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Файл:Английский язык. Литературное наследие Великобритании XIX в.. Практикум для бакалавров укрупненных групп направлений подготовки «Науки об обществе», «
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Useful resources for reading about Jerome K. Jerome:
http://www.jeromekjerome.com
Comprehension assignments:
1. Give the brief summary of Jerome’s life.
2. Highlight the literary styles of the author.
3. Name Jerome’s most memorable works.
4. Write the brief summary of one of Jerome’s works.
Oscar Wilde
(Оскар Фингал О’Флаэрти Уиллс Уайльд)
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854
in Dublin, Ireland. His father, William Wilde, was an acclaimed Ireland’s
leading oto-ophthalmologic (ear and eye) surgeon who was knighted for his work
as medical advisor for the Irish censuses. William Wilde later founded
St. Mark’s Ophthalmic Hospital, entirely at his own personal expense, to treat the
city’s poor. Oscar Wilde’s mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, was a poet who was
closely associated with the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, a skilled linguist
whose acclaimed English translation of Pomeranian novelist Wilhelm Meinhold’s
Sidonia the Sorceress had a deep influence on her son’s later writing.
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Wilde was a bright and bookish child. He attended the Portora Royal
School at Enniskillen where he fell in love with Greek and Roman studies. He
won the school’s prize for the top classics student in each of his last two years,
as well as second prize in drawing during his final year. Upon graduating in
1871, Wilde was awarded the Royal School Scholarship to attend Trinity
College in Dublin. At the end of his first year at Trinity, in 1872, he placed
first in the school’s classics examination and received the college’s Foundation
Scholarship, the highest honor awarded to undergraduates.
Upon his graduation in 1874, Wilde received the Berkeley Gold Medal as
Trinity’s best student in Greek, as well as the Demyship scholarship for further
study at Magdalen College in Oxford. At Oxford Wilde continued to excel
academically, receiving first class marks from his examiners in both classics and
classical moderations. It was also at Oxford that Wilde made his first sustained
attempts at creative writing. In 1878, the year of his graduation, his poem
Ravenna won the Newdigate Prize for the best English verse composition by an
Oxford undergraduate.
Upon graduating from Oxford, Wilde moved to London to live with his
friend, Frank Miles, a popular portraitist among London’s high society. There he
continued to focus on writing poetry, publishing his first collection, Poems, in
1881. In mid-1881, at 27 years old, Poems collected, revised and expanded his
poetic efforts. The book was generally well received, and sold out its first print
run of 750 copies, prompting further printings in 1882. It was bound in a rich,
enamel, parchment cover (embossed with gilt blossom) and printed on
hand-made Dutch paper. While the book received only modest critical praise, it
nevertheless established Wilde as an up-and-coming writer. The next year, in
1882, Wilde traveled from London to New York City to embark on an American
lecture tour, for which he delivered a staggering 140 lectures in just nine
months.
While not lecturing, he managed to meet with some of the leading
American scholars and literary figures of the day, including Henry Longfellow,
Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt Whitman. Wilde especially admired Whitman.
“There is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honor so
much”, he later wrote to his idol.
Upon the conclusion of his American tour, Wilde returned home and
immediately commenced another lecture circuit of England and Ireland that
lasted until the middle of 1884. Personal Impressions of America, The Value of
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Art in Modern Life, and Dress were among his topics. Through his lectures, as
well as his early poetry, Wilde established himself as a leading proponent of the
aesthetic movement, a theory of art and literature that emphasized the pursuit of
beauty for its own sake, rather than to promote any political or social viewpoint.
On May 29, 1884, Wilde married a wealthy Englishwoman named
Constance Lloyd. They had two sons: Cyril, born in 1885, and Vyvyan, born in
1886. A year after his wedding, Wilde was hired to run Lady’s World,
a once-popular English magazine that had recently fallen out of fashion.
During his two years editing Lady’s World, Wilde revitalized the magazine by
expanding its coverage to “deal not merely with what women wear, but with
what they think and what they feel”.
’Beginning in 1888, while he was still serving as editor of Lady’s World,
Wilde entered a seven-year period of furious creativity, during which he
produced nearly all of his great literary works. In 1888, seven years after he
wrote Poems, Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a collection
of children’s stories. In 1891 he published Intentions, an essay collection
arguing the tenets of aestheticism, and that same year, he published his first and
only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The novel is a cautionary tale about a
beautiful young man, Dorian Gray, who wishes (and receives his wish) that his
portrait ages while he remains youthful and lives a life of sin and pleasure.
Contemporary reviewers and modern critics have postulated numerous possible
sources of the story, a search Jershua McCormack argues is futile because Wilde
“has tapped a root of Western folklore so deep and ubiquitous that the story has
escaped its origins and returned to the oral tradition”. Wilde claimed the plot
was “an idea that is as old as the history of literature but to which I have given a
new form”. Modern critic Robin McKie considered the novel to be technically
mediocre, saying that the conceit of the plot had guaranteed its fame, but the
device is never pushed to its full.
Wilde’s first play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, opened in February 1892
to widespread popularity and critical acclaim, encouraging Wilde to adopt
playwriting as his primary literary form. Over the next few years, Wilde
produced several great plays-witty, highly satirical comedies of manners that
nevertheless contained dark and serious undertones. His most notable and
famous plays were A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband
(1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). The Picture of Dorian
Gray and his play The Importance of Being Earnest, are considered among the
great literary masterpieces of the late Victorian period.
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Throughout his entire life, Wilde remained deeply committed to the
principles of aestheticism, principles that he expounded through his lectures and
demonstrated through his works as well as anyone of his era. “All art is at once
surface and symbol”, Wilde wrote in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.
“Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the
symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex
and vital”.
Wilde died of meningitis in November 30, 1900 at the age of 46.
Famous quotations by Oscar Wilde:
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his pu-
nishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.
True friends stab you in the front.
How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on
treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being.
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is pas-
sion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing
in life; now that I am old I know that it is.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask,
and he will tell you the truth.
Popular works by Oscar Wilde:
Poems (1881)
The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888, fairy stories)
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891, stories)
House of Pomegranates (1891, fairy stories)
Intentions (1891, essays and dialogues on aesthetics)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (first published in Lippincott’s Monthly
Magazine July 1890, in book form in 1891; novel)
The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891, political essay)
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Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892, play)
A Woman of No Importance (1893, play)
An Ideal Husband (performed 1895, published 1898; play)
The Importance of Being Earnest (performed 1895, published 1898; play)
De Profundis (written 1897, published variously 1905, 1908, 1949, 1962;
epistle)
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898, poem)
Useful resources for reading about Oscar Wilde:
http://www.biography.com
http://www.biography.com/people/oscar-wilde-9531078
Comprehension assignments:
1. Give the brief summary of Wilde’s life.
2. Highlight the literary styles of the author.
3. Name Wilde’s most memorable works.
4. Write the brief summary of one of Wilde’s works.
George Gordon Lord Byron
(Джордж Гордон Байрон)
George Gordon, Lord Byron was born in 1788, at Holles Street in
London, the son of a Guards Officer, Captain John Byron. Abandoned by her
husband, his mother, Catherine Gordon, took him in 1790 to Aberdeen, where
they lived in considerable poverty, and where Byron attended the local school,
learning early how to deal with the taunts of his fellow schoolboys concerning
his physical deformity, a club foot. His father died in 1791 at thirty-six in
France.
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Emotionally unstable, Catherine Byron raised her son in an atmosphere
variously colored by her excessive tenderness, fierce temper, insensitivity, and
pride. She was as likely to mock his lameness as to consult doctors about its
correction. From his Presbyterian nurse Byron developed a lifelong love for the
Bible and an abiding fascination with the Calvinist doctrines of innate evil and
predestined salvation. Early schooling instilled a devotion to reading and
especially a “grand passion” for history that informed much of his later writing.
Byron received his early formal education at Aberdeen Grammar School,
and in 1799 he was sent to school in Dulwich, and in 1801 to Harrow, where he
remained until July 1805. He then attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where
he formed a close friendship with John Cam Hobhouse, a fellow at King’s
College, with whom he corresponded on literary and other matters until the end
of his life. With the death of his great-uncle in 1798, the “Wicked” fifth Lord
Byron, George became the sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, heir to Newstead
Abbey, the family seat in Nottinghamshire. He enjoyed the role of landed
nobleman, proud of his coat of arms with its mermaid and chestnut horses
surmounting the motto “Crede Byron” (“Trust Byron”).
While living with his mother in Southwell, Nottinghamshire he cultivated
friendships with Elizabeth Pigot and her brother, John, with whom he staged two
plays for the entertainment of the community. During this time, with the help of
Elizabeth Pigot, who copied many of his rough drafts, he was encouraged to
write his first volumes of poetry. Fugitive Pieces was printed by Ridge of
Newark, which contained poems written when Byron was only 17. However,
it was promptly recalled and burned on the advice of his friend, the Reverend
J. T. Becher, on account of its more amorous verses, particularly the poem
To Mary.
Hours of Idleness, which collected many of the previous poems, along
with more recent compositions, was the culminating book. Groups of verses
(Poems on Various Occasions) on a single subject show his understanding of
the effectiveness of multiple points of view. It was put into the hands of his
relation, R. C. Dallas, requesting him to publish it without his name. Although
the work was published anonymously, Dallas wrote that Byron was already
pretty generally known to be the author. The work so upset some of his critics
they challenged Byron to a duel; over time, in subsequent editions, it became a
mark of prestige to be the target of Byron’s pen.
When his cousin Margaret Parker died, two years later, he composed
On the Death of a Young Lady; and throughout his life this poetic expression
would serve him as a catharsis of strong emotion.
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In the summer of 1803 he fell so deeply in love with his distant cousin,
the beautiful and engaged – Mary Chaworth of Annesley Hall, that he
interrupted his education for a term to be near her. His unrequited passion found
expression in such poems as Hills of Annesley (written 1805), The Adieu
(written 1807), Stanzas to a Lady on Leaving England (written 1809), and
The Dream (written 1816).
Inclined to liberalism in politics, Byron joined Hobhouse in the
Cambridge Whig Club. He began to be lionised by Whig society, and capitalised
on his success with a series of verse narratives: The Giaour, The Bride of
Abydos, The Corsair and The Prisoner of Chillon. Hobhouse accompanied him
on a grand tour beginning in 1809, during which they visited Portugal, Spain,
Gibraltar, Malta, Albania and Greece. In Greece he dined with Andreas Londos,
the governor of Vistitza (now Aigion), who gave him a passionate rendering
of Arise you Sons of Greece, and opened his eyes to the longing of the Greek
people to be free from their Turkish masters. It was during this tour that he
began his autobiographical poem Childe Harold. In March 1810 he sailed for
Constantinople, visiting what was then considered to be the site of the ancient
city of Troy. He returned to England in 1811, but was not in time to see
his mother before she died in August. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, an exotic
travelogue spiced with romantic disillusionment, was published in March 1812.
It was an instant success, the first edition selling out in three days. The fame to
which Byron awoke in London in 1812 was spread rapidly throughout Europe
and the English-speaking world by scores of translations and editions.
Between June 1813 and February 1816 Byron completed and had
published six extremely popular verse tales, five of them influenced by his
travels in Greece and Turkey: The Giaour (June 1813), The Bride of Abydos
(December 1813), The Corsair (February 1814), Lara (August 1814) and The
Siege of Corinth and Parisina (February 1816). Of the major Romantic poets,
Byron most sympathized with neoclassicism, with its order, discipline, and
clarity. The importance of English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers lies not only in
its vigor and vitality but in Byron’s lively advocacy of the neoclassical virtues
found in such seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets as Dryden and Pope,
and, from his own day, in Gifford. His admiration for Pope never wavered, nor
did he ever totally abandon the heroic couplet and Augustan role of censor
and moralist, as seen in Hints from Horace (written 1811), The Curse of
Minerva (written 1811) and The Age of Bronze (written 1822–1823).
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In January 1815 he was married to Annabella Millbanke and she gave
birth to a daughter in December, but left him in January 1816 and never
returned. Byron signed the separation papers and left England in April of that
year, never to return.
In the autumn of the same year (1816) he left for Venice. Byron settled in
mid June at the Villa Foscarini at La Mira on the Brenta, seven miles from
Venice. Here, he began to distill his memories of Rome into poetry. Composing
rapidly, he had completed the first draft for 126 stanzas of Childe Harold, Canto
IV, by mid July, but he revised and expanded the manuscript for the rest of the
year.
The first five cantos of Don Juan were written between 1818 and 1820,
during which period he made the acquaintance of the young Countess Guiccioli,
who found her first love in Byron. He followed her to Ravenna, and won the
friendship of her father and brother, who initiated him into the revolutionary
society of the Carbonari, a group involved in fighting for freedom from Austrian
rule. Here he continued the Don Juan and wrote the Ravenna Diary,
My Dictionary and Recollections. In Italy Byron found himself tempted to
give dinner parties; his guests included the Shelleys, Edward Ellerker
Williams, Thomas Medwin, John Taaffe and Edward John Trelawney. Shelley
and Williams rented a house on the coast and had a schooner built. Byron decided to have his own yacht, and engaged Trelawny’s friend, Captain Daniel
Roberts, to design and construct the boat, named the Bolivar. When Byron left
for Greece in 1823, it was sold. His voyage is covered in detail in Sailing with
Byron from Genoa to Cephalonia.
In April 1823 the London Greek Committee contacted him with a view to
acting as its agent in helping the Greeks with their War of Independence from
the Turks. Byron immediately accepted the role. By the 23rd he was well
enough again to arrange the release of 29 Turkish prisoners, men, women
and children. In early April he caught a violent cold with fever. Byron died in
Missolonghi on 19 April in 1824. His physician, Julius van Millingen was
unable to prevent his death. It has been said that if Byron had lived and had gone
on to defeat the Ottomans, he might have been declared King of Greece. The
heart was removed and buried in Missolonghi, and his remains were then sent
to England, and buried near Newstead Abbey at the Church of St. Mary
Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, having been refused burial in
Westminster Abbey. The Greeks mourned Lord Byron deeply, and he became a
hero. The national poet of Greece, Dionysios Solomos, wrote a poem about the
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unexpected loss, named To the Death of Lord Byron, and a town near Athens is
called Vyronas in his honour.
Philosophically and stylistically, Byron stands apart from the other major
Romantics. He was the least insular, the most cosmopolitan of them. Poetic
imagination was not for him, as for them, the medium of revelation of ultimate
truth. He did not embrace for long Wordsworth’s belief in the benevolence of
nature, espouse Shelley’s faith in human perfectibility, or experience Keats’s
private vision. Yet, as Leslie A. Marchand observes, “The core of his thinking
and the basis of his poetry is romantic aspiration”, and he evidences a “romantic
zest for life and experience”. In narrative skill, Byron has no superior in English
poetry, save Geoffrey Chaucer; as Ronald Bottrall notes, Byron, like his
illustrious predecessor, could “sum up a society and an era”. His subjects are
fundamental ones: life and death, growth and decay, humankind and nature.
His “apotheosis of the commonplace” is, to Edward E. Bostetter”, one of his
great contributions to the language of poetry”. Lacking the inhibitions of his
contemporaries, Byron created verse that is exuberant, spontaneous, expansive,
digressive, concrete, lucid, colloquial – in celebration of “unadorned reality”.
“I was born for opposition”, Byron proclaimed in Don Juan, Canto XV.
Famous quotations by George Gordon Lord Byron:
I have not loved the world, nor the world me.
Hatred is the madness of the heart.
A mistress never is nor can be a friend. While you agree, you are lov-
ers; and when it is over, anything but friends.
Absence – that common cure of love.
All who joy would win must share it.
Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.
But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the
least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we
have got hold of.
Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides
into friendship.
Popular works by George Gordon Lord Byron:
Hours of Idleness (1807)
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I & II (1812)
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The Giaour (1813)
The Bride of Abydos (1813)
The Corsair (1814)
Lara, A Tale (1814)
Hebrew Melodies (1815)
The Siege of Corinth (1816)
Parisina (1816)
The Prisoner of Chillon (1816)
The Dream (1816)
Prometheus (1816)
Darkness (1816)
Manfred (1817)
The Lament of Tasso (1817)
Beppo (1818)
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818)
Don Juan (1819–1824; incomplete on Byron’s death in 1824)
Mazeppa (1819)
The Prophecy of Dante (1819)
Marino Faliero (1820)
Sardanapalus (1821)
The Two Foscari (1821)
Cain (1821)
The Vision of Judgment (1821)
Heaven and Earth (1821)
Werner (1822)
The Age of Bronze (1823)
The Island (1823)
The Deformed Transformed (1824)
Useful resources for reading about George Gordon Lord Byron:
http://englishhistory.net/byron/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lord-byron
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/george-gordon-byron
Comprehension assignments:
1. Give the brief summary of Byron’s life.
2. Highlight the literary styles of the author.
3. Name Byron’s most memorable works.
4. Write the brief summary of one of Byron’s works.
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