British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

То время года видишь ты во мне, Когда из листьев редко где какой, Дрожа, желтеет в веток голизне,

Аптичий свист везде сменил покой. Во мне ты видишь бледный край небес, Где от заката памятка одна, И, постепенно взявши перевес, Их опечатывает темнота.

Во мне ты видишь то сгоранье пня, Когда зола, что пламенем была, Становится могилою огня,

Ато, что грело, изошло дотла.

И, это видя, помни: нет цены Свиданьям, дни которых сочтены.

Перевод Б. Пастернака

Я время года то являю взорам, Когда сухие листья тут и там

Торчат по сучьям – разоренным хорам, Где лишь вчера стоял немолчный гам. Во мне увидишь сумерек мерцанье, Когда закатный день уже поник

Иночь его уносит на закланье – Суровой смерти пасмурный двойник. Во мне увидишь пепел охладелый, Чуть видный след угасшего огня.

Ито, что прежде грело и горело, Могильной сенью стало для меня.

Ты видишь все и любишь вес сильней: Ведь мало мне уже осталось дней.

Перевод А. Финкеля

3.Speak on the genre peculiarities of Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies.

4.What are the main issues of Shakespeare’s plays?

5.Read the following famous meditation 17 by John Donne. Discuss the meaning and effectiveness of the two main metaphors in the meditation: (1) man as a chapter in a book; and (2) man as a piece of a continent. How does this meditation reflect the humanistic ideals of the Renaissance?

“Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me and see my state may have caused it to toll for

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me, and I know not that. The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.

There was a contention as far as a suit (in which piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee…”.

6. Here is an extract from Donne’s poem “A Valediction: of Weeping”. A “valediction” is something said on parting from a loved one. In the poem Donne expresses to a woman his powerful but mixed feelings on leaving her to travel overseas:

Let me pour forth

My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here,

For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,

And by this Mintage they are something worth,

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For thus they be

Pregnant* of thee;

Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more;

When a tear falls, that thou** falls which it bore,

So thou and I are nothing then, when on a divers*** shore.

*Pregnant: full, born (possibly also a reference that lovers should “look babies” in one another’s eyes).

**That thou: since you.

*** divers: different, foreign (archaic).

Although the poem has many layers of possible meaning, which of the following alternatives do you think get closest to the main argument of the poem? Can you improve the paraphrase?

Lines 1 – 6

Allow me to be foolish enough to let my tears flow in front of you before I leave / all over your face while I am here, since your appearance causes me sorrow and encourages tears from me with your picture on them, like coins and their picture of a queen. Since the tears are caused by you and contain you they have no value / have value.

Lines 7 – 9

My tears are the products of unhappiness and signs of more unhappiness to come after we have separated. When one of my tears falls like a piece of fruit and with it the reflection of you who caused it, it seems as though we will mean nothing to each other / will have no money when I am away from you in a foreign land.

Answer the following questions about the language and style of the poem.

What can you say about:

–the rhyme scheme of the poem?

–the rhythm?

Is the verse conversational and how has it been given poetic effect? What links are there between the images: tear, coin and tear, fruit,

pregnant?

7. Read the following extract from Paradise Lost by John Milton and say whether Satan feels that the titles are rightfully secured:

Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed,

Immediately inordinate desires

And upstart passions catch the government

From reason, and to servitude reduce

Man till then free. Therefore since he permits

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Within himself unworthy powers to reign Over free reason, God in judgment just Subjects him from without to violent lords; Who oft as undeservedly enthral

His outward freedom: tyranny must be, Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse. Yet sometimes nations will decline so low From virtue, which is reason, that no wrong, But justice, and some fatal curse annexed Deprives them of their outward liberty, their inward lost.

Chapter III

THE RISE OF NEOCLASSICISM

In the XVIII century England achieved, politically and economically, the position of the greatest power in Europe. It was also distinguished in science and philosophy, natural science (Hobbes, Locke, Newton). Adherents of philosophical rationalism said that man was virtuous by nature, and vice was due to ignorance only; so they started a public movement for enlightening the people. They wanted to bring knowledge that is “light” for the people and that will do away with all the evils of the society. This movement is called Enlightenment or Neoclassical Period – a label, applied to English literature from 1660 (the Restoration of Charles II) until about 1880. The period is characterized by looking back at the conventions of Greek and Latin literatures, the qualities supposed to be typical for them: dignity, proportion, balance, restraint, and precision of analytical thinking. Since Enlighteners believed in the power of reason, the period is also called The Age of Reason. The period is divided into The Restoration (1660–1700), Augustan Age (c. 1700 – c. 1745) and Age of Sensibility or Sentimentalism (c.1745–1800).

Restoration of monarchy in Britain in 1660 changed the whole atmosphere from gloom to that of pleasure. Charles II, having been brought up in France, absorbed their culture and their manners. The late XVII century is marked by flourishing of Restoration comedy – comedy of manners, chiefly in prose, with passages in verse to render the most romantic moments; their predominant theme is adultery, the tone is usually bawdy and amoral. The main playwrights were Congreve (The Way of the World) and Wycherley (The Country Wife). The plots of their comedies were complex, usually double or triple; the dialogues were full of repartee – witty, swift, mildly insulting replies. Later, in the second half of the XVIII

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century, Richard Brinsley Sheridan followed the tradition of Restoration drama in his excellent comedies The Rivals, The Duenna and The School for Scandal.

John Dryden contributed much to the development of heroic drama – a term applied to the tragedies of the Restoration period, the subjects of which aspired to epic grandeur and dealt with the exploits of great warriors and emperors in battles and love. Typically the choice between love and duty came into conflict. The most famous of his heroic dramas is All for Love, which is often considered to be an imitation of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra. The play concentrates on the last hours in the lives of the hero and the heroine.

At the beginning of the century there appeared one of the most brilliant groups of writers that has ever graced English literature. They had a strong sense of decorum, in the literary sense, meaning what was suitable to the subject matter, hallowed by tradition, and not liable to startle or discontent. They were very concerned to forge common standards of judgment, generally acceptable views of statecraft, philosophy or religion. They worked towards a community of minds, and believed the artist should be firmly rooted in his society. They also were among the first to write in the genre of the novel.

The character and actions of Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) have been the subject of infinite controversy and slander. He has been seen by Thackeray, as “a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against mankind.” He was a Tory, deeply attached to the Anglican Church, skeptical about man's nature (he wrote carefully that man was a creature capable of reason), disgusted by the easy optimism of many contemporary philosophers. But he was also a fighter for liberty and justice, a hater of meanness, a vigorous defender of the Irish, among whom he was born and grew up, and for whom he had a kind of exasperated tenderness.

A mind of this kind, skeptical of intellectual fashions, scornful of human pretensions, takes naturally to satire. Swift was the most perfectly equipped satirist that ever lived, and his works cover the wide range from gentle ridicule to deep contempt. Though he wrote for the government at times, he was not mere propagandist. So subtle was his way of going about things that his aim was often misunderstood. Queen Anne took the Tale of a Tub to be an attack on the Anglican Church: the brothers Martin (the Church of England), Jack (Protestantism) and Peter (Catholicism) inherit coats from their father (Christianity) and try to mend them in spite of the fact the father forbade them to do so. Finally Martin and Jack quarrel with arrogant Peter and each other. The title of the pamphlet derives

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from the idiom meaning “to speak nonsense”. In his most savage satirical pamphlet, A Modest Proposal, Swift suggested that the poverty and overpopulation of Ireland could be cured by fattening up Irish babies and killing them for food at the age of one, “…by which time a child is a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or ragout”.

So reasonable is the tone of the pamphlet, so enticing is the incidental detail that backs up the argument, that one is almost surprised the proposal was not acted upon. But what we today cannot miss is the savage but generous indignation at the English treatment of Ireland.

Swift's greatest satire, Gulliver's Travels, is a dangerous book to read part of, and it is sad that it is thus it is generally read and usually in childhood. Swift sends his Gulliver to strange lands of fancy only that we may thus see contemporary England from a new angle of vision. The satiric note alters from book to book, and it is only after reading and re-reading the whole, and considering it in the context of Swift's other writings, that one can come to a tentative judgment about the author's aims and attitudes. For example, the position of Gulliver at the end of the book, when he returns home after his stay among the virtuous horses – Houyhnhnms – and can no longer tolerate the loathsome smell and disgusting habits of a “Yahoo” or human being, has often been taken as an image of Swift's own relation to the human race. Yet no simple equation of Gulliver with Swift is possible. If in the first book (Lilliput) Gulliver finds himself the only honest man (the moral giant) in a nation of civilized yet scheming and treacherous politicians, in the second (Brobdignag) it is his description to the King of Brobdignag of English politics of the previous century that prompts the king to describe the English as “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth;” and when Gulliver, not put down, goes on to describe gunpowder and its effects, and offers to show him how to make it, the king describes him as an insect, and forbids him to mention the subject again. “A strange effect of narrow principles and short views!” comments the morally abused Gulliver in this book. His third travel is to the fancy countries. In the description of them Swift gives his own ideas of political organization: a state should be based on people’s responsibility, not on fear. It is also a sharp attack against pseudo-science and misinterpretation of history.

The satire of Gulliver is subtle, balanced and profound. What everyone has noticed is the continuously entertaining surface of the book, with

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Swift's delighted manipulating of his splendid central idea, and the riotous satire on travel books (“we set in the lee-braces, and hauled forward by the weather-bowlings, and hauled them tight, and belayed them”, etc).

Another writer who contributed much to consolidate fiction as a form of literature was Daniel Defoe (1660–1731). His biography is rich in adventures: a speculator, an inventor, a bankrupt, a traveler, a journalist and even a Government agent, both for the Wigs and the Tories (some suspect, for both at the same time). Once he endured pillory and on several occasions – imprisonment. Novel writing was only one of his activities, and he came to it late in life, and rich in experience. But Defoe is considered to be the pioneer and founder of English realistic novel.

Among his most famous pamphlets there are The True-Born Englishman and The Shortest Way with the Dissentres. In the former one Defoe calls the forefathers of the English nation as barbarians, the Roman, Saxon and Viking invaders as the slum. As he writes, the English aristocracy oughtn’t to forget that their ancestors were a French cook and an Italian whore, a terrible mixture of many nations. The latter pamphlet is a parody on the attitude and style of Tory political writings.

Robinson Crusoe is often thought of as the first English novel. Defoe’s outlook on the novel is best illustrated through his book A Journal of the Plague Year. He regards a novel not as a work of imagination but as a “true relation”, and even when the element of fact decreases, he maintains the close realism of pseudo fact. Defoe writes with the knowledge of his audience, mainly the Puritan middle class, and selects themes that still are interesting for the readers. Defoe has a talent of organizing his material into a well-conductive narrative, with an effective eye for detail, in a style ever simple and welcoming, but never obtrusive. The combination of these qualities has given Robinson Crusoe its immediate and continuous appeal.

The theme of man cut off from civilization and adapting himself to an island existence is a thread running through English literature, but the bias in Defoe's narrative is significant. Crusoe's island sojourn is only an important part of a much longer narrative, in which Crusoe's adventures at sea and round the world are seen, on the one hand, as punishment for disobeying the commands of his father, and on the other as a series of transactions by which he makes his way in the world. Sums of money, quantities of goods, commercial deals play a very large part in the story. When he finds himself alone on Juan Hernandez, the interest is first on how he will survive, then on how he will establish himself and increase his stock.

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When Friday appears, Crusoe gains a companion, but (more important) he gains a slave. The book is a perfect picture of various stages in the development of mankind and man as an economic being. Crusoe is practical, capable: he learns by his errors and is firm in command. As an emotional being he hardly exists at all. He may profess to be moved by the devotion of his slave Xuri, but a few pages on he is selling him for sixty pieces of eight. It is probably this obsessive practicality, this devotion to economic self-help, distrust of the romantic, which has frequently repelled readers, particularly in the nineteenth century. But perhaps it needed such hardheaded attention to the realities of life to drag prose-narrative out of the generalized idealities of the earlier stories into the actual world of eight- eenth-century living.

Crusoe is a strikingly complete character. Though there are whole areas of human experience on which he has nothing to say, this does not make his completeness and roundness the less, for those he does not report on are rendered so fully that we can work out for ourselves his attitude to the others. The clue to his character may seem to be in his words: “It was in vain to sit still and wish for what was not to be had, and this immediately rouz’d my application”. Crusoe has also got powers of observation and deduction.

But there is also the other side to Crusoe, the religious side, his preoccupation with theology and moralizing. Crusoe is God’s Englishman, and God helps those who help themselves.

Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719, when Daniel Defoe was 60. The success of the novel encouraged him, and there followed, in rapid succession, the novels Captain Singleton, (1720), Moll Flanders based on his own experience of imprisonment (1722), Colonel Jacque (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Roxana (1724). The skill of his novels lies in their detail, which makes them authentic. Form in its subtler sense does not affect Defoe, while movement goes on, the attention is held.

Moll Flanders illustrates this perhaps even better than Robinson Crusoe. Once again Defoe goes to great lengths to convince his readers that what he is telling is not fiction, but a true story: the confessions of a notorious seventeenth-century thief. But a life of crime is (as with Crusoe's island years) only part of the story. Moll begins life in jail, and, after a run of disastrous marriages, nearly ends it there too, but a great deal of the book is taken up with her life as a middle-class wife. Her “marriages” and her “husbands” are detailed one by one, and at the end of each such episode a balance sheet is drawn up by Moll of her material profit and loss.

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Moll tells her own story, and the manner is that of the confessional autobiography. So heterogeneous a mass of material needed the immediacy of the first person and a convincing unity of tone in the narrative voice. Moll boasts as she confesses. We never quite believe in her repentance: it is a jail, shadow-of-the-gallows repentance, and it is too stridently proclaimed.

The importance of Defoe's achievement was not immediately appreciated. Within a year of publication of Crusoe, for example, a parody of it had appeared, ending with the point-blank assertion that Defoe was a liar. Defoe himself was despised by the arbiters of taste as a hack, a sensationalist, and something less than a gentleman. It was partially right. Then the novel, it should be remembered, never completely gained respectability as a literary form until the XIX century.

Samuel Richardson (1689–1761) published an influential Tory journal, the True Briton and he is the author of several books. His first book The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum is a book of advice on morals and conduct. His novel Pamela started as a series of “familiar letters”, the morality and realism of which were highly praised. It is a story of a servant-girl, who tries to avoid seduction at the hands of her young master, then marries him, and the rest of the novel describes her virtues. Richardson himself handed a weapon to his critics when he subtitled the book Virtue Rewarded. It is not just literary critics of that time who have seen Pamela as a calculating prude. The Puritan notion that virtue brings rewards is distasteful to us, as it was to Fielding, the author of one of the parodies, Shamela Andrews. We can say that Pamela is both virtuous and calculating, that she sets a high price on her freedom to choose her partner, yet is strongly influenced in her choice by worldly considerations. This is all true enough, but it implies a complex evaluation of Pamela's religious and moral notions that Richardson never comes close to attempting.

Clarissa Harlowe is a greater book about a girl, who doesn’t want to marry the man her family has chosen for her. She is loved by the scoundrel Lovelace, who abducts her, sends her to a brothel, where he drugs and rapes her. Clarissa refuses to marry him and he is killed in a duel.

Samuel Richardson continued the tradition of Defoe’s narration, his attention to detail, but sometimes he was over-obsessed by it. That is why there is so much criticism against him, though Richardson was very realistic and had deep psychological insight.

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) is another craftsman of that period. He began by writing a series of comedies, farces and burlesques – literary compositions of dramatic representation, which aim at exciting laughter

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by the comical treatment of a serious subject or the caricature of the spirit of a serious work. He made a hit with his farce of Tom Thumb in 1730, which was written in the mock-heroic manner, ridiculing the “greatness” of the fashionable tragedies of the authors of that time. Even the subtitle – The Tragedy of Tragedies – emphasized the intention of the author. Six years later he opened the Haymarket Theatre as manager, producing another farce, Pasquin which attacked the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, so severely, as to lead to the passing of the Act, which is still in force, requiring a license from Lord Chamberlain for dramatic performances.

The moral codes of his novels are deeply felt, but they are quite different from those of Richardson’s. His first novel Joseph Andrews is in fact a parody on Pamela. This novel was a real innovation in form and style. Fielding called it “a comic romance” and declared his object was to defend what is good by displaying the Ridiculous. He invents a brother for Pamela and turns the subject matter upside down. Joseph is tempted by Lady Booby and since then he starts to travel in the company of Parson Adams, the simple, good-hearted, slightly ridiculous man, a clerical Don Quixote, the curate in Sir Thomas Booby’s family. This novel gave rise to picaresque novels – the novels that center on the travels of the hero and the people he meets on the road. This tradition continued in the novels of the XIX century writers, such as Dickens or Thackeray. In Joseph Andrews Fielding was aiming at giving a panoramic picture of XVIII century England set in the context of a conservative but tolerant morality.

The History of Tom Jones, published in 1749, is Fielding’s best novel. When we first meet Tom he is a foundling, mysteriously placed in Mr. Allworthy's bed, assumed therefore to be a bastard. But Mr. Allworthy brings up the child as his ward. Tom's enemy throughout boyhood is Mr. Allworthy's heir and nephew Master Blifil, a ycuth a year younger than Tom, who constantly tells ta!es about him, and finally, when Allworthy is ill, lies about him to such effect that Tom is turned out of the house. By now he is in love with Sophia, the neighbouring Squire Western's daughter. He thinks first of going to sea, then decides to join the army marching north to meet the Scots forces. At Upton-on-Severn he sees Sophia again; she is staying in the same inn, having run away from her father who is for compelling her to marry the detestable young Blifil. Tom follows her to London with the intention of returning a pocket book of hers that he has found. In London, despairing of ever marrying Sophia, knowing indeed that he can do her only harm, he meets an entirely fresh set of adventures; he becomes the lover of Lady Bellaston, an elderly woman of fashion

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