The History of English Literature: A Brief Survey
English Education Department
State Islamic University Syarif Hidayatullah
Jakarta
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE........................................................................................................... 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS......................................................................... . 2
CHAPTER I Rationale.......................................................................... 3
CHAPTER II ........................................................................................... Discussions 4
A. What is history.................................................................................... 4
B. Old English ........................................................................................ 4
C. Middle English………………………………………………………. 6
D. The Renaissance ............................................................................. 8
E. The 17th Century................................................................................ 11
F. The restroration and 18th Century........................................ ……. 12
G. The romantic period ....................................................................15
H. The victorian age ...................................................................... ...... 17
I. Modernism ......................................................................................... 19
J. Post Modernism................................................................................. 20
CHAPTER III
Conclusions…………………………………………………………………. 23
REFERENCES........................................................................................... 24
CHAPTER I
Rationale
England has a rich literature with a long history. This is an attempt to tell the story of English literature from its beginnings to the present day. The history of English writing begins very early in the Anglo-Saxons period and continues through the Renaissance, the Augustan and Romantic periods to the Victorian age, the twentieth century, and down to the present.[1]
It should be most useful right at the start of the course, or later as a resource for exercises in revision, and to help you reflect on value judgments in literary criticism. It may also be suitable for university students and the general reader who is interested in the history of literature.
Literary history can be useful, and is increasingly necessary. Scholars specialize in single fields, English teachers teach single works. ‘Literature’ is a word with a qualitative implication, not just a neutral term for writing in general. Without this implication and without a belief on the part of the author that some qualities of literature are best appreciated when it is presented in the order in which it appeared. There would be little point in a literary history. This effort to put the most memorable English writing in an intelligible historical perspective is offered as an aid to public understanding.[2]
CHAPTER II
Discussions
A. What is history
..... According to Cambridge dictionary, history is:
a. (The study of or a record of) past events considered together, especially events of a particular period, country or subject.
b. Something that happened or ended a long time ago and is not important now or a person who is not important now, although they were in the past.
c. Something that has been done or experienced by a particular person or thing repeatedly over a long period.[3]
B. Old English
The earliest period of English Literature, is regarded as beginning with the invasion of Britain by Germanic (Anglo-saxon) tribes in the fifth century AD and lasting until the French invasion under William the conqueror in 1066. The true beginning of literature in England, however, are to be found the Latin Middle Ages, when monasteries were the main institutions that preserved classical culture.[4]
The people to be called the English lived in a mosaic of small tribal kingdoms, which gradually amalgamated. The threat of Danish began to unify a nation under king Alfred of wessex. English literature which had flourished for four centuries, was dethroned at the Norman conquest in 1066, and for generations it to well recorded some generations it was not well recorded. After 1066 the English wrote in Latin, as they had done before the conquest, but now also in French. Not very much English writing survives from the hundred years following the conquest, but changes in the language.
The first known English poet is Aldehlm (c. 640-709). King
Alfred thought Aldehlm unequalled in any age in his ability to compose poetry in his native tongue. The ‘death song’ is one of the rare vernacular poems extant in several copies. Its laconic formulation is characteristic of Anglo-Saxon. In the five early English poets whose names are known: Aldelhm, Bede, Caedmon,Alfred-two saints, a cowman and a king – and Cynewulf, who signed his poems but is otherwise unknown oral composition was not meant to be written. A poem was a social act, like telling a story today, not a thing which belonged to its former.
In this period there were many literature that developed, there were Northumbria and The dream of the Rood in the 1530 s in Henry VIII’s of the monasteries may have been in old English. The artistic wealth of Northumbria is known to us through Bede but also surviving illuminated books such the Lindisfame Gospels and the Codex Aminatus, and some fine churches, crosses, andreligious art. And there was Heroic poetry is early literature that commonly look back to a ‘heroic age’: a period in the past when warriors were more heroic kings were kings. The Christian heroism of ‘The Dream of tile Rood’ redirected the old pegan heroism which can be seen in fragments of Germanic heroic poetry . waldere, an early poem, feature the heroics of walter’s defence of narrow place against his enemies. Christian literature also represented in translation and liturgical adaptation. Translation of the bible into English did not begin in the 14thcentury or the 16th centuries: the Gospels, Psalms and other books were translated into English throughout the old English period.
Alfred’s translation program had created a body of discursive native prose . this was extended in the 10th century, after the renewal of Benedictine monastic culture under archbishop dunstand, by new writing, clerical and civil. Among the many manuscripts from this time are the four main poetry manuscripts. There was however little new poetry after Maldon. Changes in the nature of the language-notably the use of articles, pronouns and prepositions instead of final inflections-made verse composition more difficult.
The conquest of English by Danish and then by Norman kings disrupted cultural activity, and changed the language of the rulers. Latin remained the language of the church, but the hierarchy was largely replaced by Normans, and English uses were done away with. William the conqueror made his nephew Osmund the first bishop in the new see of Salisbury.
C. Middle English Period
Literature in England in this period was not just in English and Latin but in French as well, and developed in directions set largely in France. Epic and elegy gave way to romance and lyric. English writing revived fully in English after 1360, and flowered in the reign of Richard II (1372-99). It gained literary standard in London English after 1425, and developed modern forms of verse, of prose and of drama.[5]
The period began and ended with the unwelcome arrivals of two conquerors: Normans in 1066, and the printingpress in 1476. English literature survived the first conquest with difficulty. Historians of English and of England agree that a period ends with the 15th
century. When the first printed English book appeared in 1476, the phase of Middle English (ME) was virtually over: the language had assumed its modern form, except in spelling. As printing and Protestantism established themselves, the manuscripts in which vernacular writing survived, outdated and possibly suspect, were neglected. By1700 some manuscripts were being used as firelighters or worse; Alexander Pope refers to ‘the martyrdom of jakes and fire’ (‘jakes’: lavatory). Survival was chancy: some of Chaucer’s works have been lost, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knightwas not printed until 1839. Even if much more had survived, the story would be neither simple nor clear. Literature survived in three languages: Latin lived alongside Norman French and an ‘English’ which was a welter of dialects,spoken rather than written.
The Conquest of England in 1066 by William of Normandy displaced English asthe medium of literature, for the language of the new rulers was French. William the Conqueror tried to learn English, but gave up; Saxons dealing with him had to learn French, and French was the language of the court and the law for three centuries.Literature in English suffered a severe disruption in 1066. Classical Old English verse died out, reviving later in a verydifferent form, but prose continued: sermons were still written in English and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was kept up inmonasteries. When the new writing appeared, it was in an English which had become very different from that of the 11th century.
Middle English writing blossomed in the late 14th century, and developed a literary self-consciousness.turn back to the French conquest of English. Within two generations of the arrival of this romance language came new literary forms and thehumanism of the 12th-century Renaissance, when first Norman and then Gothic churches arose in England. Poems were aboutknights, and then about knights and ladies. For the 12th and 13th centuries a history of English writing has to discard itsEnglish monocle,
for writing in the Anglo-Norman kingdom of England was largely in Latin and French. After 1100 is often characterized as a change from epic to romance. William I’s minstrel Taillefer is said to have led the Normans ashore at Hastings declaiming the Chanson de Roland. This chanson de geste (‘song of deeds’) relates the deeds of Roland and Oliver, two of the twelve peers of the emperor Charlemagne, who die resisting a Saracen ambush in the Pyrenees. Roland scorns to summon the aid of Charlemagne until all his foes are dead. Having seen some of the effects of the submersion of English by French, and before approaching the flowering of Englishpoetry in the reign of Richard II (1372-98), we should look at institutions and mental habits which shaped this new Englishliterature. Foremost of these is the Church. Modern literature is largely concerned with secular life and written by lay people. But fora thousand years, the thought, culture and art of Europe were promoted by the Church. From the 12th century, intellectual initiative began to pass from these schools to universities. At universities in Paris or Oxford (founded c.1167), the teachings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church were modified by new learning. There was inthe 12th century a revival of classical learning and a new systematic thinking about God, man, civil society and the universe: aRenaissance. At the 12th century School of Chartres, France, this learning and philosophy were humanist valuing human life in itself as well as as a preparation for heavenly life.
The literature which was developing in this period is lyric, English prose, epic and romance.
D. The English renaissance
In the 19thcentury Jules Michelet extended his idea of ‘renaissance’ from the Italian 15thcentury, the Quattrocento, to a general cultural renewal in western Europe beginning earlier. Michelet’s idea has proved very popular with historians.[6]
The Renaissance spread from 15th-century Italy to France, Spain andbeyond. The Northern Renaissance was, except in the Low Countries, more intellectual than artistic; it was set back by the Reformation . The art of the Italian Renaissance is today better known than its literature. The High Renaissance trio of Leonardo da Vinci, MichaelangeloBuonarotti and Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael) typify its characteristics: Leonardo was a painter, an anatomist, a scientist andinventor; Michaelangelo a sculptor, an architect, a painter and a poet; and Raphael’s paintings in the Vatican gave classic formto the long flowering of Italian art.literature changed less than art and architecture, although the content of all three remained Christian. Celebrated icons of the High Renaissance are Michaelangelo’s gigantic David in Florence, his central design for St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and its Sistine Chapel. In Italythe Renaissance had intellectual origins, drawing on the study of Plato (c.427-348 BC) and his followers. It also found civicexpression in the Florence of the Medici and the Rome of Leo X (Pope 1513-21), as well as many smaller city-states. In 1564, the year of Michaelangelo’s death and Shakespeare’s birth, the Italian Renaissance was over, but the English Renaissance had hardly begun.[7]
The protestant Reformation had a tremendous influence on the social, political, and economic structure of Europe in the sixteenth century.
The Tudor royal line began with Henry VII who was crowned in 1485. His son Henry VIII’s reign, which began in 1509, spanned several successful wars and six marriages. In 1530, Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church and established the Church of England (THE Anglican Church), creating long-lasting conflicts among religious factions. Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth, came to the throne in 1558. She turned England into a great sea power capable of defeating the feared Spanish Armada. Elizabeth also supported a flourishing period o cultural achievement.
When Elizabeth I died in 1603. The throne passed peacefully to her cousin James, king of Scotland and a member of the Stuart family. Unfortunately, James’s domineering approach provoked disputes with Parliament, conflicts that ultimately lost. James’s son and successor, Charles I, understood the people even less. His conflicts with Parliament finally led to a civil war. In 1649, Charles lost both his throne and his life.
England soon became a commonwealth ruled by Oliver Cromwell, an iron-willed Puritan. Cromwell achieved his goals of creating a stable government and ensuring toleration for Puritans. After his death in 1658, Parliament reconvened and, in 1660, invited Charles Stuart, son of Charles I, to become king. The monarchy was restored.
England was bombarded with broadsheets and pamphlets that advertise the delights of a “new life” in the America colonies. They usually neglected to mention the hardships and hazards that accompanied it. After Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church; the Book of Common Prayer replaced the Latin missal. Because it was written in English instead of Latin, the book allowed people to read the prayers for themselves. New English versions of the Bible, including the King James Bible of 1611, also allowed people to gain a better understanding of the Christian faith. The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton (1653), combined practical information about fishing with quotations, songs, folklore, and descriptions of an idyllic rural life.
The chapbook was popular form of literature in the sixteenth century. Its content ranged from songs, poems, and fairy tales to ghost
stories and tales of travel. Chapbooks were usually only sixteenth or thirty-two pages long.
Two major groups of poets appeared during the Renaissance, metaphysical and Cavalier. Metaphysical poets wrote highly intellectual poems characterized by complex thought, paradox, natural rhythms, harsh language and, especially, the conceit, or a comparison between two very unlike things. The best known of the metaphysical poets was John Donne.
The Cavalier poets were English gentlemen who were supports of King Charles I. Their poetry, primarily about such dashing subjects as love, war, and honor, was influenced by the poetry of their predecessors Ben Jonson and John Donne. The most famous of the Cavalier poets was Sir John Suckling.
E. The 17th Century
The 17th century is divided into two by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 and the temporary overthrow of the monarchy. With thereturn of Charles II as King in 1660, newmodels of poetry and drama came in from France, where the court had been in exile. In James I’s reign, high ideals had combined with daring wit andlanguage, but the religious andpolitical extremism of the mid- century broke that combination. Restoration prose, verse, and stage comedy were marked by worldly scepticism and, in Rochester, a cynical wit worlds away from the evangelicalism of Bunyan. When Milton’s Paradise Lostcame out in 1667, its grandeur spoke of a vanished heroic world. The representative career of Dryden moves from the ‘metaphysical’ poetry of Donne to a new ‘Augustan’ consensus.[8]
The most influential figure in shaping the immediate future course of English drama was Ben Jonson. His carefully plotted comedies, satirizing with inimitable verve and imagination various departures from the norm of good sense and moderation, are written in a more sober and careful style than are those of most Elizabethan and early 17th-century dramatists. Those qualities, indeed, define the character of most later Restoration comedy. The best of Jonson's comedies are Volpone (1606) and The Alchemist (1610). Professing themselves his disciples, the dramatists Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher collaborated on a number of so-called tragicomedies (for example, Philaster, 1610?) in which morally dubious situations, surprising reversals of fortune, and sentimentality combine with hollow rhetoric.
The outstanding prose works of the Renaissance are not so numerous as those of later ages, but the great translation of the Bible, called the King James Bible, or Authorized Version, published in 1611, is significant because it was the culmination of two centuries of effort to produce the best English translation of the original texts, and also because its vocabulary, imagery, and rhythms have influenced writers of English in all lands ever since. Similarly sonorous and stately is the prose of Sir Thomas Browne, the physician and semiscientific investigator. His reduction of worldly phenomena to symbols of mystical truth is best seen in Religio Medici (Religion of a Doctor), probably written in 1635.
The outstanding prose works of the Renaissance are not so numerous as those of later ages, but the great translation of the Bible, called the King James Bible, or Authorized Version, published in 1611, is significant because it was the culmination of two centuries of effort to produce the best English translation of the original texts, and also because its vocabulary, imagery, and rhythms have influenced writers of English in all lands ever since. Similarly sonorous and stately is the prose of Sir Thomas Browne, the physician and semiscientific investigator. His reduction of worldly phenomena to symbols of mystical truth is best seen in Religio Medici (Religion of a Doctor), probably written in 1635.
F. The restoration and the 18th century
For the people of England, King Charles II’s parade marked the
beginning of a new era-one free from Cromwell and his oppressive mandates. The new king, fond of pomp and ceremony, set the tone for a nation ready to make up for years of austere living.
The glorious revolution after his coronation, Charles II worked with Parliament to restore peace and order to the nation. Upon Charles’s death in 1685, his brother James II took the throne. Unfortunately, James proved so unpopular that Parliament asked Charles’s daughter Mary and her Dutch Protestant husband William to replace James in 1688. William and Mary took the throne in what was called “Glorious Revolution” because it occurred without bloodshed. The new king and queen affirmed the 1689 Bill of Rights, which allowed the propertied classes to rule through an elected Parliament. However, not a democracy, England now had a representative’s government.
After the death of Mary and William, Anne, the younger daughter of James II, took the throne. She would be the last of the Stuarts to rule England. To prevent any Roman Catholic Stuarts from reigning in the future, Parliament passed the Act of Settlement, which provided that the throne should go next to James I’s Protestant relations. In 1707, the Act of Union was passed, and Scotland joined in England to form the kingdom of Great Britain.
When Queen Anne died leaving no heir to the throne, her nearest Protestant relative, George Augustus, succeed her. King George I came from Hanover, Germany, and never learned the English language. He took little interest of England and lost popularity because of his turbulent private life. His son George II was equally unpopular. George III, however, was born and educated an Englishman.
The political arena was not the only area of activity in Great Britain in the eighteenth century. The industrial revolution brought it lasting changes in manufacturing, the economy, and society in general. People began to migrate from their rural farms to urban communities to find jobs in factories. New class distinction emerged. Those who owned factories or controlled production were called “capitalists” and were considered to be in a higher social class than workers.
The first English newspaper was developed at the beginning of the seventh century, but was heavily censored during both King Charles I’s reign and Cromwell era. With the restoration of King Charles II, however, restrictions on the press were gradually phased out, and English publishers enjoyed considerable freedom. Their only restriction was to refrain was to refrain from criticizing the government.
People enjoyed reading about the latest developments in art, literature, and science, and British periodicals provided updates on these topics. The Tattler and The Spectator, two popular periodicals of the time, delighted readers with a mixture of current events and social gossip.
In 1719 Daniel De’Foe’s Robinson Crusoe, which tells the tale of shipwrecked man, was published to enormous success. It is over whelming popularity encouraged the publication of other novels. Five authors there are DeFoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett, they wrote the first of the classic English novels.
Personal diaries were in style, and people used them to record the details of their daily lives-from major events to the latest gossip. Today, Samuel Pepys, Fanny Burney, and John Evelyn are famous for their journal, which provides fascinating accounts of Britain during this time period.
Between the Renaissance and eighteenth century, a major change to took place in literature. Many authors switched from writing poetry to writing prose. This era, known as the Age of Reason, brought a simpler form literature marked by reason and good taste. No longer were authors writing gushing, imaginative love poems. Rather, authors such as John Locke and David Hume wrote great philosophical treatises on rational thought.
One of the most renowned works of the time was Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon’s work emphasized rational thinking and encouraged people to replace emotions with logical thought.
Eighteenth-century writers took pride in looking at the world around them with a sharp eye, and writing about what they saw with a sharp pen. Wit, or cleverness, was prized in conversation and in writing. Humorous, harsh, or pretentious, wit was every were. In the mocking poetry of Alexander Pope, in the biting satire of Jonathan Swift, and in the definitions in Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language. Two modes of satire emerged during this periods: Horatian, in which the author mildly pokes fun at a subject, and Juvenalian, in which the author mercilessly criticizes certain practice or characters. Artist, too, especially William Hogarth, produced witty, satirical drawings that ridiculed the politics, manners, and celebrities of the day.
By the end of the century, writers and readers had begun to feel that they had sacrificed heart and soul for wit. They turned to their emotions, and the Age of reason in literature came to an end.
G. The romantic period
George III George III ruled Britain for more than fifty years. The first monarch from the House of Hanover to be born in Great Britain, King George showed great concern for his subject, if not great prowess as a ruler. During the course of his long reign, King George lost the American colonies and suffered from bouts of dementia. Still, he was a kind, frugal family man whose sense of private duty and public morality made him popular with his subjects.
In 1783 George III named the youthful William Pitt prime minister of Britain. At this time, Britain was on the brink of war with France, and Pitt was prepared with strategies. As the French Revolution turned into a full-scale war, Pitt organized several coalitions of countries against France, leading eventually to the defeat of France’s leader, Napoleon, in 1814.
The Regent George IV in 1811 George III was officially declared insane at the age of seventy-three. His son was made regent, or stand-in ruler. In place of mentally incompetent monarch, Britain now had an extravagant and thoughtless ruler. In 1820 his father died, and the prince regent became King George IV, a man who lived lavishly and paid little attention to his suffering subjects for the duration of his reign.
William IV George IV died in 1830 and was succeeded by his more liberal brother, William IV. William’s major contribution to his reign was his passage of the Reform Bill 1932, which extended the right to vote to members of the middle class and some artisans. The bill encouraged political party organization and began to weaken the monarchy’s grip on politics.
The population of Great Britain was quickly rising owing to several factors: fewer people were dying of infectious diseases such as smallpox, and more people were marrying at a young age and producing large families.
The agricultural way of life continued to decline as people poured into industrial towns in search of work. Uncontrolled urban growth produced dreadful living conditions, stirring the poet Shelley to write, “Hell is a city much like London.”
The rich grew richer and the poor grew poorer, while middle-class customs and values, especially an emphasis on money making, came to dominate the society
Editors and publishers catered to the growing middle class, tailoring publications to suit the public’s tastes. The Edinburgh Review, providing critical essays and literary pieces, became extremely popular, and contributors such as Thomas Babington Macaulay gained literary fame through it.
Satirical works continued to entertain the public. Artist George Cruikshank caricatured social life in drawings he created for Pierce Egan’s 1821 book Life in London; or The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom… In their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis. The book, which chronicles two characters’ exiting lives in London, was a best-seller
The Gentleman’s Magazine was the first periodical to contain the word “magazine.” Each edition included a wide variety of entertaining material from political debates to poems. The magazine served as a model for later American periodicals.
Essays many writers expressed their opinions, feelings, and personalities in informal essays. William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, and others voiced their thoughts on politics, philosophy, literature, and popular culture, while reformers exposed society’s ills and proposed remedies.
About London, The people of England were dazzled by London. Both professional and novice writers penned letters, memoirs, and diary entries describing London’s mixture of social classes, constant activity, and entertaining theater.
Out of the smoke of the French revolution and the Industrial Revolution emerged an approach to writing characterized by emotion over reason. In this Romantic Age, the individual person was valued over society, imagination was valued over logic, and the natural was valued over the artificial. Romantics found inspiration in nature, folk art, the past, and their passions.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were two of the most important romantic poets. Wordsworth created simple poems about common people in ordinary settings. Coleridge, on the other hand, explored exotics and supernatural themes.
The Romantics watched as cities grew, industry prospered, and farming life declined. In an effort to reclaim nature, the Romantics made it a central force in their lives and their literature. Nature was celebrated as a source of delight, an image of love, and a model of moral perfection. To the Romantics, nature provided the pattern on which to base their creative lives.
At the same time, libertarianism, or an emphasis on individual rights, became popular. The Romantics rejected the authoritarian themes of the previous period and asserted individual freedoms in their writings. To them, nature and libertarianism went hand in hand.
H. The Victorian age
Victoria was crowned queen in 1837, at the age of eighteen, and went to rule more than sixty years- the longest reign in British history. In 1840 she married her German cousin Albert, whom she adored. Victoria eventually bore nine children, while Albert assumed an extensive role in influencing the governing of the country. Royal observers commented that for all intents and purposes he was king.
To escape hectic London, Albert design Balmoral Castle in Scotland and a royal residence on the Isle of Wight. The family made frequent retreats to these homes was they could enjoy a simpler life that brought them closer to lives of their increasingly middle-class subjects.
In 1861 Prince Albert died of typhoid fever; the inconsolable queen went into deep mourning, which lasted virtually the rest of her life. She attempted to govern her country as her beloved Albert would have wished. But eventually she withdrew to Balmoral and become remote figure. Victoria’s minister and subjects disapproved of her distant manner and began to talk of abolishing the monarchy. By the time of her death in 1901, however, Victoria had reached the peak of her popularity, especially among the middle classes that had risen and prospered during her reign.
The Victorian age encompassed years of unprecedented economic, technological, and political expansion and dramatic social change. In 1901 Victoria’s eldest son took the throne as Edward VII. The Victorian age was over, and the modern age had begun.
Victorians enjoyed reading in a variety of genres. Historical fiction gripped readers, as did the mystery novel. English science fiction vividly portrayed the deep split between a Victorian man’s public and private lives.
Founded by Henry Mayhew and Ebenezer Landells, Punch magazine amused Victorians with satiric commentaries and clever drawings. The magazine has enjoyed more than 150 years of success despite often being banned in Europe.
In December of 1855, Thomas Macaulay published the third and fourth volumes of his History of England. They were a huge success, selling 26,500 copies in the first ten weeks. The fifth and final volume appeared in 1861. Macaulay had fulfilled his dream of writing a work of history that was as popular as a fashionable novel.
The social codes governing middle class life found expression in ever-growing numbers of etiquette books and deportment guides. One such book, entitled Office Staff Practices, listed a strict code of behavior for employees, including no talking during business hours.
“Theater”, as one critic has pointed out, “was to Victorian England what television is to us today”. Like television, Victorian theater drew a huge audience with a spectacular staging of farces and melodramas, and, like television, most of what it offered was artistically undistinguished. By the 1890’s, however, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw were turning out plays that rank with the masterpieces of any age.
I. Modernism
These modern writers are often called modernists. The word ‘modernism’ is a convenience term, for the ‘-ism’ of the new is hard to define; it therefore appears in this text without a capital letter.[9]Although the present had begun - before 1914 - to feel more than usually different from the past, there were no agreed principles for an artistic programme. Rather, the old ways would not do any more. Behind this cultural shift were changes in society, politics and technology, and slackening family, local and religious ties. As the value for the human person fostered byChristianity and continuing in liberal humanism weakened, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, the fathers of modern atheism, were read. But these general factors donot point to an obvious formulation which fits these writers as a group. Ambitious, they broke with prevailing formal conventions. ‘Modern Art’,meaning the painting of Picasso, the music of Stravinsky and the poetry of Eliot, soon became a historical label.
The application of the term "modern," of course, varies with the passage of time, but it is frequently applied specifically to the literature written since the beginning of World War I in 1914. This period has been marked by persistent and multidimensional experiments in subject matter, form, and style, and has produced major achievements in all the literary genres. Among the notable writers are the poets W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, and Seamus Heaney; the novelists Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Ε. Μ. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer; the dramatists G. Β. Shaw, Sean O'Casey, Noel Coward, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Brendan Behan, Frank McGuinness, and Tom Stoppard. The modern age was also an important era for literary criticism; among the innovative English critics were T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, Virginia Woolf, E R. Leavis, and William Empson. This entry has followed what has been the widespread practice of including under "English literature" writers in the English language from all the British Isles. A number of the authors listed above, were in fact natives of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Of the Modern Period especially it can be said that much of the greatest "English" literature was written by the Irish writers Yeats, Shaw, Joyce, O'Casey, Beckett, Iris Murdoch, and Seamus Heaney. And in recent decades, some of the most notable literary achievements in the English language have been written by natives of recently liberated English colonies (who are often referred to as "postcolonial authors")/ including the South Africans Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, and Athol Fugard; the West Indians V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott; the Nigerians Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka; and the Indian novelists R. K. Narayan and Salman Rushdie. See postcolonial studies.The Postmodern Period is a name sometimes applied to the era after World War II (1939-45). [10]
J. Postmodernism
AS Hornby defines Postmodernism as:
“a style and movement in art, architecture, literature, etc. in the late 20th Century that reacts against modern styles, e.g. by mixing features from traditional and modern styles.”[11]
In addition, the term postmodernism, according to MH Abraham, is often applied to the literature and art after World War II (1939-45), when the effects on Western morale of the first war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb, the progressive devastation of the natural environment, and the ominous fact of overpopulation.[12]
Base on the two views above, then we may draw a definition of postmodernism. It can be defined as a period, roughly after World War II, i.e. from 1939-1945, and it appears after (as the reacts against) the modern styles, that its features have any mixes and combinations of the traditional and modern styles.
Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the counter traditional experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist "high art" by recourse to the models of "mass culture" in film, television, newspaper cartoons, and popular music. Many of the works of postmodern literature—by Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes, and many others—so blend literary genres, cultural and stylistic levels, the serious and the playful, that they resist classification according to traditional literary rubrics. And these literary anomalies are paralleled in other arts by phenomena like pop art, op art, the musical compositions of John Cage, and the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other directors. An undertaking in some postmodernist writings—prominently in Samuel Beckett and other authors of the literature of the absurd—is to subvert the foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experience so as to reveal the meaninglessness of existence and the underlying "abyss," or "void," or "nothingness" on which any supposed security is conceived to be precariously suspended. Postmodernism in literature and the arts has parallels with the movement known as post structuralism in linguistic and literary theory; poststructuralists undertake to subvert the foundations of language in order to show that its seeming meaningfulness dissipates, for a rigorous inquirer, into a play of conflicting indeterminacies, or else to show that all forms of cultural discourse are manifestations of the ideology, or of the relations and constructions of power, in contemporary society.[13]
CHAPTER III
Conclusions
We need to study literature from the basic level because it will help us to know about any kinds of literature especially in English. Literary history will be useful for us to know about the development of English literature since old English until present time. It was known that there are five period in English literature development. Old English, middle English, renaissance, modern and post modern.
REFERENCES
1. Henry, Alexander. A History of English Literature. Macmillan Foundation, 2000.
2. Klarer, Mario. An introduction to literary studies second edition. Taylor and Francis e-library. 2005
4. Abraham, MH. 1999. A Glossary of Literary Term Seventh Edition. USA: Heinle & Heinle. Thomson Learning, Inc.
5. Wehmeir, Sally (Ed.). 2003. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English Sixth Edition. New York: Oxford Univers
[1] Alexander Henry, A History of English Literature (Macmillan Foundation, 2000) pg. 7.
[2] Ibid, pg 7
[3] Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary: third editions (software).
[4] Mario klarer, an introduction to literary studies second edition ( taylor and francis e-library,2005) pg. 68
[5]Alexander Henry, A History of English Literature. Macmillan (2000). Pg 27
[6]Ibid, pg 53
[7]Ibid, pg 54
[8]Ibid, pg 90
[9]Ibid, pg 216
[10]Ibid
[13]Ibid, p. 168-169
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