; narration [stream of consciousness]; the use of time and space
- Woolf’s vision of life
- feminist perspective
- “A room of one’s own” [general understanding]
W. B. Yeats
- modernist language
- the Irish question
- modern apocalypse
aqnee