Literature
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Unlike scholars in certain fields of learning, such as biology, where the boundaries are fairly well defined, those in the field of literature still debate exactly what the term means. When the celebrated 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica defined literature as “the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing,” few dared question it. Now, though, a century of such questioning has broadened the definition so that it can include nearly any text in any human language, even works in other media. Practically speaking, literature’s present-day definition is shaped by the perspective from which one regards it: scholars of a theoretical bent see it as embedded in questions of race, class, and gender, and highly variable over historical time, while those more aesthetically inclined tend to emphasize its continuity within traditions of arts and humane letters. One perspective typically mistrusts the other.
Contents
[hide] [hide]
* 1 The study of literature
* 2 Scope of literature
* 3 Literary media
* 4 Formal categories
* 5 Genres
* 6 National literatures
* 7 The future of literature
* 8 References
The study of literature
In its modern descriptive sense, literature denotes written texts; by extension scholars have also applied the term to spoken or sung texts ("oral literature"), writings in particular subject areas ("medical literature"), other collections of material in a given language or national tradition ("English literature"), visual texts such as video and illustration, and published ephemera (“campaign literature”). It is often divided into historical periods ("Victorian literature") as well as into formal categories (prose, poetry, or drama) and genres (such as the epic, the novel, or the folktale).
In its more traditional prescriptive sense (that of the 1911 Britannica), literature connotes a particular quality found in the written culture of humane learning, the profession of “letters” (from Latin litteras), and written texts considered as aesthetic and expressive objects. In that sense, the art of “literature” differs from the science of “language,” as studied by theoretical linguists and cognitive psychologists such as Steven Pinker.
Literature as a subject worthy of academic study was first identified in the nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the English word itself back to the 1200s (when it described familiarity with classical learning); not until the early 1800s was it used in the more modern sense. Classical authors of ancient Greece and Rome generally never recognized the study of “literature” as a discipline per se; rather, they looked at forms such as drama, history, poetry, philosophy, and mythology on their own terms, or in terms of various schools of philosophical or religious thought. With the revival of advanced learning in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, though, the focus of study became classical literature itself—the sense first recorded by the OED; a person of “letters” was one who knew the classical traditions, and could read the classics. Only after literature in modern vernaculars became too significant to ignore did the current sense of the word develop.
European universities long resisted according writers working in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and other vernacular languages the same status in their curricula as that given to writers of classical Latin and Greek. Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries were always conscious of the perceived inferiority of their native language, even as they rivaled and surpassed the literary achievements of their classical precursors. As scientific learning began to supplant classical learning in the early nineteenth century, universities added philology (the predecessor of modern linguistics) as a discipline, but that field focused more on the historical relationships between languages than on their literature.
In the United Kingdom, for example, the first institutions to offer instruction in literature were not the elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, but those geared toward students seeking to move up in the world, such as the London Working Men's College (founded in 1854). There, much to their surprise, sons of London bricklayers and artisans encountered teachers such as F.J. Furnivall, an early editor of the OED, who opened his classes with the dramatic announcement that he was about to return a national literature to its citizens, and then commenced reading aloud in Middle English from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, J.C. Collins stressed the influence of classics on English literature, shifting studies of the language away from philology and toward the present-day discipline of comparative literature[1]. In the United States, the study of literature was introduced at normal schools (schools for the preparation of teachers, mostly women at that time), and subsequently at land grant universities, where English literature was given the place assigned at older universities to reading in Latin and Greek.
First Edition of Quiller-Couch
First Edition of Quiller-Couch
Early professors of English literature, among them Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Henry Morley, devoted much of their attention to establishing a canon of suitable texts for study. In the twentieth century, this led to standardized anthologies, such as the Oxford and Norton anthologies of English literature. With the rise of the New Critics in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, scholars began looking at the literary text as a cultural object—a living repository of tradition extending across ages and civilizations. This movement coincided with expanding post-World War II college populations and helped elevate literature’s place and prestige in university curricula. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, proponents of poststructuralist theory began questioning the traditional literary canon and accepted hierarchies: Why, for instance, should lyric poetry be regarded as worthy of literary study, when comic books weren’t? Couldn’t we learn important things about contemporary culture from native American storytelling traditions as well as Italian opera? Practically speaking, this has meant that while college English departments still teach courses in Shakespeare and James Joyce, the sense of a highly exclusive canon of “great writers” is much diminished, and more kinds of literature are fair game for scholarly inquiry.
Scope of literature
In its broadest sense, literature came into being with the first use of pictographs, hieroglyphs, cuneiform, or alphabetic scripts, although it is more common to designate as "literature" only those texts which contain a degree of imaginative, emotive, allegoric, didactic, or descriptive content. Thus, business records, tallies, or lists are not generally included, even though such texts, which can be found in the earliest civilizations, are significant from a historical and archaeological perspective. The earliest literature evolved from the transcription of pre-existing oral traditional narratives, and progressed gradually to a point where such materials were first composed in written form.
Religious texts, while they have of course an entirely different significance to the adherents of the faiths to which they pertain, may also be considered literature when their narrative, figurative, or compositional qualities are foregrounded. The earliest instances of literature, therefore, those termed "ancient", include a variety of texts ranging from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh to the Hebrew Torah, and onward to the Hellenistic Odyssey of Homer. These texts, though clearly recognized as literature, share an origin in pre-literate cultures, and thus predate, in some sense, the modern use of the term. Later in human history, the deliberate writing of imaginary or fanciful texts, disseminated in written form to a literate audience, marks the first fully self-conscious literary traditions. In this context, although still considered ancient, might be placed such compositions as the Latin Aeneid of Virgil, the Chinese Songs of Chu, or the Greek lyrical poetry of Sappho. With improvements in the production and dissemination of written texts, from Roman copyhouses to the invention of the printing press, along with the increase of a literate reading public, a third sense of "literature," and the one most commonly used today, came into being. Specifically, literature encompasses all imaginative writing in any language, as well as essays, criticism, travel writing, biographies, memoirs, diaries, and collections of letters.
Literary media
Literature was first recorded in pictographic and alphabetic systems of writing, which were either incised on clay tablets or stone, or written with inks or dyes on various flat organic media such as papyrus or parchment. The development of alphabetic systems, in which characters stood for sounds instead of things, by the Phoenecian and Greek cultures, enabled a rapid advancement in the variety and dissemination of written literature. In earliest times, such documents were generally prepared and stored on long sheets rolled into scrolls, but beginning in the second century CE, the codex, a bound set of trimmed sheets with a cover, began to predominate; this is the ancestor of the modern book.
The introduction of paper to Western Europe in the later Middle Ages greatly reduced the cost of written manuscripts, and the invention of movable type in 1450 led to to the printing of books in large numbers, and still further reduction in cost. Further refinements to the printing process, such as machines which could cast whole blocks of type at once, led to the emergence of print as a mass medium in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with new formats such as magazines and newspapers printed in thousands of copies, both for subscribers and for sale at booksellers and newsstands. Genres such as the novel gained tremendous new audiences through appearances in periodical and serial forms, bringing writers such as Poe, Dickens, Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to a mass audience, and establishing literature as a popular medium.
In the later twentieth century, the field of popular literature continued to expand, both through the introduction of mass-market genres such as the dime novel and the illustrated press, and via the new commitment to public education and developing a literary curriculum of standard school texts. Established genres, such as detective fiction and science fiction, gained new audiences through the introduction of the paperback book, printed on inexpensive paper with a thin cardboard wrapper, and sold for a small fraction of the cost of a hardcover book. The large number of young readers led to a great expansion of children's literature and adolescent literature, as well as to new popular forms such as the comic book, which in recent years has emerged as a medium for adult fiction in the form of graphic novels.
With the advent of new media and technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, texts are often stored and transmitted electronically, magnetically, or digitally, without ever being printed on paper; they also often include, or are linked to audio, video, or multimedia content. Speech can now also be recorded, stored, and transmitted, so that some literary historians, such as Walter J. Ong, regard this as an age of "secondary orality". Such changes will doubtlessly expand and alter the definition of literature, just as did earlier technological developments.
Formal categories
A formal distinction common to many literary traditions is that between poetry and prose. Although the precise distinction between these two categories varies somewhat among world literatures, and though the boundaries between them have grown more blurred according to certain modern literary theories, it may generally be observed that poetry depends upon a relatively fixed array of metrical and phonological patterns used as repetitive devices, and involves a more densely interconnected arrangement of imagery and metaphor. In Old English poetry, as in the earliest Latin verse, a fixed pattern of stressed syllables, with the alliteration of their initial sounds, provides the basic structure, whereas in ancient Greek poetry, the length of the syllables was the primary principle. Rhyme, the assonance of the final sounds of words or lines, is one of the most common and recognizable options of poetic structure. Prose, of course, especially prose described as "poetic", may partake of all these qualities as well, though generally not in such a dense and closely patterned manner. Modern poetry also includes forms such as free verse and concrete poetry, which depart from the strict poetic meter or earlier forms, or attempt to abandon formal constraints altogether.
Prose is a far more inclusive category, and indeed envelops a wide variety of texts, such as business letters, instruction manuals, newpapers, memos, lists, contracts, speeches, and legal documents, which may not be considered literature at all. The earliest epic narratives were poetic in form, and prose was more generally reserved for the writing of history, religious instruction, or descriptive accounts of events or travels. The modern western tradition of literary prose emerged in the later Middle Ages, in texts such as Boccaccio's Decameron, or the prose segments of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales such as the Tale of Melibee, which Chaucer himself describes as "a litel thing in prose". By the time of the Renaissance, literary prose tended to take the form of extended essays, such as Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, or in narratives now regarded as early antecedents of the novel such as Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. From the eighteenth century onward, literary prose has largely comprised either narrative fiction or essays, along with collections of personal letters, biography, and autobiography.
Genres
The evolution of various genres of literature has varied considerably in different languages and cultures, although some very general categories can be outlined. Much early imaginative literature can be classed as epic; within this category one would find texts as various as the Odyssey, the Mahabharata, the Finnish Kalevala, the Elder Edda, or the Táin Bó Cúailnge. Epic literature is marked by a strong, central narrative, often focused on the deeds of a single heroic figure, and featuring elaborately detailed accounts of battle. The Greek term "lyric" also has close equivalents in many world literatures; lyric poetry is generally written in short stanzas or strophes, with an emphasis on image and affective emotion. Significant lyric poets in world traditions have included Sappho, Li Po, Kabir, Keats, and Dickinson.
Another early and continuing form, dramatic literature, consists of words and actions to be spoken and performed upon a stage by actors; while it has often been recorded in writing and print, the primary venue for this form of literature is theatrical performance. In ancient Greece, where plays evolved out of the religious observances of Dionysus, the works of Aristophanes, Sophocles, and others retain their force after two millenia. Significant world playwrights include Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov, and Beckett. Some of the paradigms of the stage extend to those of cinema film, and today film studies are often conjoined academically with the study of literature.
In the past few centuries, the novel has emerged as one of the dominant literary forms of modern literature, combining some features of the epic (such as a strong, central protagonist) with elements of historical narrative, travel writing, and the naturalistic dialogue of plays. Many claim Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605, 1615) as the first novel, though some assign it instead to the category of mock epic. Among the great practitioners of the novel over the centuries since have been Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner. Novels themselves, from their first appearance, have been categorized in a variety of topical or formal sub-genres, such as the picaresque novel or the epistolary novel, as well as broader thematic categories such as science fiction, detective fiction, or fantasy.
National literatures
De Vulgari Eloquentia
De Vulgari Eloquentia
Although their names imply otherwise, national literatures often emerged before the emergence of modern nation-states. Dante, famously, in De Vulgari Eloquentia, his defense of writing in Italian, declared that literary Italian must be "curial", or "of the manner of the Italian court"" - even though, at the time he wrote there was no such singular Italian state. Like Chaucer and other medieval poets, he wrote before the language of his compositions reached its modern form. The writers of the Renaissance were a vital part of the emergence of their respective national literatures, though some, like Sir Thomas More, eschewed their own vernacular in favor of Latin. Even writers whose works now seem essential to their national literature, such as Goethe or Shakespeare, only became legitimate subjects of serious academic consideration very late in the nineteenth century, when national vernacular literatures became subjects for schools and universities. Today, at a point when literary works are frequently translated into other languages soon after their publication, and literacy rates around the world are at historic highs, there is a growing sense of an international audience for literature.
Not all the study of literature takes place along national lines; comparative literature is one academic discipline that engages in the study of literature in an interdisciplinary and transnational context. The relationships between the national literatures of former colonial powers has also led to postcolonial literature's emergence as a significent area of study. Other interdisciplinary fields with close ties to literature, such as film studies and cultural studies, also move readily across the old boundaries of national and ethnic literatures.
The future of literature
In 2003, poet Dana Gioia, chairman of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, noted that the average American spent a mere twenty-four minutes per day reading, compared to more than four hours spent watching television. "The decline of print as our culture's primary means of codifying, presenting, and preserving information isn't merely a methodological change," he observed, "it is an epistemological transformation."[2] This trend, combined with the proliferation of new media for literary expression—such as e-books, "blogs" and other online vehicles, audiobooks, "podcasts," text messaging, and other technologies—could be seen as cause for alarm about the future of letters, especially on the part of devotees of traditional written literature. Yet Gioia and other literary futurists suggest that the likely outcome is not the end of literature, but new ways in which the literary impulse expresses itself through new media. In other words, the future of literature may have less to do with traditional literacy and letters than anyone can predict.
References
* The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-1921). http://www.bartleby.com/cambridge/
* CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu
* Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, 2002.
* Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.
* Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven, Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.
* Ashcroft, Bill, et. al., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York Routledge, 2002 (ISBN 0415280206)
* Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature. 10th ed. New York: Prentice-Hall, 2005. (ISBN 0131344420)
Notes
1. ↑ Kearny, Anthony. "John Churton Collins and the Attempt to Link English and Classics." British Journal of Educational Studies 29:3 (1981), 258-267
2. ↑ Gioia, Dana. "Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture." Hudson Review 56.1 (Spring 2003). http://www.hudsonreview.com/gioiaSp03.pdf
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Tampilkan postingan dengan label Literature. Tampilkan semua postingan
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Senin, 04 Januari 2010
some poems by William Shakespear
Aubade
HARK! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chaliced flowers that lies;
And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes:
With everything that pretty bin,
My lady sweet, arise!
Arise, arise
Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind
Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most freindship if feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze thou bitter sky,
That does not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As a friend remembered not.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most freindship if feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Bridal Song
ROSES, their sharp spines being gone,
Not royal in their smells alone,
But in their hue;
Maiden pinks, of odour faint,
Daisies smell-less, yet most quaint,
And sweet thyme true;
Primrose, firstborn child of Ver;
Merry springtime's harbinger,
With her bells dim;
Oxlips in their cradles growing,
Marigolds on death-beds blowing,
Larks'-heels trim;
All dear Nature's children sweet
Lie 'fore bride and bridegroom's feet,
Blessing their sense!
Not an angel of the air,
Bird melodious or bird fair,
Be absent hence!
The crow, the slanderous cuckoo, nor
The boding raven, nor chough hoar,
Nor chattering pye,
May on our bride-house perch or sing,
Or with them any discord bring,
But from it fly!
Carpe Diem
O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O stay and hear! your true-love's coming
That can sing both high and low;
Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
Journey's end in lovers' meeting--
Every wise man's son doth know.
What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty,--
Then come kiss me, Sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.
Dirge
COME away, come away, death,
And in sad cypres let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet,
On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corse, where my bones shall be thrown:
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O, where
Sad true lover never find my grave
To weep there!
Fairy Land i
OVER hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moone's sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green:
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dew-drops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
HARK! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins arise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chaliced flowers that lies;
And winking Mary-buds begin
To ope their golden eyes:
With everything that pretty bin,
My lady sweet, arise!
Arise, arise
Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind
Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most freindship if feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze thou bitter sky,
That does not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As a friend remembered not.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most freindship if feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Bridal Song
ROSES, their sharp spines being gone,
Not royal in their smells alone,
But in their hue;
Maiden pinks, of odour faint,
Daisies smell-less, yet most quaint,
And sweet thyme true;
Primrose, firstborn child of Ver;
Merry springtime's harbinger,
With her bells dim;
Oxlips in their cradles growing,
Marigolds on death-beds blowing,
Larks'-heels trim;
All dear Nature's children sweet
Lie 'fore bride and bridegroom's feet,
Blessing their sense!
Not an angel of the air,
Bird melodious or bird fair,
Be absent hence!
The crow, the slanderous cuckoo, nor
The boding raven, nor chough hoar,
Nor chattering pye,
May on our bride-house perch or sing,
Or with them any discord bring,
But from it fly!
Carpe Diem
O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O stay and hear! your true-love's coming
That can sing both high and low;
Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
Journey's end in lovers' meeting--
Every wise man's son doth know.
What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty,--
Then come kiss me, Sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.
Dirge
COME away, come away, death,
And in sad cypres let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet,
On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corse, where my bones shall be thrown:
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O, where
Sad true lover never find my grave
To weep there!
Fairy Land i
OVER hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moone's sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green:
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dew-drops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
Poems
THE POEMS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
William Shakespeare is referred to as a Literary Genius and much of this praise is due to the wonderful words of his short sonnet poems and his extended poems as detailed on this page. He is the most widely read author in the whole of the Western World - his poems and quotes from poems are familiar to everyone. And yet when we think about Shakespear we immediately we think of his famous plays and not his less famous poems. During the Bard's lifetime dramatists were not considered 'serious' authors with 'serious' talent - but it was highly fashionable to write poems. Plays were for entertainment poems were for the elite! There was not even such a thing as a custom built theatre until 1576! Actors were common folk. Poets of the era such as Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sydney, Sir Walter Raleigh were of the nobility and there poems are still enjoyed today. These poets had credibility and so did their poetry. William Shakespeare came from Yeoman stock - he lacked credibility - his poems would have helped with this poblem !. The Bard did not give permission for one of his plays or his sonnets to be published. He was, however, happy to have his poems published. William Shake-speare has been attributed with the following poems:
William Shakespeare Poem - A Lover's Complaint
William Shakespeare Poem - Phoenix and the Turtle
William Shakespeare Poem - Rape of Lucrece
William Shakespeare poem - Venus and Adonis
Please click the link at the top of the page to access the full texts of the 154 love sonnets ( short poems ) accredited to William Shakespeare
A Lover's Complaint Poem
A Lover's Complaint is the most neglected of the Poems of William Shakespear, assuming that it is his. It was first published in 1609, by Thomas Thorpe, under the same cover as the Sonnets; but has seldom been reprinted. The Lover's Complaint seems to be a very early poem (perhaps 1591), but no date of composition of the poem can be assigned.
Venus and Adonis Poem
April 18, 1593 Registration of Venus and Adonis Poem
Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare's narrative poem in six-line stanzas, was published by Richard Field (1561 - 1624). The poem was dedicated to Shakespeare's patron, Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton (1573-1624). This dedication refers to the author's "unpolisht lines" and contains the typically fawning language of a commoner addressing a nobleman in the hope of obtaining, or retaining, their patronage in exchange for poems dedicated to the recipient.
The Rape of Lucrece Poem
May 9, 1594 Registration of The Rape of Lucrece
On May 9, 1594, the poem was entered in the Hall Book of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, the English government's pre-publication registry. The poem was listed in the Hall Book under the title of The Ravyshement [Ravishment] of Lucrece but was published with the title Lucrece. The Rape of Lucrece was substituted as a title at a later date. The Rape of Lucrece is a narrative poem resembling a revenge tragedy with 1,855 lines.
The Phoenix and the Turtle Poem
In 1601 a very fine poem subsequently titled The Phoenix and the Turtle appeared untitled as one of the Poetical Essays appended to Robert Chester's Love's Martyr: or Rosalind's Complaint. It was attributed to William, and many scholars have accepted the poem as genuine. The date of composition of the poem is unknown, but this poem must be a more mature work.
The Passionate Pilgrim Poems
The Passionate Pilgrime (1599) was a poetry collection containing twenty poems by various poets. The title page to the second edition contains the ascription "By W. Shakespeare" but only five of the poems appear to be his. The poems, or Sonnets 138 and 144, despite the "never before imprinted" claim of "a Booke called Shakespeares sonnettes", were included, albeit in a slightly different format, in The Passionate Pilgrim poem.
Poems
THE POEMS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
William Shakespeare is referred to as a Literary Genius and much of this praise is due to the wonderful words of his short sonnet poems and his extended poems as detailed on this page. He is the most widely read author in the whole of the Western World - his poems and quotes from poems are familiar to everyone. And yet when we think about Shakespear we immediately we think of his famous plays and not his less famous poems. During the Bard's lifetime dramatists were not considered 'serious' authors with 'serious' talent - but it was highly fashionable to write poems. Plays were for entertainment poems were for the elite! There was not even such a thing as a custom built theatre until 1576! Actors were common folk. Poets of the era such as Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sydney, Sir Walter Raleigh were of the nobility and there poems are still enjoyed today. These poets had credibility and so did their poetry. William Shakespeare came from Yeoman stock - he lacked credibility - his poems would have helped with this poblem !. The Bard did not give permission for one of his plays or his sonnets to be published. He was, however, happy to have his poems published. William Shake-speare has been attributed with the following poems:
William Shakespeare Poem - A Lover's Complaint
William Shakespeare Poem - Phoenix and the Turtle
William Shakespeare Poem - Rape of Lucrece
William Shakespeare poem - Venus and Adonis
Please click the link at the top of the page to access the full texts of the 154 love sonnets ( short poems ) accredited to William Shakespeare
A Lover's Complaint Poem
A Lover's Complaint is the most neglected of the Poems of William Shakespear, assuming that it is his. It was first published in 1609, by Thomas Thorpe, under the same cover as the Sonnets; but has seldom been reprinted. The Lover's Complaint seems to be a very early poem (perhaps 1591), but no date of composition of the poem can be assigned.
Venus and Adonis Poem
April 18, 1593 Registration of Venus and Adonis Poem
Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare's narrative poem in six-line stanzas, was published by Richard Field (1561 - 1624). The poem was dedicated to Shakespeare's patron, Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton (1573-1624). This dedication refers to the author's "unpolisht lines" and contains the typically fawning language of a commoner addressing a nobleman in the hope of obtaining, or retaining, their patronage in exchange for poems dedicated to the recipient.
The Rape of Lucrece Poem
May 9, 1594 Registration of The Rape of Lucrece
On May 9, 1594, the poem was entered in the Hall Book of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, the English government's pre-publication registry. The poem was listed in the Hall Book under the title of The Ravyshement [Ravishment] of Lucrece but was published with the title Lucrece. The Rape of Lucrece was substituted as a title at a later date. The Rape of Lucrece is a narrative poem resembling a revenge tragedy with 1,855 lines.
The Phoenix and the Turtle Poem
In 1601 a very fine poem subsequently titled The Phoenix and the Turtle appeared untitled as one of the Poetical Essays appended to Robert Chester's Love's Martyr: or Rosalind's Complaint. It was attributed to William, and many scholars have accepted the poem as genuine. The date of composition of the poem is unknown, but this poem must be a more mature work.
The Passionate Pilgrim Poems
The Passionate Pilgrime (1599) was a poetry collection containing twenty poems by various poets. The title page to the second edition contains the ascription "By W. Shakespeare" but only five of the poems appear to be his. The poems, or Sonnets 138 and 144, despite the "never before imprinted" claim of "a Booke called Shakespeares sonnettes", were included, albeit in a slightly different format, in The Passionate Pilgrim poem.
English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; Joseph Conrad was born in Poland, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, Vladimir Nabokov was Russian. In other words, English literature is as diverse as the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world. In academia, the term often labels departments and programmes practising English studies in secondary and tertiary educational systems. Despite the variety of authors of English literature, works of William Shakespeare remain paramount throughout the English-speaking world.
This article primarily deals with literature from Britain written in English, some notable works listed. For literature from specific English-speaking regions, consult the see also section, bottom of the page.
Old English
The first works in English, written in Old English, appeared in the early Middle Ages (the oldest surviving text is Cædmon's Hymn). The oral tradition was very strong in the early English culture and most literary works were written to be performed. Epic poems were thus very popular and many, including Beowulf, have survived to the present day in the rich corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature that closely resemble today's Icelandic, Norwegian, North Frisian and the Northumbrian and Scots English dialects of modern English. Much Old English verse in the extant manuscripts is probably a "milder" adaptation of the earlier Germanic war poems from the continent. When such poetry was brought to England it was still being handed down orally from one generation to another, and the constant presence of alliterative verse, or consonant rhyme (today's newspaper headlines and marketing abundantly use this technique such as in Big is Better) helped the Anglo-Saxon peoples remember it. Such rhyme is a feature of Germanic languages and is opposed to vocalic or end-rhyme of Romance languages. But the first written literature dates to the early Christian monasteries founded by St. Augustine of Canterbury and his disciples and it is reasonable to believe that it was somehow adapted to suit to needs of Christian readers. Even without their crudest lines, the Old English war poems, and to a larger extent all Germanic war poems, still smell of blood feuds and their consonant rhymes sound like the smashing of swords under the gloomy northern sky: there is always a sense of imminent danger in the narratives. Sooner or later, all things must come to an end, as Beowulf eventually dies at the hands of the monsters he spends the tale fighting. The feelings of Beowulf that nothing lasts, that youth and joy will turn to death and sorrow entered Christianity and were to dominate the future landscape of English fiction.
Middle English literature
Renaissance literature
Following the introduction of a printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476, vernacular literature flourished. The Reformation inspired the production of vernacular liturgy which led to the Book of Common Prayer, a lasting influence on literary English language. The poetry, drama, and prose produced under both Queen Elizabeth I and King James I constitute what is today labelled as Early modern (or Renaissance).
Early Modern period
Further information: Early Modern English and Early Modern Britain
Elizabethan Era
Further information: Canons of Renaissance poetry
The Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the field of drama. The Italian Renaissance had rediscovered the ancient Greek and Roman theatre, and this was instrumental in the development of the new drama, which was then beginning to evolve apart from the old mystery and miracle plays of the Middle Ages. The Italians were particularly inspired by Seneca (a major tragic playwright and philosopher, the tutor of Nero) and Plautus (its comic clichés, especially that of the boasting soldier had a powerful influence on the Renaissance and after). However, the Italian tragedies embraced a principle contrary to Seneca's ethics: showing blood and violence on the stage. In Seneca's plays such scenes were only acted by the characters. But the English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model: a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London and Giovanni Florio had brought much of the Italian language and culture to England. It is also true that the Elizabethan Era was a very violent age and that the high incidence of political assassinations in Renaissance Italy (embodied by Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince) did little to calm fears of popish plots. As a result, representing that kind of violence on the stage was probably more cathartic for the Elizabethan spectator. Following earlier Elizabethan plays such as Gorboduc by Sackville & Norton and The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd that was to provide much material for Hamlet, William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed. Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably had only some grammar school education. He was neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat as the "university wits" that had monopolised the English stage when he started writing. But he was very gifted and incredibly versatile, and he surpassed "professionals" as Robert Greene who mocked this "shake-scene" of low origins. Though most dramas met with great success, it is in his later years (marked by the early reign of James I) that he wrote what have been considered his greatest plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, a tragicomedy that inscribes within the main drama a brilliant pageant to the new king. Shakespeare also popularized the English sonnet which made significant changes to Petrarch's model.
The sonnet was introduced into English by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century. Poems intended to be set to music as songs, such as by Thomas Campion, became popular as printed literature was disseminated more widely in households. See English Madrigal School. Other important figures in Elizabethan theatre include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont. Had Marlowe (1564-1593) not been stabbed at twenty-nine in a tavern brawl, says Anthony Burgess, he might have rivalled, if not equalled Shakespeare himself for his poetic gifts. Remarkably, he was born only a few weeks before Shakespeare and must have known him well. Marlowe's subject matter, though, is different: it focuses more on the moral drama of the renaissance man than any other thing. Marlowe was fascinated and terrified by the new frontiers opened by modern science. Drawing on German lore, he introduced Dr. Faustus to England, a scientist and magician who is obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man's technological power to its limits. He acquires supernatural gifts that even allow him to go back in time and wed Helen of Troy, but at the end of his twenty-four years' covenant with the devil he has to surrender his soul to him. His dark heroes may have something of Marlowe himself, whose untimely death remains a mystery. He was known for being an atheist, leading a lawless life, keeping many mistresses, consorting with ruffians: living the 'high life' of London's underworld. But many suspect that this might have been a cover-up for his activities as a secret agent for Elizabeth I, hinting that the 'accidental stabbing' might have been a premeditated assassination by the enemies of The Crown. Beaumont and Fletcher are less-known, but it is almost sure that they helped Shakespeare write some of his best dramas, and were quite popular at the time. It is also at this time that the city comedy genre develops. In the later 16th century English poetry was characterised by elaboration of language and extensive allusion to classical myths. The most important poets of this era include Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. Elizabeth herself, a product of Renaissance humanism, produced occasional poems such as On Monsieur’s Departure.
Jacobean literature
After Shakespeare's death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era (The reign of James I). However, Jonson's aesthetics hark back to the Middle Ages rather than to the Tudor Era: his characters embody the theory of humours. According to this contemporary medical theory, behavioral differences result from a prevalence of one of the body's four "humours" (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) over the other three; these humours correspond with the four elements of the universe: air, water, fire, and earth. This leads Jonson to exemplify such differences to the point of creating types, or clichés.
Jonson is a master of style, and a brilliant satirist. His Volpone shows how a group of scammers are fooled by a top con-artist, vice being punished by vice, virtue meting out its reward.
Others who followed Jonson's style include Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote the brilliant comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a mockery of the rising middle class and especially of those nouveaux riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much literature at all. In the story, a couple of grocers wrangle with professional actors to have their illiterate son play a leading role in a drama. He becomes a knight-errant wearing, appropriately, a burning pestle on his shield. Seeking to win a princess' heart, the young man is ridiculed much in the way Don Quixote was. One of Beaumont and Fletcher's chief merits was that of realising how feudalism and chivalry had turned into snobbery and make-believe and that new social classes were on the rise.
Another popular style of theatre during Jacobean times was the revenge play, popularized by John Webster and Thomas Kyd. George Chapman wrote a couple of subtle revenge tragedies, but must be remembered chiefly on account of his famous translation of Homer, one that had a profound influence on all future English literature, even inspiring John Keats to write one of his best sonnets.
The King James Bible, one of the most massive translation projects in the history of English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. It represents the culmination of a tradition of Bible translation into English that began with the work of William Tyndale. It became the standard Bible of the Church of England, and some consider it one of the greatest literary works of all time. This project was headed by James I himself, who supervised the work of forty-seven scholars. Although many other translations into English have been made, some of which are widely considered more accurate, many aesthetically prefer the King James Bible, whose meter is made to mimic the original Hebrew verse.
Besides Shakespeare, whose figure towers over the early 1600s, the major poets of the early 17th century included John Donne and the other Metaphysical poets. Influenced by continental Baroque, and taking as his subject matter both Christian mysticism and eroticism, metaphysical poetry uses unconventional or "unpoetic" figures, such as a compass or a mosquito, to reach surprise effects. For example, in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", one of Donne's Songs and Sonnets, the points of a compass represent two lovers, the woman who is home, waiting, being the centre, the farther point being her lover sailing away from her. But the larger the distance, the more the hands of the compass lean to each other: separation makes love grow fonder. The paradox or the oxymoron is a constant in this poetry whose fears and anxieties also speak of a world of spiritual certainties shaken by the modern discoveries of geography and science, one that is no longer the centre of the universe. Apart from the metaphysical poetry of Donne, the 17th century is also celebrated for its Baroque poetry. Baroque poetry served the same ends as the art of the period; the Baroque style is lofty, sweeping, epic, and religious. Many of these poets have an overtly Catholic sensibility (namely Richard Crashaw) and wrote poetry for the Catholic counter-Reformation in order to establish a feeling of supremacy and mysticism that would ideally persuade newly emerging Protestant groups back toward Catholicism.
Caroline and Cromwellian literature
The turbulent years of the mid-17th century, during the reign of Charles I and the subsequent Commonwealth and Protectorate, saw a flourishing of political literature in English. Pamphlets written by sympathisers of every faction in the English civil war ran from vicious personal attacks and polemics, through many forms of propaganda, to high-minded schemes to reform the nation. Of the latter type, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes would prove to be one of the most important works of British political philosophy. Hobbes's writings are some of the few political works from the era which are still regularly published while John Bramhall, who was Hobbes's chief critic, is largely forgotten. The period also saw a flourishing of news books, the precursors to the British newspaper, with journalists such as Henry Muddiman, Marchamont Needham, and John Birkenhead representing the views and activities of the contending parties. The frequent arrests of authors and the suppression of their works, with the consequence of foreign or underground printing, led to the proposal of a licensing system. The Areopagitica, a political pamphlet by John Milton, was written in opposition to licensing and is regarded as one of the most eloquent defenses of press freedom ever written.
Specifically in the reign of Charles I (1625 – 42), English Renaissance theatre experienced its concluding efflorescence. The last works of Ben Jonson appeared on stage and in print, along with the final generation of major voices in the drama of the age: John Ford, Philip Massinger, James Shirley, and Richard Brome. With the closure of the theatres at the start of the English Civil War in 1642, drama was suppressed for a generation, to resume only in the altered society of the English Restoration in 1660.
Other forms of literature written during this period are usually ascribed political subtexts, or their authors are grouped along political lines. The cavalier poets, active mainly before the civil war, owed much to the earlier school of metaphysical poets. The forced retirement of royalist officials after the execution of Charles I was a good thing in the case of Izaak Walton, as it gave him time to work on his book The Compleat Angler. Published in 1653, the book, ostensibly a guide to fishing, is much more: a meditation on life, leisure, and contentment. The two most important poets of Oliver Cromwell's England were Andrew Marvell and John Milton, with both producing works praising the new government; such as Marvell's An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland. Despite their republican beliefs they escaped punishment upon the Restoration of Charles II, after which Milton wrote some of his greatest poetical works (with any possible political message hidden under allegory). Thomas Browne was another writer of the period; a learned man with an extensive library, he wrote prolifically on science, religion, medicine and the esoteric.
Restoration literature
Main article: Restoration Literature
Restoration literature includes both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Two Treatises on Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments of Robert Boyle and the holy meditations of Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, the pioneering of literary criticism from Dryden, and the first newspapers. The official break in literary culture caused by censorship and radically moralist standards under Cromwell's Puritan regime created a gap in literary tradition, allowing a seemingly fresh start for all forms of literature after the Restoration. During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to the court of Charles I went into exile with the twenty-year old Charles II. The nobility who travelled with Charles II were therefore lodged for over a decade in the midst of the continent's literary scene. Charles spent his time attending plays in France, and he developed a taste for Spanish plays. Those nobles living in Holland began to learn about mercantile exchange as well as the tolerant, rationalist prose debates that circulated in that officially tolerant nation.
The largest and most important poetic form of the era was satire. In general, publication of satire was done anonymously. There were great dangers in being associated with a satire. On the one hand, defamation law was a wide net, and it was difficult for a satirist to avoid prosecution if he were proven to have written a piece that seemed to criticize a noble. On the other hand, wealthy individuals would respond to satire as often as not by having the suspected poet physically attacked by ruffians. John Dryden was set upon for being merely suspected of having written the Satire on Mankind. A consequence of this anonymity is that a great many poems, some of them of merit, are unpublished and largely unknown.
Prose in the Restoration period is dominated by Christian religious writing, but the Restoration also saw the beginnings of two genres that would dominate later periods: fiction and journalism. Religious writing often strayed into political and economic writing, just as political and economic writing implied or directly addressed religion. The Restoration was also the time when John Locke wrote many of his philosophical works. Locke's empiricism was an attempt at understanding the basis of human understanding itself and thereby devising a proper manner for making sound decisions. These same scientific methods led Locke to his three Treatises on Government, which later inspired the thinkers in the American Revolution. As with his work on understanding, Locke moves from the most basic units of society toward the more elaborate, and, like Thomas Hobbes, he emphasizes the plastic nature of the social contract. For an age that had seen absolute monarchy overthrown, democracy attempted, democracy corrupted, and limited monarchy restored, only a flexible basis for government could be satisfying. The Restoration moderated most of the more strident sectarian writing, but radicalism persisted after the Restoration. Puritan authors such as John Milton were forced to retire from public life or adapt, and those Digger, Fifth Monarchist, Leveller, Quaker, and Anabaptist authors who had preached against monarchy and who had participated directly in the regicide of Charles I were partially suppressed. Consequently, violent writings were forced underground, and many of those who had served in the Interregnum attenuated their positions in the Restoration. John Bunyan stands out beyond other religious authors of the period. Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of personal salvation and a guide to the Christian life. Instead of any focus on eschatology or divine retribution, Bunyan instead writes about how the individual saint can prevail against the temptations of mind and body that threaten damnation. The book is written in a straightforward narrative and shows influence from both drama and biography, and yet it also shows an awareness of the grand allegorical tradition found in Edmund Spenser. During the Restoration period, the most common manner of getting news would have been a broadsheet publication. A single, large sheet of paper might have a written, usually partisan, account of an event. However, the period saw the beginnings of the first professional and periodical (meaning that the publication was regular) journalism in England. Journalism develops late, generally around the time of William of Orange's claiming the throne in 1689. Coincidentally or by design, England began to have newspapers just when William came to court from Amsterdam, where there were already newspapers being published.
It is impossible to satisfactorily date the beginning of the novel in English. However, long fiction and fictional biographies began to distinguish themselves from other forms in England during the Restoration period. An existing tradition of Romance fiction in France and Spain was popular in England. The "Romance" was considered a feminine form, and women were taxed with reading "novels" as a vice. One of the most significant figures in the rise of the novel in the Restoration period is Aphra Behn. She was not only the first professional female novelist, but she may be among the first professional novelists of either sex in England. Behn's most famous novel was Oroonoko in 1688. This was a biography of an entirely fictional African king who had been enslaved in Suriname. Behn's novels show the influence of tragedy and her experiences as a dramatist.
As soon as the previous Puritan regime's ban on public stage representations was lifted, the drama recreated itself quickly and abundantly. The most famous plays of the early Restoration period are the unsentimental or "hard" comedies of John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Etherege, which reflect the atmosphere at Court, and celebrate an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and conquest. After a sharp drop in both quality and quantity in the 1680s, the mid-90s saw a brief second flowering of the drama, especially comedy. Comedies like William Congreve's Love For Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700), and John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697) were "softer" and more middle-class in ethos, very different from the aristocratic extravaganza twenty years earlier, and aimed at a wider audience. The playwrights of the 1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with a strong middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of marriage. The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells.
Diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys depicted everyday London life and the cultural scene of the times.
Augustan literature
Main article: Augustan literature
The term Augustan literature derives from authors of the 1720s and 1730's themselves, who responded to a term that George I of England preferred for himself. While George I meant the title to reflect his might, they instead saw in it a reflection of Ancient Rome's transition from rough and ready literature to highly political and highly polished literature. Because of the aptness of the metaphor, the period from 1689 - 1750 was called "the Augustan Age" by critics throughout the 18th century (including Voltaire and Oliver Goldsmith). The literature of the period is overtly political and thoroughly aware of critical dictates for literature. It is an age of exuberance and scandal, of enormous energy and inventiveness and outrage, that reflected an era when English, Scottish, and Irish people found themselves in the midst of an expanding economy, lowering barriers to education, and the stirrings of the Industrial Revolution.
The most outstanding poet of the age is Alexander Pope, but Pope's excellence is partially in his constant battle with other poets, and his serene, seemingly neo-Classical approach to poetry is in competition with highly idiosyncratic verse and strong competition from such poets as Ambrose Philips. It was during this time that James Thomson produced his melancholy The Seasons and Edward Young wrote Night Thoughts. It is also the era that saw a serious competition over the proper model for the pastoral. In criticism, poets struggled with a doctrine of decorum, of matching proper words with proper sense and of achieving a diction that matched the gravity of a subject. At the same time, the mock-heroic was at its zenith. Pope's Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad are still the greatest mock-heroic poems ever written.
In prose, the earlier part of the period was overshadowed by the development of the English essay. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Spectator established the form of the British periodical essay, inventing the pose of the detached observer of human life who can meditate upon the world without advocating any specific changes in it. However, this was also the time when the English novel, first emerging in the Restoration, developed into a major artform. Daniel Defoe turned from journalism and writing criminal lives for the press to writing fictional criminal lives with Roxana and Moll Flanders. He also wrote a fictional treatment of the travels of Alexander Selkirk called Robinson Crusoe (1719). The novel would benefit indirectly from a tragedy of the stage, and in mid-century many more authors would begin to write novels.
If Addison and Steele overawed one type of prose, then Jonathan Swift did another. Swift's prose style is unmannered and direct, with a clarity that few contemporaries matched. He was a profound skeptic about the modern world, but he was similarly profoundly distrustful of nostalgia. He saw in history a record of lies and vanity, and he saw in the present a madness of vanity and lies. Core Christian values were essential, but these values had to be muscular and assertive and developed by constant rejection of the games of confidence men and their gullies. Swift's A Tale of a Tub announced his skeptical analysis of the claims of the modern world, and his later prose works, such as his war with Patridge the astrologer, and most of all his derision of pride in Gulliver's Travels left only the individual in constant fear and humility safe. After his "exile" to Ireland, Swift reluctantly began defending the Irish people from the predations of colonialism. His A Modest Proposal and the Drapier Letters provoked riots and arrests, but Swift, who had no love of Irish Roman Catholics, was outraged by the abuses and barbarity he saw around him.
Drama in the early part of the period featured the last plays of John Vanbrugh and William Congreve, both of whom carried on the Restoration comedy with some alterations. However, the majority of stagings were of lower farces and much more serious and domestic tragedies. George Lillo and Richard Steele both produced highly moral forms of tragedy, where the characters and the concerns of the characters were wholly middle class or working class. This reflected a marked change in the audience for plays, as royal patronage was no longer the important part of theatrical success. Additionally, Colley Cibber and John Rich began to battle each other for greater and greater spectacles to present on stage. The figure of Harlequin was introduced, and pantomime theatre began to be staged. This "low" comedy was quite popular, and the plays became tertiary to the staging. Opera also began to be popular in London, and there was significant literary resistance to this Italian incursion. This trend was broken only by a few attempts at a new type of comedy. Pope and John Arbuthnot and John Gay attempted a play entitled Three Hours After Marriage that failed. In 1728, however, John Gay returned to the playhouse with The Beggar's Opera. Gay's opera was in English and retold the story of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. However, it seemed to be an allegory for Robert Walpole and the directors of the South Sea Company, and so Gay's follow up opera was banned without performance. The Licensing Act 1737 brought an abrupt halt to much of the period's drama, as the theatres were once again brought under state control.
An effect of the Licensing Act was to cause more than one aspiring playwright to switch over to writing novels. Henry Fielding began to write prose satire and novels after his plays could not pass the censors. Henry Brooke also turned to novels. In the interim, Samuel Richardson had produced a novel intended to counter the deleterious effects of novels in Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1749). Henry Fielding attacked the absurdity of this novel with two of his own works, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, and then countered Richardson's Clarissa with Tom Jones. Henry Mackenzie wrote The Man of Feeling and indirectly began the sentimental novel. Laurence Sterne attempted a Swiftian novel with a unique perspective on the impossibility of biography (the model for most novels up to that point) and understanding with Tristram Shandy, even as his detractor Tobias Smollett elevated the picaresque novel with his works. Each of these novels represents a formal and thematic divergence from the others. Each novelist was in dialogue and competition with the others, and, in a sense, the novel established itself as a diverse and open-formed genre in this explosion of creativity. The most lasting effects of the experimentation would be the psychological realism of Richardson, the bemused narrative voice of Fielding, and the sentimentality of Brooke.
18th century
Further information: 18th century literature
During the Age of Sensibility, literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) – a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility. Led by the philosophers who were inspired by the discoveries of the previous century (Newton) and the writings of Descartes, Locke and Bacon.
They sought to discover and to act upon universally valid principles governing humanity, nature, and society. They variously attacked spiritual and scientific authority, dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and economic and social restraints. They considered the state the proper and rational instrument of progress. The extreme rationalism and skepticism of the age led naturally to deism; the same qualities played a part in bringing the later reaction of romanticism. The Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot epitomized the spirit of the age.
During the end of the 19th century Ann Radcliffe would be the pioneer of the Gothic Novel. Her novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne in 1789, sets the tone for the majority of her work, which tended to involve innocent, but heroic young women who find themselves in gloomy, mysterious castles ruled by even more mysterious barons with dark pasts. The Romance of the Forest would follow and her most famous novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, is considered the ultimate Gothic Novel of the late 18th century.
Increased emphasis on instinct and feeling, rather than judgment and restraint. A growing sympathy for the Middle Ages during the Age of Sensibility sparked an interest in medieval ballads and folk literature. Ann Radcliffe's novel would embody all of this in The Mysteries of Udolpho.
Romanticism
The changing landscape of Britain brought about by the steam engine has two major outcomes: the boom of industrialism with the expansion of the city, and the consequent depopulation of the countryside as a result of the enclosures, or privatisation of pastures. Most peasants poured into the city to work in the new factories.
This abrupt change is revealed by the change of meaning in five key words: industry (once meaning "creativity"), democracy (once disparagingly used as "mob rule"), class (from now also used with a social connotation), art (once just meaning "craft"), culture (once only belonging to farming).
But the poor condition of workers, the new class-conflicts and the pollution of the environment causes a reaction to urbanism and industrialisation prompting poets to rediscover the beauty and value of nature. Mother earth is seen as the only source of wisdom, the only solution to the ugliness caused by machines.
The superiority of nature and instinct over civilisation had been preached by Jean Jacques Rousseau and his message was picked by almost all European poets. The first in England were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These early Romantic Poets brought a new emotionalism and introspection, and their emergence is marked by the first romantic Manifesto in English literature, the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads". This collection was mostly contributed by Wordsworth, although Coleridge must be credited for his long and impressive Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a tragic ballad about the survival of one sailor through a series of supernatural events on his voyage through the south seas which involves the slaying of an albatross, the death of the rest of the crew, a visit from Death and his mate, Life-in-Death, and the eventual redemption of the Mariner.
Coleridge and Wordsworth, however, understood romanticism in two entirely different ways: while Coleridge sought to make the supernatural "real" (much like sci-fi movies use special effects to make unlikely plots believable), Wordsworth sought to stir the imagination of readers through his down-to-earth characters taken from real life (for eg. in "The Idiot Boy"), or the beauty of the Lake District that largely inspired his production (as in "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey").
The "Second generation" of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Keats. Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least 'romantic' of the three. His amours with a number of prominent but married ladies was also a way to voice his dissent on the hypocrisy of a high society that was only apparently religious but in fact largely libertine, the same that had derided him for being physically impaired. His first trip to Europe resulted in the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a mock-heroic epic of a young man's adventures in Europe but also a sharp satire against London society. Despite Childe Harold's success on his return to England, accompanied by the publication of The Giaour and The Corsair his alleged incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh in 1816 actually forced him to leave England for good and seek asylum on the continent. Here he joined Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, with his secretary Dr. John Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva during the 'year without a summer' of 1816.
Although his is just a short story, Polidori must be credited for introducing The Vampyre, conceived from the same competition which spawned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to English literature. Percy, like Mary, had much in common with Byron: he was an aristocrat from a famous and ancient family, had embraced atheism and free-thinking and, like him, was fleeing from scandal in England.
Shelley had been expelled from college for openly declaring his atheism. He had married a 16-year-old girl, Harriet Westbrook whom he had abandoned soon after for Mary (Harriet took her own life after that). Harriet did not embrace his ideals of free love and anarchism, and was not as educated as to contribute to literary debate. Mary was different: the daughter of philosopher and revolutionary William Godwin, she was intellectually more of an equal, shared some of his ideals and was a feminist like her late mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Women.
One of Percy Shelley's most prominent works is the Ode to the West Wind. Despite his apparent refusal to believe in God, this poem is considered a homage to pantheism, the recognition of a spiritual presence in nature.
Mary Shelley did not go down in history for her poetry, but for giving birth to science fiction: the plot for the novel is said to have come from a nightmare during stormy nights on Lake Geneva in the company of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. Her idea of making a body with human parts stolen from different corpses and then animating it with electricity was perhaps influenced by Alessandro Volta's invention and Luigi Galvani's experiments with dead frogs. Frankenstein's chilling tale also suggests modern organ transplants, tissue regeneration, reminding us of the moral issues raised by today's medicine. But the creature of Frankenstein is incredibly romantic as well. Although "the monster" is intelligent, good and loving, he is shunned by everyone because of his ugliness and deformity, and the desperation and envy that result from social exclusion turn him against the very man who created him.
John Keats did not share Byron's and Shelley's extremely revolutionary ideals, but his cult of pantheism is as important as Shelley's. Keats was in love with the ancient stones of the Parthenon that Lord Elgin had brought to England from Greece, also known as the Elgin Marbles). He celebrates ancient Greece: the beauty of free, youthful love couples here with that of classical art. Keats's great attention to art, especially in his Ode on a Grecian Urn is quite new in romanticism, and it will inspire Walter Pater's and then Oscar Wilde's belief in the absolute value of art as independent from aesthetics.
Some rightly think that the most popular novelist of the era was Sir Walter Scott, whose grand historical romances inspired a generation of painters, composers, and writers throughout Europe. His most remembered work, Ivanhoe, continues to be studied to this day.
In retrospect, we now look back to Jane Austen, who wrote novels about the life of the landed gentry, seen from a woman's point of view, and wryly focused on practical social issues, especially marriage and choosing the right partner in life, with love being above all else. Her most important and popular novel, Pride and Prejudice, would set the model for all Romance Novels to follow. Jane Austen created the ultimate hero and heroine in Darcy and Elizabeth, who must overcome their own stubborn pride and the prejudices they have toward each other, in order to come to a middle ground, where they finally realize their love for one another. In her novels, Jane Austen brings to light the hardships women faced, who usually did not inherit money, could not work and where their only chance in life depended on the man they married. She brought to light not only the difficulties women faced in her day, but also what was expected of men and of the careers they had to follow. This she does with wit and humour and with endings where all characters, good or bad, receive exactly what they deserve. Jane Austen started a genre that is still followed today. Her works generally are seen as 'realist' and not romantic in the artistic sense.
Poet, painter and printmaker William Blake is usually included among the English Romanticists, though his visionary work is much different from that of the others discussed in this section.
Victorian literature
Main article: Victorian literature
Charles Dickens
It was in the Victorian era (1837-1901) that the novel became the leading form of literature in English. Most writers were now more concerned to meet the tastes of a large middle class reading public than to please aristocratic patrons. The best known works of the era include the emotionally powerful works of the Brontë sisters; the satire Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray; the realist novels of George Eliot; and Anthony Trollope's insightful portrayals of the lives of the landowning and professional classes.
Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s, confirming the trend for serial publication. Dickens wrote vividly about London life and the struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion which was acceptable to readers of all classes. His early works such as the Pickwick Papers are masterpieces of comedy. Later his works became darker, without losing his genius for caricature.
The Bronte sisters were English writers of the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published and were subsequently accepted into the canon of great English literature. They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published, at their own expense, in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The book attracted little attention, selling only two copies. The sisters returned to prose, producing a novel each in the following year. Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were released in 1847 after their long search to secure publishers.
An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside may be seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, and others. Leading poetic figures included Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Christina Rossetti.
Literature for children developed as a separate genre. Some works become globally well-known, such as those of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, both of whom used nonsense verse. Adventure novels, such as those of Anthony Hope and Robert Louis Stevenson, were written for adults but are now generally classified as for children. At the end of the Victorian Era and leading into the Edwardian Era, Helen Beatrix Potter was an English author and illustrator, best known for her children’s books, which featured animal characters. In her thirties, Potter published the highly successful children's book The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902. Potter eventually went on to published 23 children's books and become a wealthly woman. Her books along with Lewis Carroll’s are read and published to this day.
Modernism
Main article: Modernist literature
The movement known as English literary modernism grew out of a general sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and objective truth. The movement was greatly influenced by the ideas of Romanticism, Karl Marx's political writings, and the psychoanalytic theories of subconscious - Sigmund Freud. The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers.
Although literary modernism reached its peak between the First and Second World Wars, the earliest examples of the movement's attitudes appeared in the mid to late nineteenth century. Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, and the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy represented a few of the major early modernists writing in England during the Victorian period.
The first decades of the twentieth century saw several major works of modernism published, including the seminal short story collection Dubliners by James Joyce, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the poetry and drama of William Butler Yeats.
Important novelists between the World Wars included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse and D. H. Lawrence. T. S. Eliot was the preeminent English poet of the period. Across the Atlantic writers like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and the poets Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost developed a more American take on the modernist aesthetic in their work.
Perhaps the most contentiously important figure in the development of the modernist movement was the American poet Ezra Pound. Credited with "discovering" both T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, whose stream of consciousness novel Ulysses is considered to be one of the century's greatest literary achievements, Pound also advanced the cause of imagism and free verse, forms which would dominate English poetry into the twenty-first century.
Gertrude Stein, an American expat, was also an enormous literary force during this time period, famous for her line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."
Other notable writers of this period included H.D., Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas and Graham Greene. However, some of these writers are more closely associated with what has become known as post-modernism, a term often used to encompass the diverse range of writers who succeeded the modernists.
Post-modern literature
Main article: Postmodern literature
This section requires expansion.
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is difficult to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Thomas Pynchon
Views of English literature
"I had always thought of English literature as the richest in the world; the discovery now of a secret chamber (sc. Old English literature) at the very threshold of that literature came to me as an additional gift." - Jorge Luis Borges, 'An Autobiographical Essay', The Aleph & Other Stories
See also
Wikiversity has learning materials about Topic:Literary Studies
• American literature
• Anglo-Welsh literature
• Australian literature
• British literature
• Canadian literature
• Early English Jewish literature
• Indian English literature
• Irish literature
• List of English language poets
• Literature of South Africa
• New Zealand literature
• Postcolonial literature
• Women's writing in English
External links
• Luminarium: Anthology of Middle English Literature (1350-1485)
• Luminarium: 16th Century Renaissance English Literature (1485-1603)
• Luminarium: Seventeenth Century English Literature (1603-1660)
• Norton Anthology of English Literature
• A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology Ed. José Ángel García Landa, (University of Zaragoza, Spain)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_literature"
Categories: English literature | English-language culture
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English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; Joseph Conrad was born in Poland, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, Vladimir Nabokov was Russian. In other words, English literature is as diverse as the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world. In academia, the term often labels departments and programmes practising English studies in secondary and tertiary educational systems. Despite the variety of authors of English literature, works of William Shakespeare remain paramount throughout the English-speaking world.
This article primarily deals with literature from Britain written in English, some notable works listed. For literature from specific English-speaking regions, consult the see also section, bottom of the page.
Old English
The first works in English, written in Old English, appeared in the early Middle Ages (the oldest surviving text is Cædmon's Hymn). The oral tradition was very strong in the early English culture and most literary works were written to be performed. Epic poems were thus very popular and many, including Beowulf, have survived to the present day in the rich corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature that closely resemble today's Icelandic, Norwegian, North Frisian and the Northumbrian and Scots English dialects of modern English. Much Old English verse in the extant manuscripts is probably a "milder" adaptation of the earlier Germanic war poems from the continent. When such poetry was brought to England it was still being handed down orally from one generation to another, and the constant presence of alliterative verse, or consonant rhyme (today's newspaper headlines and marketing abundantly use this technique such as in Big is Better) helped the Anglo-Saxon peoples remember it. Such rhyme is a feature of Germanic languages and is opposed to vocalic or end-rhyme of Romance languages. But the first written literature dates to the early Christian monasteries founded by St. Augustine of Canterbury and his disciples and it is reasonable to believe that it was somehow adapted to suit to needs of Christian readers. Even without their crudest lines, the Old English war poems, and to a larger extent all Germanic war poems, still smell of blood feuds and their consonant rhymes sound like the smashing of swords under the gloomy northern sky: there is always a sense of imminent danger in the narratives. Sooner or later, all things must come to an end, as Beowulf eventually dies at the hands of the monsters he spends the tale fighting. The feelings of Beowulf that nothing lasts, that youth and joy will turn to death and sorrow entered Christianity and were to dominate the future landscape of English fiction.
Middle English literature
Renaissance literature
Following the introduction of a printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476, vernacular literature flourished. The Reformation inspired the production of vernacular liturgy which led to the Book of Common Prayer, a lasting influence on literary English language. The poetry, drama, and prose produced under both Queen Elizabeth I and King James I constitute what is today labelled as Early modern (or Renaissance).
Early Modern period
Further information: Early Modern English and Early Modern Britain
Elizabethan Era
Further information: Canons of Renaissance poetry
The Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the field of drama. The Italian Renaissance had rediscovered the ancient Greek and Roman theatre, and this was instrumental in the development of the new drama, which was then beginning to evolve apart from the old mystery and miracle plays of the Middle Ages. The Italians were particularly inspired by Seneca (a major tragic playwright and philosopher, the tutor of Nero) and Plautus (its comic clichés, especially that of the boasting soldier had a powerful influence on the Renaissance and after). However, the Italian tragedies embraced a principle contrary to Seneca's ethics: showing blood and violence on the stage. In Seneca's plays such scenes were only acted by the characters. But the English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model: a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London and Giovanni Florio had brought much of the Italian language and culture to England. It is also true that the Elizabethan Era was a very violent age and that the high incidence of political assassinations in Renaissance Italy (embodied by Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince) did little to calm fears of popish plots. As a result, representing that kind of violence on the stage was probably more cathartic for the Elizabethan spectator. Following earlier Elizabethan plays such as Gorboduc by Sackville & Norton and The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd that was to provide much material for Hamlet, William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed. Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably had only some grammar school education. He was neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat as the "university wits" that had monopolised the English stage when he started writing. But he was very gifted and incredibly versatile, and he surpassed "professionals" as Robert Greene who mocked this "shake-scene" of low origins. Though most dramas met with great success, it is in his later years (marked by the early reign of James I) that he wrote what have been considered his greatest plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, a tragicomedy that inscribes within the main drama a brilliant pageant to the new king. Shakespeare also popularized the English sonnet which made significant changes to Petrarch's model.
The sonnet was introduced into English by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century. Poems intended to be set to music as songs, such as by Thomas Campion, became popular as printed literature was disseminated more widely in households. See English Madrigal School. Other important figures in Elizabethan theatre include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont. Had Marlowe (1564-1593) not been stabbed at twenty-nine in a tavern brawl, says Anthony Burgess, he might have rivalled, if not equalled Shakespeare himself for his poetic gifts. Remarkably, he was born only a few weeks before Shakespeare and must have known him well. Marlowe's subject matter, though, is different: it focuses more on the moral drama of the renaissance man than any other thing. Marlowe was fascinated and terrified by the new frontiers opened by modern science. Drawing on German lore, he introduced Dr. Faustus to England, a scientist and magician who is obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man's technological power to its limits. He acquires supernatural gifts that even allow him to go back in time and wed Helen of Troy, but at the end of his twenty-four years' covenant with the devil he has to surrender his soul to him. His dark heroes may have something of Marlowe himself, whose untimely death remains a mystery. He was known for being an atheist, leading a lawless life, keeping many mistresses, consorting with ruffians: living the 'high life' of London's underworld. But many suspect that this might have been a cover-up for his activities as a secret agent for Elizabeth I, hinting that the 'accidental stabbing' might have been a premeditated assassination by the enemies of The Crown. Beaumont and Fletcher are less-known, but it is almost sure that they helped Shakespeare write some of his best dramas, and were quite popular at the time. It is also at this time that the city comedy genre develops. In the later 16th century English poetry was characterised by elaboration of language and extensive allusion to classical myths. The most important poets of this era include Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. Elizabeth herself, a product of Renaissance humanism, produced occasional poems such as On Monsieur’s Departure.
Jacobean literature
After Shakespeare's death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era (The reign of James I). However, Jonson's aesthetics hark back to the Middle Ages rather than to the Tudor Era: his characters embody the theory of humours. According to this contemporary medical theory, behavioral differences result from a prevalence of one of the body's four "humours" (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) over the other three; these humours correspond with the four elements of the universe: air, water, fire, and earth. This leads Jonson to exemplify such differences to the point of creating types, or clichés.
Jonson is a master of style, and a brilliant satirist. His Volpone shows how a group of scammers are fooled by a top con-artist, vice being punished by vice, virtue meting out its reward.
Others who followed Jonson's style include Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote the brilliant comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a mockery of the rising middle class and especially of those nouveaux riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much literature at all. In the story, a couple of grocers wrangle with professional actors to have their illiterate son play a leading role in a drama. He becomes a knight-errant wearing, appropriately, a burning pestle on his shield. Seeking to win a princess' heart, the young man is ridiculed much in the way Don Quixote was. One of Beaumont and Fletcher's chief merits was that of realising how feudalism and chivalry had turned into snobbery and make-believe and that new social classes were on the rise.
Another popular style of theatre during Jacobean times was the revenge play, popularized by John Webster and Thomas Kyd. George Chapman wrote a couple of subtle revenge tragedies, but must be remembered chiefly on account of his famous translation of Homer, one that had a profound influence on all future English literature, even inspiring John Keats to write one of his best sonnets.
The King James Bible, one of the most massive translation projects in the history of English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. It represents the culmination of a tradition of Bible translation into English that began with the work of William Tyndale. It became the standard Bible of the Church of England, and some consider it one of the greatest literary works of all time. This project was headed by James I himself, who supervised the work of forty-seven scholars. Although many other translations into English have been made, some of which are widely considered more accurate, many aesthetically prefer the King James Bible, whose meter is made to mimic the original Hebrew verse.
Besides Shakespeare, whose figure towers over the early 1600s, the major poets of the early 17th century included John Donne and the other Metaphysical poets. Influenced by continental Baroque, and taking as his subject matter both Christian mysticism and eroticism, metaphysical poetry uses unconventional or "unpoetic" figures, such as a compass or a mosquito, to reach surprise effects. For example, in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", one of Donne's Songs and Sonnets, the points of a compass represent two lovers, the woman who is home, waiting, being the centre, the farther point being her lover sailing away from her. But the larger the distance, the more the hands of the compass lean to each other: separation makes love grow fonder. The paradox or the oxymoron is a constant in this poetry whose fears and anxieties also speak of a world of spiritual certainties shaken by the modern discoveries of geography and science, one that is no longer the centre of the universe. Apart from the metaphysical poetry of Donne, the 17th century is also celebrated for its Baroque poetry. Baroque poetry served the same ends as the art of the period; the Baroque style is lofty, sweeping, epic, and religious. Many of these poets have an overtly Catholic sensibility (namely Richard Crashaw) and wrote poetry for the Catholic counter-Reformation in order to establish a feeling of supremacy and mysticism that would ideally persuade newly emerging Protestant groups back toward Catholicism.
Caroline and Cromwellian literature
The turbulent years of the mid-17th century, during the reign of Charles I and the subsequent Commonwealth and Protectorate, saw a flourishing of political literature in English. Pamphlets written by sympathisers of every faction in the English civil war ran from vicious personal attacks and polemics, through many forms of propaganda, to high-minded schemes to reform the nation. Of the latter type, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes would prove to be one of the most important works of British political philosophy. Hobbes's writings are some of the few political works from the era which are still regularly published while John Bramhall, who was Hobbes's chief critic, is largely forgotten. The period also saw a flourishing of news books, the precursors to the British newspaper, with journalists such as Henry Muddiman, Marchamont Needham, and John Birkenhead representing the views and activities of the contending parties. The frequent arrests of authors and the suppression of their works, with the consequence of foreign or underground printing, led to the proposal of a licensing system. The Areopagitica, a political pamphlet by John Milton, was written in opposition to licensing and is regarded as one of the most eloquent defenses of press freedom ever written.
Specifically in the reign of Charles I (1625 – 42), English Renaissance theatre experienced its concluding efflorescence. The last works of Ben Jonson appeared on stage and in print, along with the final generation of major voices in the drama of the age: John Ford, Philip Massinger, James Shirley, and Richard Brome. With the closure of the theatres at the start of the English Civil War in 1642, drama was suppressed for a generation, to resume only in the altered society of the English Restoration in 1660.
Other forms of literature written during this period are usually ascribed political subtexts, or their authors are grouped along political lines. The cavalier poets, active mainly before the civil war, owed much to the earlier school of metaphysical poets. The forced retirement of royalist officials after the execution of Charles I was a good thing in the case of Izaak Walton, as it gave him time to work on his book The Compleat Angler. Published in 1653, the book, ostensibly a guide to fishing, is much more: a meditation on life, leisure, and contentment. The two most important poets of Oliver Cromwell's England were Andrew Marvell and John Milton, with both producing works praising the new government; such as Marvell's An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland. Despite their republican beliefs they escaped punishment upon the Restoration of Charles II, after which Milton wrote some of his greatest poetical works (with any possible political message hidden under allegory). Thomas Browne was another writer of the period; a learned man with an extensive library, he wrote prolifically on science, religion, medicine and the esoteric.
Restoration literature
Main article: Restoration Literature
Restoration literature includes both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Two Treatises on Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments of Robert Boyle and the holy meditations of Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, the pioneering of literary criticism from Dryden, and the first newspapers. The official break in literary culture caused by censorship and radically moralist standards under Cromwell's Puritan regime created a gap in literary tradition, allowing a seemingly fresh start for all forms of literature after the Restoration. During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to the court of Charles I went into exile with the twenty-year old Charles II. The nobility who travelled with Charles II were therefore lodged for over a decade in the midst of the continent's literary scene. Charles spent his time attending plays in France, and he developed a taste for Spanish plays. Those nobles living in Holland began to learn about mercantile exchange as well as the tolerant, rationalist prose debates that circulated in that officially tolerant nation.
The largest and most important poetic form of the era was satire. In general, publication of satire was done anonymously. There were great dangers in being associated with a satire. On the one hand, defamation law was a wide net, and it was difficult for a satirist to avoid prosecution if he were proven to have written a piece that seemed to criticize a noble. On the other hand, wealthy individuals would respond to satire as often as not by having the suspected poet physically attacked by ruffians. John Dryden was set upon for being merely suspected of having written the Satire on Mankind. A consequence of this anonymity is that a great many poems, some of them of merit, are unpublished and largely unknown.
Prose in the Restoration period is dominated by Christian religious writing, but the Restoration also saw the beginnings of two genres that would dominate later periods: fiction and journalism. Religious writing often strayed into political and economic writing, just as political and economic writing implied or directly addressed religion. The Restoration was also the time when John Locke wrote many of his philosophical works. Locke's empiricism was an attempt at understanding the basis of human understanding itself and thereby devising a proper manner for making sound decisions. These same scientific methods led Locke to his three Treatises on Government, which later inspired the thinkers in the American Revolution. As with his work on understanding, Locke moves from the most basic units of society toward the more elaborate, and, like Thomas Hobbes, he emphasizes the plastic nature of the social contract. For an age that had seen absolute monarchy overthrown, democracy attempted, democracy corrupted, and limited monarchy restored, only a flexible basis for government could be satisfying. The Restoration moderated most of the more strident sectarian writing, but radicalism persisted after the Restoration. Puritan authors such as John Milton were forced to retire from public life or adapt, and those Digger, Fifth Monarchist, Leveller, Quaker, and Anabaptist authors who had preached against monarchy and who had participated directly in the regicide of Charles I were partially suppressed. Consequently, violent writings were forced underground, and many of those who had served in the Interregnum attenuated their positions in the Restoration. John Bunyan stands out beyond other religious authors of the period. Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of personal salvation and a guide to the Christian life. Instead of any focus on eschatology or divine retribution, Bunyan instead writes about how the individual saint can prevail against the temptations of mind and body that threaten damnation. The book is written in a straightforward narrative and shows influence from both drama and biography, and yet it also shows an awareness of the grand allegorical tradition found in Edmund Spenser. During the Restoration period, the most common manner of getting news would have been a broadsheet publication. A single, large sheet of paper might have a written, usually partisan, account of an event. However, the period saw the beginnings of the first professional and periodical (meaning that the publication was regular) journalism in England. Journalism develops late, generally around the time of William of Orange's claiming the throne in 1689. Coincidentally or by design, England began to have newspapers just when William came to court from Amsterdam, where there were already newspapers being published.
It is impossible to satisfactorily date the beginning of the novel in English. However, long fiction and fictional biographies began to distinguish themselves from other forms in England during the Restoration period. An existing tradition of Romance fiction in France and Spain was popular in England. The "Romance" was considered a feminine form, and women were taxed with reading "novels" as a vice. One of the most significant figures in the rise of the novel in the Restoration period is Aphra Behn. She was not only the first professional female novelist, but she may be among the first professional novelists of either sex in England. Behn's most famous novel was Oroonoko in 1688. This was a biography of an entirely fictional African king who had been enslaved in Suriname. Behn's novels show the influence of tragedy and her experiences as a dramatist.
As soon as the previous Puritan regime's ban on public stage representations was lifted, the drama recreated itself quickly and abundantly. The most famous plays of the early Restoration period are the unsentimental or "hard" comedies of John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Etherege, which reflect the atmosphere at Court, and celebrate an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and conquest. After a sharp drop in both quality and quantity in the 1680s, the mid-90s saw a brief second flowering of the drama, especially comedy. Comedies like William Congreve's Love For Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700), and John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697) were "softer" and more middle-class in ethos, very different from the aristocratic extravaganza twenty years earlier, and aimed at a wider audience. The playwrights of the 1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with a strong middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of marriage. The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells.
Diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys depicted everyday London life and the cultural scene of the times.
Augustan literature
Main article: Augustan literature
The term Augustan literature derives from authors of the 1720s and 1730's themselves, who responded to a term that George I of England preferred for himself. While George I meant the title to reflect his might, they instead saw in it a reflection of Ancient Rome's transition from rough and ready literature to highly political and highly polished literature. Because of the aptness of the metaphor, the period from 1689 - 1750 was called "the Augustan Age" by critics throughout the 18th century (including Voltaire and Oliver Goldsmith). The literature of the period is overtly political and thoroughly aware of critical dictates for literature. It is an age of exuberance and scandal, of enormous energy and inventiveness and outrage, that reflected an era when English, Scottish, and Irish people found themselves in the midst of an expanding economy, lowering barriers to education, and the stirrings of the Industrial Revolution.
The most outstanding poet of the age is Alexander Pope, but Pope's excellence is partially in his constant battle with other poets, and his serene, seemingly neo-Classical approach to poetry is in competition with highly idiosyncratic verse and strong competition from such poets as Ambrose Philips. It was during this time that James Thomson produced his melancholy The Seasons and Edward Young wrote Night Thoughts. It is also the era that saw a serious competition over the proper model for the pastoral. In criticism, poets struggled with a doctrine of decorum, of matching proper words with proper sense and of achieving a diction that matched the gravity of a subject. At the same time, the mock-heroic was at its zenith. Pope's Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad are still the greatest mock-heroic poems ever written.
In prose, the earlier part of the period was overshadowed by the development of the English essay. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Spectator established the form of the British periodical essay, inventing the pose of the detached observer of human life who can meditate upon the world without advocating any specific changes in it. However, this was also the time when the English novel, first emerging in the Restoration, developed into a major artform. Daniel Defoe turned from journalism and writing criminal lives for the press to writing fictional criminal lives with Roxana and Moll Flanders. He also wrote a fictional treatment of the travels of Alexander Selkirk called Robinson Crusoe (1719). The novel would benefit indirectly from a tragedy of the stage, and in mid-century many more authors would begin to write novels.
If Addison and Steele overawed one type of prose, then Jonathan Swift did another. Swift's prose style is unmannered and direct, with a clarity that few contemporaries matched. He was a profound skeptic about the modern world, but he was similarly profoundly distrustful of nostalgia. He saw in history a record of lies and vanity, and he saw in the present a madness of vanity and lies. Core Christian values were essential, but these values had to be muscular and assertive and developed by constant rejection of the games of confidence men and their gullies. Swift's A Tale of a Tub announced his skeptical analysis of the claims of the modern world, and his later prose works, such as his war with Patridge the astrologer, and most of all his derision of pride in Gulliver's Travels left only the individual in constant fear and humility safe. After his "exile" to Ireland, Swift reluctantly began defending the Irish people from the predations of colonialism. His A Modest Proposal and the Drapier Letters provoked riots and arrests, but Swift, who had no love of Irish Roman Catholics, was outraged by the abuses and barbarity he saw around him.
Drama in the early part of the period featured the last plays of John Vanbrugh and William Congreve, both of whom carried on the Restoration comedy with some alterations. However, the majority of stagings were of lower farces and much more serious and domestic tragedies. George Lillo and Richard Steele both produced highly moral forms of tragedy, where the characters and the concerns of the characters were wholly middle class or working class. This reflected a marked change in the audience for plays, as royal patronage was no longer the important part of theatrical success. Additionally, Colley Cibber and John Rich began to battle each other for greater and greater spectacles to present on stage. The figure of Harlequin was introduced, and pantomime theatre began to be staged. This "low" comedy was quite popular, and the plays became tertiary to the staging. Opera also began to be popular in London, and there was significant literary resistance to this Italian incursion. This trend was broken only by a few attempts at a new type of comedy. Pope and John Arbuthnot and John Gay attempted a play entitled Three Hours After Marriage that failed. In 1728, however, John Gay returned to the playhouse with The Beggar's Opera. Gay's opera was in English and retold the story of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. However, it seemed to be an allegory for Robert Walpole and the directors of the South Sea Company, and so Gay's follow up opera was banned without performance. The Licensing Act 1737 brought an abrupt halt to much of the period's drama, as the theatres were once again brought under state control.
An effect of the Licensing Act was to cause more than one aspiring playwright to switch over to writing novels. Henry Fielding began to write prose satire and novels after his plays could not pass the censors. Henry Brooke also turned to novels. In the interim, Samuel Richardson had produced a novel intended to counter the deleterious effects of novels in Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1749). Henry Fielding attacked the absurdity of this novel with two of his own works, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, and then countered Richardson's Clarissa with Tom Jones. Henry Mackenzie wrote The Man of Feeling and indirectly began the sentimental novel. Laurence Sterne attempted a Swiftian novel with a unique perspective on the impossibility of biography (the model for most novels up to that point) and understanding with Tristram Shandy, even as his detractor Tobias Smollett elevated the picaresque novel with his works. Each of these novels represents a formal and thematic divergence from the others. Each novelist was in dialogue and competition with the others, and, in a sense, the novel established itself as a diverse and open-formed genre in this explosion of creativity. The most lasting effects of the experimentation would be the psychological realism of Richardson, the bemused narrative voice of Fielding, and the sentimentality of Brooke.
18th century
Further information: 18th century literature
During the Age of Sensibility, literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) – a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility. Led by the philosophers who were inspired by the discoveries of the previous century (Newton) and the writings of Descartes, Locke and Bacon.
They sought to discover and to act upon universally valid principles governing humanity, nature, and society. They variously attacked spiritual and scientific authority, dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and economic and social restraints. They considered the state the proper and rational instrument of progress. The extreme rationalism and skepticism of the age led naturally to deism; the same qualities played a part in bringing the later reaction of romanticism. The Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot epitomized the spirit of the age.
During the end of the 19th century Ann Radcliffe would be the pioneer of the Gothic Novel. Her novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne in 1789, sets the tone for the majority of her work, which tended to involve innocent, but heroic young women who find themselves in gloomy, mysterious castles ruled by even more mysterious barons with dark pasts. The Romance of the Forest would follow and her most famous novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, is considered the ultimate Gothic Novel of the late 18th century.
Increased emphasis on instinct and feeling, rather than judgment and restraint. A growing sympathy for the Middle Ages during the Age of Sensibility sparked an interest in medieval ballads and folk literature. Ann Radcliffe's novel would embody all of this in The Mysteries of Udolpho.
Romanticism
The changing landscape of Britain brought about by the steam engine has two major outcomes: the boom of industrialism with the expansion of the city, and the consequent depopulation of the countryside as a result of the enclosures, or privatisation of pastures. Most peasants poured into the city to work in the new factories.
This abrupt change is revealed by the change of meaning in five key words: industry (once meaning "creativity"), democracy (once disparagingly used as "mob rule"), class (from now also used with a social connotation), art (once just meaning "craft"), culture (once only belonging to farming).
But the poor condition of workers, the new class-conflicts and the pollution of the environment causes a reaction to urbanism and industrialisation prompting poets to rediscover the beauty and value of nature. Mother earth is seen as the only source of wisdom, the only solution to the ugliness caused by machines.
The superiority of nature and instinct over civilisation had been preached by Jean Jacques Rousseau and his message was picked by almost all European poets. The first in England were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These early Romantic Poets brought a new emotionalism and introspection, and their emergence is marked by the first romantic Manifesto in English literature, the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads". This collection was mostly contributed by Wordsworth, although Coleridge must be credited for his long and impressive Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a tragic ballad about the survival of one sailor through a series of supernatural events on his voyage through the south seas which involves the slaying of an albatross, the death of the rest of the crew, a visit from Death and his mate, Life-in-Death, and the eventual redemption of the Mariner.
Coleridge and Wordsworth, however, understood romanticism in two entirely different ways: while Coleridge sought to make the supernatural "real" (much like sci-fi movies use special effects to make unlikely plots believable), Wordsworth sought to stir the imagination of readers through his down-to-earth characters taken from real life (for eg. in "The Idiot Boy"), or the beauty of the Lake District that largely inspired his production (as in "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey").
The "Second generation" of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Keats. Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least 'romantic' of the three. His amours with a number of prominent but married ladies was also a way to voice his dissent on the hypocrisy of a high society that was only apparently religious but in fact largely libertine, the same that had derided him for being physically impaired. His first trip to Europe resulted in the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a mock-heroic epic of a young man's adventures in Europe but also a sharp satire against London society. Despite Childe Harold's success on his return to England, accompanied by the publication of The Giaour and The Corsair his alleged incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh in 1816 actually forced him to leave England for good and seek asylum on the continent. Here he joined Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, with his secretary Dr. John Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva during the 'year without a summer' of 1816.
Although his is just a short story, Polidori must be credited for introducing The Vampyre, conceived from the same competition which spawned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to English literature. Percy, like Mary, had much in common with Byron: he was an aristocrat from a famous and ancient family, had embraced atheism and free-thinking and, like him, was fleeing from scandal in England.
Shelley had been expelled from college for openly declaring his atheism. He had married a 16-year-old girl, Harriet Westbrook whom he had abandoned soon after for Mary (Harriet took her own life after that). Harriet did not embrace his ideals of free love and anarchism, and was not as educated as to contribute to literary debate. Mary was different: the daughter of philosopher and revolutionary William Godwin, she was intellectually more of an equal, shared some of his ideals and was a feminist like her late mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Women.
One of Percy Shelley's most prominent works is the Ode to the West Wind. Despite his apparent refusal to believe in God, this poem is considered a homage to pantheism, the recognition of a spiritual presence in nature.
Mary Shelley did not go down in history for her poetry, but for giving birth to science fiction: the plot for the novel is said to have come from a nightmare during stormy nights on Lake Geneva in the company of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. Her idea of making a body with human parts stolen from different corpses and then animating it with electricity was perhaps influenced by Alessandro Volta's invention and Luigi Galvani's experiments with dead frogs. Frankenstein's chilling tale also suggests modern organ transplants, tissue regeneration, reminding us of the moral issues raised by today's medicine. But the creature of Frankenstein is incredibly romantic as well. Although "the monster" is intelligent, good and loving, he is shunned by everyone because of his ugliness and deformity, and the desperation and envy that result from social exclusion turn him against the very man who created him.
John Keats did not share Byron's and Shelley's extremely revolutionary ideals, but his cult of pantheism is as important as Shelley's. Keats was in love with the ancient stones of the Parthenon that Lord Elgin had brought to England from Greece, also known as the Elgin Marbles). He celebrates ancient Greece: the beauty of free, youthful love couples here with that of classical art. Keats's great attention to art, especially in his Ode on a Grecian Urn is quite new in romanticism, and it will inspire Walter Pater's and then Oscar Wilde's belief in the absolute value of art as independent from aesthetics.
Some rightly think that the most popular novelist of the era was Sir Walter Scott, whose grand historical romances inspired a generation of painters, composers, and writers throughout Europe. His most remembered work, Ivanhoe, continues to be studied to this day.
In retrospect, we now look back to Jane Austen, who wrote novels about the life of the landed gentry, seen from a woman's point of view, and wryly focused on practical social issues, especially marriage and choosing the right partner in life, with love being above all else. Her most important and popular novel, Pride and Prejudice, would set the model for all Romance Novels to follow. Jane Austen created the ultimate hero and heroine in Darcy and Elizabeth, who must overcome their own stubborn pride and the prejudices they have toward each other, in order to come to a middle ground, where they finally realize their love for one another. In her novels, Jane Austen brings to light the hardships women faced, who usually did not inherit money, could not work and where their only chance in life depended on the man they married. She brought to light not only the difficulties women faced in her day, but also what was expected of men and of the careers they had to follow. This she does with wit and humour and with endings where all characters, good or bad, receive exactly what they deserve. Jane Austen started a genre that is still followed today. Her works generally are seen as 'realist' and not romantic in the artistic sense.
Poet, painter and printmaker William Blake is usually included among the English Romanticists, though his visionary work is much different from that of the others discussed in this section.
Victorian literature
Main article: Victorian literature
Charles Dickens
It was in the Victorian era (1837-1901) that the novel became the leading form of literature in English. Most writers were now more concerned to meet the tastes of a large middle class reading public than to please aristocratic patrons. The best known works of the era include the emotionally powerful works of the Brontë sisters; the satire Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray; the realist novels of George Eliot; and Anthony Trollope's insightful portrayals of the lives of the landowning and professional classes.
Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s, confirming the trend for serial publication. Dickens wrote vividly about London life and the struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion which was acceptable to readers of all classes. His early works such as the Pickwick Papers are masterpieces of comedy. Later his works became darker, without losing his genius for caricature.
The Bronte sisters were English writers of the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published and were subsequently accepted into the canon of great English literature. They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published, at their own expense, in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The book attracted little attention, selling only two copies. The sisters returned to prose, producing a novel each in the following year. Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were released in 1847 after their long search to secure publishers.
An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside may be seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, and others. Leading poetic figures included Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Christina Rossetti.
Literature for children developed as a separate genre. Some works become globally well-known, such as those of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, both of whom used nonsense verse. Adventure novels, such as those of Anthony Hope and Robert Louis Stevenson, were written for adults but are now generally classified as for children. At the end of the Victorian Era and leading into the Edwardian Era, Helen Beatrix Potter was an English author and illustrator, best known for her children’s books, which featured animal characters. In her thirties, Potter published the highly successful children's book The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902. Potter eventually went on to published 23 children's books and become a wealthly woman. Her books along with Lewis Carroll’s are read and published to this day.
Modernism
Main article: Modernist literature
The movement known as English literary modernism grew out of a general sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and objective truth. The movement was greatly influenced by the ideas of Romanticism, Karl Marx's political writings, and the psychoanalytic theories of subconscious - Sigmund Freud. The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers.
Although literary modernism reached its peak between the First and Second World Wars, the earliest examples of the movement's attitudes appeared in the mid to late nineteenth century. Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, and the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy represented a few of the major early modernists writing in England during the Victorian period.
The first decades of the twentieth century saw several major works of modernism published, including the seminal short story collection Dubliners by James Joyce, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the poetry and drama of William Butler Yeats.
Important novelists between the World Wars included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse and D. H. Lawrence. T. S. Eliot was the preeminent English poet of the period. Across the Atlantic writers like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and the poets Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost developed a more American take on the modernist aesthetic in their work.
Perhaps the most contentiously important figure in the development of the modernist movement was the American poet Ezra Pound. Credited with "discovering" both T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, whose stream of consciousness novel Ulysses is considered to be one of the century's greatest literary achievements, Pound also advanced the cause of imagism and free verse, forms which would dominate English poetry into the twenty-first century.
Gertrude Stein, an American expat, was also an enormous literary force during this time period, famous for her line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."
Other notable writers of this period included H.D., Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas and Graham Greene. However, some of these writers are more closely associated with what has become known as post-modernism, a term often used to encompass the diverse range of writers who succeeded the modernists.
Post-modern literature
Main article: Postmodern literature
This section requires expansion.
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is difficult to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Thomas Pynchon
Views of English literature
"I had always thought of English literature as the richest in the world; the discovery now of a secret chamber (sc. Old English literature) at the very threshold of that literature came to me as an additional gift." - Jorge Luis Borges, 'An Autobiographical Essay', The Aleph & Other Stories
See also
Wikiversity has learning materials about Topic:Literary Studies
• American literature
• Anglo-Welsh literature
• Australian literature
• British literature
• Canadian literature
• Early English Jewish literature
• Indian English literature
• Irish literature
• List of English language poets
• Literature of South Africa
• New Zealand literature
• Postcolonial literature
• Women's writing in English
External links
• Luminarium: Anthology of Middle English Literature (1350-1485)
• Luminarium: 16th Century Renaissance English Literature (1485-1603)
• Luminarium: Seventeenth Century English Literature (1603-1660)
• Norton Anthology of English Literature
• A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology Ed. José Ángel García Landa, (University of Zaragoza, Spain)
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Lesbian Feminism and Queer Theory: Another "Battle of the Sexes"?
Lesbian Feminism and Queer Theory: Another "Battle of the Sexes"?
Over the past decade scholarship on lesbian and gay issues has rapidly increased not only in scope and size but also in level of acceptance as "valid" research within the academy. Although lesbian-feminist theory has long been a part of the academic field of women's studies, only recently has it begun to gain a degree of critical autonomy, a development that has been attributed to the need of some lesbian theorists to define their projects over against those of both feminist theory and the new darling of academia: "queer theory." While lesbian theory diverges in some important ways from feminist theory, it's opposition with queer theory is, I would argue, much greater and more fundamental, to the extent that the two may be wholly incompatible as politically useful theoretical positions. Not all lesbian theorists would agree, however, as the most recent work on these issues attests; even when lesbian theorists wholeheartedly embrace queer theory, they are often reluctant to give up on some of the basic premises of lesbian feminism. This, I believe, suggests that lesbian-feminism provides a certain type of social and political analysis that is not available through queer theory, a case I intend to make through a critical review of some of the scholarship on these issues produced over the last five years.
Some of the issues that divide lesbian-feminists and queer theorists are the very issues that threatened to divide lesbians from feminists in the early stages of the women's movement ( 1). The practice of identity politics, with its concern for the nature and boundaries of identity, has been central to most social movements of the past few decades, with perhaps the most visible example being that of the Black Power movement. Identity politics assumes a coherent, unified, and stable identity on the basis of which individuals should not be discriminated against; while activists concerned with ending racism and classism have used identity politics with some success, gender and especially sexuality pose a more difficult problem, as we will see in the work of both lesbian-feminists and queer theorists. Another related issue that divides these two critical perspectives is the nature and function of the sex/gender system; for lesbian-feminists, sex and gender are conceptually interdependent categories, best exemplified by the institution of compulsory heterosexuality, but for queer theorists, sex and gender are and must be conceptually distinct, which opens up the possibility for an analysis of homophobia that excludes the role of sexism ( 2 ). Lesbian-feminists and queer theorists also come to heads over the meaning of "sexual difference," the construction of identities through hierarchical, binary gender roles, and what it means to be "anti-normative." These are but some of the issues that scholars have recently taken up, as a way both of understanding the historical role and importance of lesbian-feminist theory, and of coming to terms with the emergence of queer theory.
Arlene Stein's article, "Sisters and Queers: the Decentering of Lesbian Feminism" (1992), offers a brief but thorough account of the history and development of lesbian-feminism, as well as an analysis of the fallout from lesbian feminism's recent encounter with queer theory. According to Stein, the recent increase in lesbian visibility and diversity has led lesbian feminists to reconceptualize what is meant by "lesbian community," since it seems more accurate to refer to lesbian "communities," and to recognize that not all of these communities will identify as feminist (35). But this has certainly not always been the case, and in order to understand the hegemony that lesbian feminism has had over constructions of lesbian identity, Stein reviews the basic assumptions of lesbian feminism as a political philosophy.
Early lesbian feminism developed in an attempt to counter the dominant medical construction of lesbianism as the congenital defect of "inversion." The medical model clearly suggested that lesbianism was a biological trait, albeit a defective one, and early homosexual rights advocates used this evidence to claim that lesbians should be pitied for their condition rather than oppressed because of it (37). With the rise of the women's movement in the seventies came an increasing dissatisfaction with the association of lesbianism with biological "abnormality," as early feminists began to analyze other explanations for the existence of lesbians. The theory that came to dominate early lesbian feminism was that lesbians were those who resisted the regime of compulsory heterosexuality, that they, unlike heterosexual women, refused to become part of the male economy by choosing to identify only with other women; thus was born the concept of the "woman-identified woman." ( 3 )
Lesbian feminist activists in the seventies claimed not only that lesbianism had nothing to do with a medical, or biologically "essential" condition, but that it was, in fact, a choice available to all women, and a choice that any woman aware of the oppressive nature of heteropatriarchy would make. While lesbian feminism at first sought to "liberate the 'lesbian' in every woman" (38), the movement soon found itself faced with the dilemma of identity politics. In order to gain political ground, lesbian feminists felt the need to fix lesbian identity as somewhat stable and coherent, in order to classify lesbians as a "minority" deserving of protection against discrimination, but the boundaries of this identity were fairly narrow, and excluded those whose experience of being lesbian didn't measure up to the feminist "ideal" (45). The tension produced by this move, away from recognizing lesbianism as a personal and political choice and towards a more essentialist understanding of lesbian identity (ironically not too far removed from the medical models), sowed the seeds for the demise of lesbian feminism as a powerful political force in the eighties, although it also opened up the possibility for more specifically lesbian varieties of political analysis, such as those taken up by the sex-radicals of the early eighties (48). ( 4 )
Towards the late eighties, Stein observes, lesbian feminism and lesbian politics in general were separate entities, often with contradictory assumptions and political aims. While the lesbian feminist analysis of oppression assumed an inherent link between sex and gender -- arguing, in the words of Suzanne Pharr, that "homophobia is a weapon of sexism" ( 5 ) -- other kinds of lesbian analysis (some of which also insisted on being considered feminist) argued for the "relative autonomy of gender and sexuality, sexism and heterosexism" (50). This latter position more closely resembles that taken by many queer (male) activists in the late eighties and early nineties, with whom these lesbians would come to identify as a way of marking their difference from "traditional" lesbian feminism. "Queerness," for these gay men and lesbians, is understood as "a non-normative sexuality which transcends the binary distinction homosexual/heterosexual to include all who feel disenfranchised by dominant sexual norms" (50).
Stein's primary critique of this newly emerging "queer" theory is that it fails to adequately "compensate for real, persistent structural differences in style, ideology, and access to resources among men and women" (50). In other words, it privileges sexuality, in both political analysis and cultural expression, over gender, and thereby threatens to erase or reduce the gender-bound experience of lesbians as women. While feminism may have failed to adequately address the multiplicity of sexual difference in its analysis of the sex/gender system, she argues, the new "queer theory" fails to address gender at all, which makes it an arguably less effective political philosophy for many lesbians. But a possible benefit of the clash between lesbian feminism and queer theory is that lesbian feminists have had to rethink their commitment to the belief in the primacy of the sex/gender system over other forms of oppression, to the extent that they have begun to theorize lesbianism as a provisional identity "situated in a web of multiple oppressions and identities "(51), taking into account differences of race, class, ethnicity in ways that queer theory has so far failed to do. According to Stein, then, this newer version of lesbian feminism, which has shifted away from an exclusive focus on gender towards an understanding of multiple oppressions, is a more "decentered" movement, which "may present new democratic potential" (52).
Not all lesbian-feminists have let queer theory off the hook quite so easily, though. While Stein argues that a newly "redesigned" lesbian feminism is more politically useful to lesbians than queer theory, she does not critique the assumptions and indeed arrogance of queer theory to the extent that other scholars have. This is perhaps in part due to the most recent developments in queer theory which Stein may not have been aware of in 1992; by 1994, however, lesbian scholars have become acutely aware of the hegemony that queer theory threatens to hold over all studies of gender and sexuality in the academy, and have thus launched into full-scale critiques of its totalizing tendencies.
Perhaps the most scathing critique comes from Sheila Jeffreys, whose work is not always received well by non lesbian feminist scholars because of her tendency to claim to speak for all lesbian feminists, when in fact she only speaks for a particularly radical group. In her most recent article, "The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians: Sexuality in the Academy" (1994), Jeffreys states simply, "The appearance of queer theory and queer studies threatens to mean the disappearance of lesbians" (459). Jeffreys' concern, like that of so many lesbian feminists, is that queer theory threatens to offset the advances made by feminism by failing altogether to recognize its impact in shaping contemporary understanding of sexuality and gender; queer theory, she argues, is "feminism free" (459). Despite its supposedly counter-normative associations, Jeffreys believes the word "queer" has come to signify white gay male, which renders any project associated with this signifier simply "more of the same," while masquerading as "new and uniquely liberating" (469). Thus, unlike Stein, whose critique of queer theory is relatively mild in comparison, Jeffreys accuses this new theoretical discourse of deliberately reinscribing the very oppression(s) that feminists and lesbian feminists have been fighting against for years, in order to privilege (homo)sexuality and gay male culture as the epitome of the "anti-discourse" made so much of by postmodern theory.
Central to Jeffreys' critique is that queer theory privileges and indeed naturalizes the masculine in a way that runs counter to the aims and goals of most forms of feminism. The notion of "camp" or "drag," which Jeffreys sees as one of the key concepts of queer theory, is built on gay male notions of performative femininity, which not only excludes biological women but enshrines the dominant construction of masculine as the binary opposite of feminine; a drag queen's enactment of femininity for the pleasure of other men, rather than calling into question the performative nature of all gender roles, instead fixes perceived sexual difference at the core of desire, a claim early lesbian feminists were most anxious to refute. According to Jeffreys, then, while queer theory may claim to expand the limits of gender by "playing" with the terms that constitute it -- by supposedly separating femininity from the female body in the persona of a drag queen, for example -- it in fact fails to account for the sexism inherent in the terms as they are constituted by the dominant culture. A man "playing at" being a coy, submissive woman, for the benefit of other men, is hardly a vision of sophisticated gender analysis to most lesbian feminists -- which is not to criticize drag queens in and of themselves, so much as to point out the inadequacy of drag as core theoretical concept.
Jeffreys also criticizes the tendency of queer politics to "[accept] and [celebrate] the minority status of homosexuality." This, she believes, is a politics "which is in contradiction to lesbian feminism" (469) because of its insistence on a stable, coherent albeit counter-normative identity. She continues:
Lesbian feminists do not see themselves as being part of a transhistorical minority of 1 in 10 or 1 in 20, but as the model of free womanhood. Rather than wanting acceptance as a minority which is defined in opposition to an accepted and inevitable heterosexual majority, lesbian feminist theorists seek to dismantle heterosexuality, and one strategy is the promotion of lesbianism as a choice for women. (469)
One of the supposedly progressive things about the word "queer" -- its open and defiant stance against heteronormativity -- is, to critics like Jeffreys, precisely its greatest weakness, since it presupposes the naturalness of that which it is supposed to be in opposition against, and lesbian feminism has long insisted that no system of sexuality is natural. Failing to see this fundamental insight of lesbian feminism, queer theorists are unable to account the total hegemony institutionalized heterosexuality has over all human interactions, ranging from the regulation of marriage and reproduction to a whole host of seemingly unrelated restrictions which prevent the self-identified queer from being free.
Jacquelyn Zita, in an article entitled "Gay and Lesbian Studies: Yet Another Unhappy Marriage?" (1994), raises many of the same objections to queer theory as Jeffreys, and with only slightly less anger at its critical dominance. While Jeffreys is concerned with the impact of queer theory and queer politics both inside and out of the academy, Zita is primarily concerned with the academic field of queer theory, and its potential impact on departments of lesbian and gay studies departments and of women's studies. According to Zita, one problem with subsuming gay and lesbian studies under the heading "queer" is that gay male academics haven't adequately theorized oppression on bases other than sexuality (such as race, gender, class, ability), and instead tend to privilege homophobia as "the" central form of oppression (259-60). Feminism, on the other hand, has been much more willing to expand its analyses to incorporate multiple oppressions -- to, in fact, argue that all forms of oppression are fundamentally linked to each other -- although there are some feminists who argue that patriarchy lies at the heart of all other forms of oppression. While feminism works to be inclusive, then, Zita finds it particularly "disappointing when queer theorists unreflectively practice exclusion in their theory building, and [it is] even more disappointing when it is lesbian feminists who are among the marginalized" (261).
Like Jeffreys, Zita also criticizes queer theory for its reliance on notions of camp and drag, on the performance and theatricality of gender, which are male-defined and deployed. While gay men may engage in performative femininity as a form of entertainment, or as a means of erotic stimulation, Zita notes that lesbians who adopt masculine roles rarely do so for such reasons, but rather for survival, which suggests that theorizing gender solely as performance is a "luxury," one that is "a function of social and theoretical privilege, where gender is radically deconstructed as an ontology-free artifice of sexual semiotics by the postmodern constructionists or as a history-free stylistic by what-ever-turns-you-on pro-sex liberals" (263). Zita's frustration with the masculinist bias of queer theory is, in part, the result of her more general frustration with the critical hegemony of postmodernism, a theoretical perspective that may very well turn out to be hostile to the goals of most types of feminist analysis. In the passage below, Zita links the recent success of queer theory directly to the influence of postmodernism, and suggests , as Jeffreys has, that queer theory is essentially "feminism free."
This rapid ascent [of queer theory] into the esoteric echelons of academic discourse seems not only related to a quick resolution of male Oedipal tension between disgraced gay sons and forgiving straight fathers, but also a quick cover of the ass -- and overreactive, if not homophobic attempt to sanitize and intellectualize over the cultural shame and embodied grit that grounds queer studies in the body and its heady sexual desire. (266)
As a result, Zita argues, feminist scholars who "have not been heavily schooled in the privileged Eurocentric discourse appropriated by queer theory may find themselves marginalized from this drama between fathers and sons" (266), which further underscores the divisions between queer theory and lesbian feminism.
Another scholar who links the development and critical success of queer theory to postmodernism is Shane Phelan, whose book, Identity Politics: Lesbian Feminism and the Limits of Community (1989), was written several years before the term "queer theory" was even coined. ( 6 ) While she does not, therefore, mention it by name, it is clear that this is what she has in mind when she critiques the potential of postmodern theory to spawn theoretical perspectives that will be antagonistic towards the fundamental claims of feminism (140-1). According to Phelan, postmodernism is particularly hostile to lesbian feminism because of its insistence that all subjectivity is suspect, even though it is precisely the awareness of oneself as a "speaking subject" that lesbians most need to develop (140). Unlike Zita, neither Phelan nor Jeffreys seems to believe that the tensions between postmodern/queer theory and lesbian feminism can ever be resolved, because the problem isn't that (male) queer theorists have not yet adequately theorized multiple oppressions, but that their theoretical project is fundamentally at odds with that of most feminists.( 7 )
This is not to suggest, however, that all lesbian feminists find it impossible to reconcile their perspective with queer theory; on the contrary, quite a few theorists who consider themselves lesbian feminists have embraced the new queer politics enthusiastically, and in fact some of the most influential thinkers in queer theory are female: Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick, Teresa de Lauretis. In her article, "Making it All Perfectly Queer" (1992), Lisa Duggan argues in favor of both the word "queer" and the project of queer theory, which she believes is a necessary counterpoint to the limited strategies of nationalism and liberalism which have for so long dominated gay politics (11). Because these earlier strains of activism posit a unified, coherent "gay identity," they fail to adequately account for the varieties of difference within the ranks of "gay," with the result being that a politics which claims to represent all gay people does so only for white, middle class gay men (18). Duggan argues that the notion of "a 'queer community' can work somewhat differently [because it] is often used to construct a collectivity no longer defined solely by the gender of its members' sexual partners. This new community is unified only by a shared dissent from the dominant organization of sex and gender" (20).
While I would have to disagree with her implication that earlier models of gay identity were defined solely on the basis of the gender of one's sexual partners, since lesbian feminism in particular worked towards a much broader definition, Duggan's point that queer signals a "shared dissent" from heteronormativity is well taken, even though, as I mentioned earlier, this tends to naturalize heterosexuality. Duggan goes on to explain that the constructionist position supported by queer theory "stake[s] out a new stance of opposition... [which] is constituted through its dissent from the hegemonic, structured relations and meanings of sexuality and gender, but its actual historical forms and positions are open, constantly subject to negotiation and renegotiation" (23). In other words, Duggan claims that queer identity cannot, by its very nature, be fixed, but is constantly under negotiation, as it were, defining itself over against the non-queer, the normative, the institution of compulsory heterosexuality. This, Duggan believes, is a politically useful strategy, one that is bound to be more successful than traditional liberal or nationalist strategies, although it currently occupies the critical margins in the arena of political activism (26-7).
Michael Warner, in his introduction to Fear of A Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993),also makes positive political claims for queer theory, although his analysis is slightly more problematic because he tries to suggest a partnership between queer theory and feminist theory that, to the minds of most lesbian feminists, does not exist. According to Warner, queer theory is "opening up in the way that feminism did when feminists began treating gender more and more as a primary category for understanding problems that did not initially look gender-specific" (xiv). Not only is Warner assuming that all feminists hold gender to be the central category of oppression, he is also implying that queer theory posits sexuality as the central category for understanding social problems, and given queer theory's insistence on the complete separation of sex and gender, it would seem then that these two modes of theoretical analysis are therefore in contradiction with each other. Warner downplays the possibility of contradiction by drawing out similarities between the two theoretical positions:
Much of the work of feminist social theory has consisted of showing that basic conceptualizations -- ways of opposing home and economy, the political and personal, or system and lifeworld -- presuppose and reinforce a paradigmatically male position. Queer theory is beginning to be in a position to make similar criticisms, sometimes with reference to the same oppositions,... but also with others. (xxiii)
But what this analysis fails to account for is the "paradigmatically male position" that informs so much of queer theory, which is precisely Jeffreys' and Zita's most vehement complaint against it.
Warner also uncritically assumes that the term queer "represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal" (xxvi). Here Warner is making a point similar to Duggan's, but given his apparent need to demonstrate the similarities between feminism and queer theory, it is surprising that he does not mention that this is precisely the position of early lesbian feminism: that lesbians represent "resistance to regimes of the normal" by resisting compulsory heteropatriarchy. He also fails to see the ways in which queer itself can operate as "minoritizing logic," since it assumes not only a fixed majority "norm" against which it constitutes itself as "queer," but also a fixed minority "queerness," which never slips into the realm of the norm. Given that most gay men participate in normative male privilege, it seems unrealistic to believe that queerness alone is sufficient to constitute oneself entirely on the margins.
Although I was not clear when I began this review where I would locate myself in the debate, my particularly critical response to Warner leads me to believe that, at least at this point, I would argue that queer theory is not politically useful for lesbian feminism. That is not to say, however, that with a more thoroughgoing analysis of its assumptions about gender queer theory might indeed fulfill its promise of being "all-inclusive," in the way that Duggan envisions, but as long as its central category of analysis is sexuality, to the exclusion of gender or indeed even race, class, etc., queer theory and feminism will continue to be at odds with each other. While lesbian feminists might usefully employ queer theory's critique of US liberalism and the tendency of early gay activists towards militant nationalism, it is hardly necessary to embrace queer theory on the whole, especially since lesbian feminism, in its new "decentered" form analyzed by Stein, contains within it the elements necessary to make such a critique on its own. Perhaps, then, this is my most fundamental criticism of queer theory: that it fails entirely to acknowledge and build on the theoretical and political work that has long been done by lesbian feminists, preferring instead to assume that it alone is capable of inventing and sustaining "important" forms of political analysis for lesbians and gays. For so many feminists, the male arrogance that supports this assumption is all too familiar, and altogether unwelcome.
Over the past decade scholarship on lesbian and gay issues has rapidly increased not only in scope and size but also in level of acceptance as "valid" research within the academy. Although lesbian-feminist theory has long been a part of the academic field of women's studies, only recently has it begun to gain a degree of critical autonomy, a development that has been attributed to the need of some lesbian theorists to define their projects over against those of both feminist theory and the new darling of academia: "queer theory." While lesbian theory diverges in some important ways from feminist theory, it's opposition with queer theory is, I would argue, much greater and more fundamental, to the extent that the two may be wholly incompatible as politically useful theoretical positions. Not all lesbian theorists would agree, however, as the most recent work on these issues attests; even when lesbian theorists wholeheartedly embrace queer theory, they are often reluctant to give up on some of the basic premises of lesbian feminism. This, I believe, suggests that lesbian-feminism provides a certain type of social and political analysis that is not available through queer theory, a case I intend to make through a critical review of some of the scholarship on these issues produced over the last five years.
Some of the issues that divide lesbian-feminists and queer theorists are the very issues that threatened to divide lesbians from feminists in the early stages of the women's movement ( 1). The practice of identity politics, with its concern for the nature and boundaries of identity, has been central to most social movements of the past few decades, with perhaps the most visible example being that of the Black Power movement. Identity politics assumes a coherent, unified, and stable identity on the basis of which individuals should not be discriminated against; while activists concerned with ending racism and classism have used identity politics with some success, gender and especially sexuality pose a more difficult problem, as we will see in the work of both lesbian-feminists and queer theorists. Another related issue that divides these two critical perspectives is the nature and function of the sex/gender system; for lesbian-feminists, sex and gender are conceptually interdependent categories, best exemplified by the institution of compulsory heterosexuality, but for queer theorists, sex and gender are and must be conceptually distinct, which opens up the possibility for an analysis of homophobia that excludes the role of sexism ( 2 ). Lesbian-feminists and queer theorists also come to heads over the meaning of "sexual difference," the construction of identities through hierarchical, binary gender roles, and what it means to be "anti-normative." These are but some of the issues that scholars have recently taken up, as a way both of understanding the historical role and importance of lesbian-feminist theory, and of coming to terms with the emergence of queer theory.
Arlene Stein's article, "Sisters and Queers: the Decentering of Lesbian Feminism" (1992), offers a brief but thorough account of the history and development of lesbian-feminism, as well as an analysis of the fallout from lesbian feminism's recent encounter with queer theory. According to Stein, the recent increase in lesbian visibility and diversity has led lesbian feminists to reconceptualize what is meant by "lesbian community," since it seems more accurate to refer to lesbian "communities," and to recognize that not all of these communities will identify as feminist (35). But this has certainly not always been the case, and in order to understand the hegemony that lesbian feminism has had over constructions of lesbian identity, Stein reviews the basic assumptions of lesbian feminism as a political philosophy.
Early lesbian feminism developed in an attempt to counter the dominant medical construction of lesbianism as the congenital defect of "inversion." The medical model clearly suggested that lesbianism was a biological trait, albeit a defective one, and early homosexual rights advocates used this evidence to claim that lesbians should be pitied for their condition rather than oppressed because of it (37). With the rise of the women's movement in the seventies came an increasing dissatisfaction with the association of lesbianism with biological "abnormality," as early feminists began to analyze other explanations for the existence of lesbians. The theory that came to dominate early lesbian feminism was that lesbians were those who resisted the regime of compulsory heterosexuality, that they, unlike heterosexual women, refused to become part of the male economy by choosing to identify only with other women; thus was born the concept of the "woman-identified woman." ( 3 )
Lesbian feminist activists in the seventies claimed not only that lesbianism had nothing to do with a medical, or biologically "essential" condition, but that it was, in fact, a choice available to all women, and a choice that any woman aware of the oppressive nature of heteropatriarchy would make. While lesbian feminism at first sought to "liberate the 'lesbian' in every woman" (38), the movement soon found itself faced with the dilemma of identity politics. In order to gain political ground, lesbian feminists felt the need to fix lesbian identity as somewhat stable and coherent, in order to classify lesbians as a "minority" deserving of protection against discrimination, but the boundaries of this identity were fairly narrow, and excluded those whose experience of being lesbian didn't measure up to the feminist "ideal" (45). The tension produced by this move, away from recognizing lesbianism as a personal and political choice and towards a more essentialist understanding of lesbian identity (ironically not too far removed from the medical models), sowed the seeds for the demise of lesbian feminism as a powerful political force in the eighties, although it also opened up the possibility for more specifically lesbian varieties of political analysis, such as those taken up by the sex-radicals of the early eighties (48). ( 4 )
Towards the late eighties, Stein observes, lesbian feminism and lesbian politics in general were separate entities, often with contradictory assumptions and political aims. While the lesbian feminist analysis of oppression assumed an inherent link between sex and gender -- arguing, in the words of Suzanne Pharr, that "homophobia is a weapon of sexism" ( 5 ) -- other kinds of lesbian analysis (some of which also insisted on being considered feminist) argued for the "relative autonomy of gender and sexuality, sexism and heterosexism" (50). This latter position more closely resembles that taken by many queer (male) activists in the late eighties and early nineties, with whom these lesbians would come to identify as a way of marking their difference from "traditional" lesbian feminism. "Queerness," for these gay men and lesbians, is understood as "a non-normative sexuality which transcends the binary distinction homosexual/heterosexual to include all who feel disenfranchised by dominant sexual norms" (50).
Stein's primary critique of this newly emerging "queer" theory is that it fails to adequately "compensate for real, persistent structural differences in style, ideology, and access to resources among men and women" (50). In other words, it privileges sexuality, in both political analysis and cultural expression, over gender, and thereby threatens to erase or reduce the gender-bound experience of lesbians as women. While feminism may have failed to adequately address the multiplicity of sexual difference in its analysis of the sex/gender system, she argues, the new "queer theory" fails to address gender at all, which makes it an arguably less effective political philosophy for many lesbians. But a possible benefit of the clash between lesbian feminism and queer theory is that lesbian feminists have had to rethink their commitment to the belief in the primacy of the sex/gender system over other forms of oppression, to the extent that they have begun to theorize lesbianism as a provisional identity "situated in a web of multiple oppressions and identities "(51), taking into account differences of race, class, ethnicity in ways that queer theory has so far failed to do. According to Stein, then, this newer version of lesbian feminism, which has shifted away from an exclusive focus on gender towards an understanding of multiple oppressions, is a more "decentered" movement, which "may present new democratic potential" (52).
Not all lesbian-feminists have let queer theory off the hook quite so easily, though. While Stein argues that a newly "redesigned" lesbian feminism is more politically useful to lesbians than queer theory, she does not critique the assumptions and indeed arrogance of queer theory to the extent that other scholars have. This is perhaps in part due to the most recent developments in queer theory which Stein may not have been aware of in 1992; by 1994, however, lesbian scholars have become acutely aware of the hegemony that queer theory threatens to hold over all studies of gender and sexuality in the academy, and have thus launched into full-scale critiques of its totalizing tendencies.
Perhaps the most scathing critique comes from Sheila Jeffreys, whose work is not always received well by non lesbian feminist scholars because of her tendency to claim to speak for all lesbian feminists, when in fact she only speaks for a particularly radical group. In her most recent article, "The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians: Sexuality in the Academy" (1994), Jeffreys states simply, "The appearance of queer theory and queer studies threatens to mean the disappearance of lesbians" (459). Jeffreys' concern, like that of so many lesbian feminists, is that queer theory threatens to offset the advances made by feminism by failing altogether to recognize its impact in shaping contemporary understanding of sexuality and gender; queer theory, she argues, is "feminism free" (459). Despite its supposedly counter-normative associations, Jeffreys believes the word "queer" has come to signify white gay male, which renders any project associated with this signifier simply "more of the same," while masquerading as "new and uniquely liberating" (469). Thus, unlike Stein, whose critique of queer theory is relatively mild in comparison, Jeffreys accuses this new theoretical discourse of deliberately reinscribing the very oppression(s) that feminists and lesbian feminists have been fighting against for years, in order to privilege (homo)sexuality and gay male culture as the epitome of the "anti-discourse" made so much of by postmodern theory.
Central to Jeffreys' critique is that queer theory privileges and indeed naturalizes the masculine in a way that runs counter to the aims and goals of most forms of feminism. The notion of "camp" or "drag," which Jeffreys sees as one of the key concepts of queer theory, is built on gay male notions of performative femininity, which not only excludes biological women but enshrines the dominant construction of masculine as the binary opposite of feminine; a drag queen's enactment of femininity for the pleasure of other men, rather than calling into question the performative nature of all gender roles, instead fixes perceived sexual difference at the core of desire, a claim early lesbian feminists were most anxious to refute. According to Jeffreys, then, while queer theory may claim to expand the limits of gender by "playing" with the terms that constitute it -- by supposedly separating femininity from the female body in the persona of a drag queen, for example -- it in fact fails to account for the sexism inherent in the terms as they are constituted by the dominant culture. A man "playing at" being a coy, submissive woman, for the benefit of other men, is hardly a vision of sophisticated gender analysis to most lesbian feminists -- which is not to criticize drag queens in and of themselves, so much as to point out the inadequacy of drag as core theoretical concept.
Jeffreys also criticizes the tendency of queer politics to "[accept] and [celebrate] the minority status of homosexuality." This, she believes, is a politics "which is in contradiction to lesbian feminism" (469) because of its insistence on a stable, coherent albeit counter-normative identity. She continues:
Lesbian feminists do not see themselves as being part of a transhistorical minority of 1 in 10 or 1 in 20, but as the model of free womanhood. Rather than wanting acceptance as a minority which is defined in opposition to an accepted and inevitable heterosexual majority, lesbian feminist theorists seek to dismantle heterosexuality, and one strategy is the promotion of lesbianism as a choice for women. (469)
One of the supposedly progressive things about the word "queer" -- its open and defiant stance against heteronormativity -- is, to critics like Jeffreys, precisely its greatest weakness, since it presupposes the naturalness of that which it is supposed to be in opposition against, and lesbian feminism has long insisted that no system of sexuality is natural. Failing to see this fundamental insight of lesbian feminism, queer theorists are unable to account the total hegemony institutionalized heterosexuality has over all human interactions, ranging from the regulation of marriage and reproduction to a whole host of seemingly unrelated restrictions which prevent the self-identified queer from being free.
Jacquelyn Zita, in an article entitled "Gay and Lesbian Studies: Yet Another Unhappy Marriage?" (1994), raises many of the same objections to queer theory as Jeffreys, and with only slightly less anger at its critical dominance. While Jeffreys is concerned with the impact of queer theory and queer politics both inside and out of the academy, Zita is primarily concerned with the academic field of queer theory, and its potential impact on departments of lesbian and gay studies departments and of women's studies. According to Zita, one problem with subsuming gay and lesbian studies under the heading "queer" is that gay male academics haven't adequately theorized oppression on bases other than sexuality (such as race, gender, class, ability), and instead tend to privilege homophobia as "the" central form of oppression (259-60). Feminism, on the other hand, has been much more willing to expand its analyses to incorporate multiple oppressions -- to, in fact, argue that all forms of oppression are fundamentally linked to each other -- although there are some feminists who argue that patriarchy lies at the heart of all other forms of oppression. While feminism works to be inclusive, then, Zita finds it particularly "disappointing when queer theorists unreflectively practice exclusion in their theory building, and [it is] even more disappointing when it is lesbian feminists who are among the marginalized" (261).
Like Jeffreys, Zita also criticizes queer theory for its reliance on notions of camp and drag, on the performance and theatricality of gender, which are male-defined and deployed. While gay men may engage in performative femininity as a form of entertainment, or as a means of erotic stimulation, Zita notes that lesbians who adopt masculine roles rarely do so for such reasons, but rather for survival, which suggests that theorizing gender solely as performance is a "luxury," one that is "a function of social and theoretical privilege, where gender is radically deconstructed as an ontology-free artifice of sexual semiotics by the postmodern constructionists or as a history-free stylistic by what-ever-turns-you-on pro-sex liberals" (263). Zita's frustration with the masculinist bias of queer theory is, in part, the result of her more general frustration with the critical hegemony of postmodernism, a theoretical perspective that may very well turn out to be hostile to the goals of most types of feminist analysis. In the passage below, Zita links the recent success of queer theory directly to the influence of postmodernism, and suggests , as Jeffreys has, that queer theory is essentially "feminism free."
This rapid ascent [of queer theory] into the esoteric echelons of academic discourse seems not only related to a quick resolution of male Oedipal tension between disgraced gay sons and forgiving straight fathers, but also a quick cover of the ass -- and overreactive, if not homophobic attempt to sanitize and intellectualize over the cultural shame and embodied grit that grounds queer studies in the body and its heady sexual desire. (266)
As a result, Zita argues, feminist scholars who "have not been heavily schooled in the privileged Eurocentric discourse appropriated by queer theory may find themselves marginalized from this drama between fathers and sons" (266), which further underscores the divisions between queer theory and lesbian feminism.
Another scholar who links the development and critical success of queer theory to postmodernism is Shane Phelan, whose book, Identity Politics: Lesbian Feminism and the Limits of Community (1989), was written several years before the term "queer theory" was even coined. ( 6 ) While she does not, therefore, mention it by name, it is clear that this is what she has in mind when she critiques the potential of postmodern theory to spawn theoretical perspectives that will be antagonistic towards the fundamental claims of feminism (140-1). According to Phelan, postmodernism is particularly hostile to lesbian feminism because of its insistence that all subjectivity is suspect, even though it is precisely the awareness of oneself as a "speaking subject" that lesbians most need to develop (140). Unlike Zita, neither Phelan nor Jeffreys seems to believe that the tensions between postmodern/queer theory and lesbian feminism can ever be resolved, because the problem isn't that (male) queer theorists have not yet adequately theorized multiple oppressions, but that their theoretical project is fundamentally at odds with that of most feminists.( 7 )
This is not to suggest, however, that all lesbian feminists find it impossible to reconcile their perspective with queer theory; on the contrary, quite a few theorists who consider themselves lesbian feminists have embraced the new queer politics enthusiastically, and in fact some of the most influential thinkers in queer theory are female: Judith Butler, Eve Sedgewick, Teresa de Lauretis. In her article, "Making it All Perfectly Queer" (1992), Lisa Duggan argues in favor of both the word "queer" and the project of queer theory, which she believes is a necessary counterpoint to the limited strategies of nationalism and liberalism which have for so long dominated gay politics (11). Because these earlier strains of activism posit a unified, coherent "gay identity," they fail to adequately account for the varieties of difference within the ranks of "gay," with the result being that a politics which claims to represent all gay people does so only for white, middle class gay men (18). Duggan argues that the notion of "a 'queer community' can work somewhat differently [because it] is often used to construct a collectivity no longer defined solely by the gender of its members' sexual partners. This new community is unified only by a shared dissent from the dominant organization of sex and gender" (20).
While I would have to disagree with her implication that earlier models of gay identity were defined solely on the basis of the gender of one's sexual partners, since lesbian feminism in particular worked towards a much broader definition, Duggan's point that queer signals a "shared dissent" from heteronormativity is well taken, even though, as I mentioned earlier, this tends to naturalize heterosexuality. Duggan goes on to explain that the constructionist position supported by queer theory "stake[s] out a new stance of opposition... [which] is constituted through its dissent from the hegemonic, structured relations and meanings of sexuality and gender, but its actual historical forms and positions are open, constantly subject to negotiation and renegotiation" (23). In other words, Duggan claims that queer identity cannot, by its very nature, be fixed, but is constantly under negotiation, as it were, defining itself over against the non-queer, the normative, the institution of compulsory heterosexuality. This, Duggan believes, is a politically useful strategy, one that is bound to be more successful than traditional liberal or nationalist strategies, although it currently occupies the critical margins in the arena of political activism (26-7).
Michael Warner, in his introduction to Fear of A Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993),also makes positive political claims for queer theory, although his analysis is slightly more problematic because he tries to suggest a partnership between queer theory and feminist theory that, to the minds of most lesbian feminists, does not exist. According to Warner, queer theory is "opening up in the way that feminism did when feminists began treating gender more and more as a primary category for understanding problems that did not initially look gender-specific" (xiv). Not only is Warner assuming that all feminists hold gender to be the central category of oppression, he is also implying that queer theory posits sexuality as the central category for understanding social problems, and given queer theory's insistence on the complete separation of sex and gender, it would seem then that these two modes of theoretical analysis are therefore in contradiction with each other. Warner downplays the possibility of contradiction by drawing out similarities between the two theoretical positions:
Much of the work of feminist social theory has consisted of showing that basic conceptualizations -- ways of opposing home and economy, the political and personal, or system and lifeworld -- presuppose and reinforce a paradigmatically male position. Queer theory is beginning to be in a position to make similar criticisms, sometimes with reference to the same oppositions,... but also with others. (xxiii)
But what this analysis fails to account for is the "paradigmatically male position" that informs so much of queer theory, which is precisely Jeffreys' and Zita's most vehement complaint against it.
Warner also uncritically assumes that the term queer "represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal" (xxvi). Here Warner is making a point similar to Duggan's, but given his apparent need to demonstrate the similarities between feminism and queer theory, it is surprising that he does not mention that this is precisely the position of early lesbian feminism: that lesbians represent "resistance to regimes of the normal" by resisting compulsory heteropatriarchy. He also fails to see the ways in which queer itself can operate as "minoritizing logic," since it assumes not only a fixed majority "norm" against which it constitutes itself as "queer," but also a fixed minority "queerness," which never slips into the realm of the norm. Given that most gay men participate in normative male privilege, it seems unrealistic to believe that queerness alone is sufficient to constitute oneself entirely on the margins.
Although I was not clear when I began this review where I would locate myself in the debate, my particularly critical response to Warner leads me to believe that, at least at this point, I would argue that queer theory is not politically useful for lesbian feminism. That is not to say, however, that with a more thoroughgoing analysis of its assumptions about gender queer theory might indeed fulfill its promise of being "all-inclusive," in the way that Duggan envisions, but as long as its central category of analysis is sexuality, to the exclusion of gender or indeed even race, class, etc., queer theory and feminism will continue to be at odds with each other. While lesbian feminists might usefully employ queer theory's critique of US liberalism and the tendency of early gay activists towards militant nationalism, it is hardly necessary to embrace queer theory on the whole, especially since lesbian feminism, in its new "decentered" form analyzed by Stein, contains within it the elements necessary to make such a critique on its own. Perhaps, then, this is my most fundamental criticism of queer theory: that it fails entirely to acknowledge and build on the theoretical and political work that has long been done by lesbian feminists, preferring instead to assume that it alone is capable of inventing and sustaining "important" forms of political analysis for lesbians and gays. For so many feminists, the male arrogance that supports this assumption is all too familiar, and altogether unwelcome.
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