- •Lecture 1. Period I. The Anglo-Saxons. To a.D. 1066
- •Period II. The Norman-French Period. A.D. 1066 To About 1350
- •Lecture 2. Period III. The end of the middle ages (about 1350 to about 1500). The medieval drama.
- •The medieval drama
- •The reformation.
- •Sir thomas more and his 'utopia.'
- •The elizabethan period.
- •Prose fiction.
- •Edmund spenser, 1552-1599.
- •In general style and spirit, it should be added, Spenser has been one of the most powerful influences on all succeeding English romantic poetry.
- •Christopher marlowe, 1564-1593.
- •Shakespeare, 1564-1616.
- •Ben jonson.
- •Lecture 4. The Seventeenth Century (1603-1660). Prose and Poetry. The Restoration (1660-1700).
- •Lecture 5. The Eighteenth Century, Pseudo-Classicism And The Beginnings Of Modern Romanticism
- •Samuel taylor coleridge.
- •William wordsworth (1770-1850).
- •Robert southey.
- •Walter scott.
- •The last group of romantic poets.
- •Percy bysshe shelley (1792-1832).
- •John keats (1795-1821).
- •Lord macaulay.
- •Thomas carlyle.
- •It will probably be evident that the mainspring of the undeniable and volcanic power of 'Sartor Resartus' is a tremendous moral conviction and fervor.
- •John ruskin.
- •Matthew arnold.
- •Alfred tennyson.
- •Elizabeth barrett browning and robert browning.
- •The novel. The earlier secondary novelists.
- •Charles dickens.
- •William m. Thackeray.
- •George eliot.
- •George meredith (1828-1910).
- •Thomas hardy.
- •Stevenson.
- •Rudyard kipling.
- •Lecture 8. The 20th century english literature
- •William Strachey (1609-1618).
- •George Sandys (1578-1644).
- •John Winthrop (1588-1649).
- •Early Descriptive Writers.
- •Roger Williams, 1606-83.
- •Increase Mather, 1639-1723.
- •Cotton Mather, 1663-1728.
- •The Bay Psalm Book
- •Michael Wigglesworth, 1631-1705.
- •Sarah Kemble Knight, 1666-1727.
- •William Byrd, 1674-1744.
- •Other historical books.
- •Jonathan Edwards, 1703-58.
- •Benjamin franklin: 1706-1790.
- •Second half of the eighteenth century. The revolutionary period: speeches, argumentative essays, state papers.
- •The Declaration and the Constitution.
- •Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817.
- •Revolutionary Songs and Ballads.
- •Francis Hopkinson, 1737-91.
- •Charles Brockden Brown, 1771-1810.
- •James fenimore cooper: 1789-1851.
- •The literary development of new england in the 19th century.
- •Ralph waldo emerson: 1803-82.
- •Henry d. Thoreau: 1817-1862.
- •Nathaniel hawthorne: 1804-1864.
- •In 1849, following his enforced retirement from surveyorship at the custom-house in Salem office, -- the result of political schemes, -- Hawthorne wrote “The Scarlet Letter”.
- •Edgar allan poe: 1809-1849.
- •Lecture 11. Poetry and prose of the 19th century.
- •John greenleaf whittier (1807-1892).
- •James russell lowell (1819-1891).
- •Oliver wendell holmes: 1809-1894.
- •Walt Whitman (1819-1892).
- •Novelists and humorists. Southern Romancers and realistic fiction.
- •W.G. Simms, 1806-1870.
- •Realistic Fiction.
- •Lecture 12. Literature of the new spirit. Fiction at the turn of the 20th century.
- •Fiction since 1870.
- •W. D. Howells (1837-1920).
- •Henry James (1843-1916).
- •Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
- •Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
- •Ezra Pound
- •Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
- •F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American Dream
- •Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
- •Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
- •William Faulkner (1897-1962)
- •John Hoyer Updike
The last group of romantic poets.
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott had mostly ceased to produce poetry by 1815. The group of younger men, the last out-and-out Romanticists, who succeeded them, writing chiefly from about 1810 to 1825, in some respects contrast strongly with them. Byron and Shelley were far more radically revolutionary; and Keats, in his poetry, was devoted wholly to the pursuit and worship of beauty with no concern either for a moral philosophy of life or for vigorous external adventure. It is a striking fact also that these later men were all very short-lived; they died at ages ranging only from twenty-six to thirty-six.
LORD BYRON (1788-1824). Byron (George Gordon Byron) expresses mainly the spirit of individual revolt, revolt against all existing institutions and standards. This was largely a matter of his own personal temperament, but the influence of the time also had a share in it, the time when the apparent failure of the French Revolution had thrown the pronounced liberals back upon their own resources in bitter dissatisfaction with the existing state of society. In childhood his poetic instincts were stimulated by summers spent among the scenery of his mother's native Scottish Highlands.
He spent two years on a European tour, through Spain, Greece, and Turkey. The first literary result of his journey was the publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.' This began as the record of the wanderings of Childe Harold, a dissipated young noble who was clearly intended to represent the author himself; but Byron soon dropped this figure as a useless impediment in the series of descriptions of Spain and Greece of which the first two cantos consist. The public received the poem with the greatest enthusiasm; Byron summed up the case in his well-known comment: 'I awoke one morning and found myself famous.' In fact, 'Childe Harold' is the best of all Byron's works, though the third and fourth cantos, published some years later, and dealing with Belgium, the battle of Waterloo, and central Europe, are superior to the first two. Its excellence consists chiefly in the fact that while it is primarily a descriptive poem, its pictures, dramatically and finely vivid in themselves, are permeated with intense emotion and often serve only as introductions to passionate rhapsodies, so that the effect is largely lyrical.
Though Byron always remained awkward in company he now became the idol of the world of fashion. He followed up his first literary success by publishing during the next four years his brief and vigorous metrical romances, most of them Eastern in setting, 'The Giaour' (pronounced by Byron 'Jower'), 'The Bride of Abydos,' 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' 'The Siege of Corinth,' and 'Parisina.' These were composed not only with remarkable facility but in the utmost haste, sometimes a whole poem in only a few days and sometimes in odds and ends of time snatched from social diversions. The results are only too clearly apparent; the meter is often slovenly, the narrative structure highly defective, and the characterization superficial or flatly inconsistent. In other respects the poems are thoroughly characteristic of their author. In each of them stands out one dominating figure, the hero, a desperate and terrible adventurer, characterized by Byron himself as possessing 'one virtue and a thousand crimes,' merciless and vindictive to his enemies, tremblingly obeyed by his followers, manifesting human tenderness only toward his mistress (a delicate romantic creature to whom he is utterly devoted in the approved romantic-sentimental fashion), and above all inscrutably enveloped in a cloud of pretentious romantic melancholy and mystery. Like Childe Harold, this impossible and grandiose figure of many incarnations was well understood by every one to be meant for a picture of Byron himself, who thus posed for and received in full measure the horrified admiration of the public. But in spite of all this melodramatic clap-trap the romances, like 'Childe Harold,' are filled with the tremendous Byronic passion, which, as in 'Childe Harold,' lends great power alike to their narrative and their description.
In his half dozen or more poetic dramas he entered a new field. In the most important of them, 'Manfred,' a treatment of the theme which Marlowe and Goethe had used in 'Faust,' his real power is largely thwarted by the customary Byronic mystery and swagger. 'Cain' and 'Heaven and Earth,' though wretchedly written, have also a vaguely vast imaginative impressiveness. Their defiant handling of Old Testament material and therefore of Christian theology was shocking to most respectable Englishmen and led to characterization of Byron as the founder of the 'Satanic School' of English poetry. More significant is the longest and chief of his satires, 'Don Juan,' on which he wrote intermittently for years as the mood took him. It is ostensibly the narrative of the adventures of a young Spaniard, but as a story it rambles on formlessly without approaching an end, and its real purpose is to serve as an utterly cynical indictment of mankind, the institutions of society, and accepted moral principles. Byron often points the cynicism by lapsing into brilliant doggerel, but his double nature appears in the occasional intermingling of tender and beautiful passages.
As a poet he continues to occupy a conspicuous place (especially in the judgment of non-English-speaking nations) through the power of his volcanic emotion. It was this quality of emotion, perhaps the first essential in poetry.
In moods of moral and literary severity, to summarize, a critic can scarcely refrain from dismissing Byron with impatient contempt; nevertheless his genius and his in part splendid achievement are substantial facts. He stands as the extreme but significant exponent of violent Romantic individualism in a period when Romantic aspiration was largely disappointed and disillusioned, but was indignantly gathering its strength for new efforts.