A Journey Through English Literature: Periods, Styles, and Key Authors
Periods of English Literature
Old English or Anglo-Saxon (450-1066)
Beowulf, The Wanderer
Middle English (1066-1500)
The Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)
The Renaissance (1500-1660)
Shakespeare: Macbeth, Hamlet
John Donne: The Flea
Margaret Cavendish (Neoclassical): To the Ladies
The Neoclassical Period (1660-1798)
Daniel Defoe: The Education of Women
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
Samuel Richardson: Pamela
The Romantic Period (1798-1832)
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias
Jane Austen: Sense & Sensibility
The Victorian Period (1832-1901)
Charles Dickens: Bleak House, Hard Times
Thomas Hardy: The Oxen
The Edwardian Period (1901-1910)
The Georgian Period (1910-1936)
Virginia Woolf: Professions for Women, The Legacy
The Modern Period
The Canterbury Tales (Middle English)
Context: Idealism vs. Realism
- The stories are a compilation in prose interspersed with verse.
- Argument: Pilgrims journey from London to the sanctuary of Canterbury and tell stories along the way.
- Reflects a microcosm of English society in the 14th century.
- Features: Irony & Humor
- Anglo-Saxon Literature: Aristocratic audience
The General Prologue
Chaucer introduces the characters who will appear later. These characters belong to different estates: the noble estate (Knight), the religious estate, and the estate of the non-privileged (Wife of Bath).
The Portrait of the Wife of Bath in the General Prologue
- A woman dedicated to wandering the world, suggesting great sexual freedom.
- Married several times, indicating an independent woman.
- Strong, good wife.
- Contradiction: Religious yet enjoys her body and wears pretty clothes.
- Visits important religious sites such as Rome, Boulogne, and Saint-James of Compostela.
- Narrator’s Attitude: Admires but distances himself.
Shakespeare (The Renaissance)
Historical Context: Strengthening royal power against the feudal system and the rise of the humanist spirit and Renaissance aesthetic.
The Author
- Used the conventions of the Elizabethan sonnet but with personal feeling.
- Mixed elements of lyric poetry and the dramatic.
- Expressed dramatic emotions like jealousy, passion, and despair, producing the cathartic effect of tragedy.
- Gave a new twist to Elizabethan resources:
- The love theme challenges the Platonic ideal.
- Offers a personal view of time as a destructive element.
- Treats the subject of reality and appearance.
- Many symbols, metaphors, and images came from fields such as gardening, navigation, or astrology.
John Donne (Renaissance)
Context: Period of skepticism (dogmas are questioned), exciting times of discoveries.
Metaphysical Poets: Use paradoxes, strange metaphors, and transcendental arguments (similar to the Baroque period in Spain).
Characteristics of Metaphysical Poets
- Poetry in the 17th century was personal and private.
- Religious and lay poetry intermingle.
- Wit challenges the reader.
- Employ colloquial speech and innovative verse forms based on rhythms.
- Explore the relationship between lovers or private feelings about God.
- Awareness of physical death.
The Author
- Reason + Feeling: Thinking becomes a lived experience and thought-provoking feeling.
- Love isn’t an idealized feeling; it’s a natural passion involving both body and spirit.
- Uses the third person to develop reasoning.
- White Renaissance: Broke with medieval idealism and recovered the body.
- Modern character: Distance between work and reader (different from Shakespeare’s conception of love).
- Intellectual and emotional poetry but not sentimental.
Batter my heart, three-personed God
- Structure: 3 quatrains + coda
- Tone: Between begging and commanding; expresses pain and pleads with God.
- Difficulty believing in God, suggesting a religious crisis.
- Asks God for freedom, creating a paradox.
- Mixes passion with reason.
- Idea of punishment related to religion.
- Three persons of God: God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit.
- The soul and mind are intertwined.
Margaret Cavendish – To the Ladies
The Author
- Addresses issues of feminism.
- Her poetry is about human relationships.
- Her references to marriage as a trap suggest it was psychologically stifling for women.
To the Ladies
- Lines 1-20: Depicts the typical life of many women.
- Lines 20-24: Offers advice for independent women.
- Receiver: Women
- Critical: Presents men as innately violent and destructive to women.
- Tone: Angry
- Repetition: The word “nothing” appears five times.
Daniel Defoe – The Education of Women (Neoclassical Period)
Topics: Political, philosophical, and literary.
Values: Presents values of the civilized world.
Literature’s Purpose: Should instruct and delight.
Robinson Crusoe was considered the first novel, representing the genre of the bourgeoisie.
Features of the Novel
- Contemporaneity
- Simple and direct language
- Presented life as it was
- Characters weren’t stereotypes
- Plausible stories
- Rise of the individual due to the empiricist philosophy
- Realistic, subjective, and individualistic
Development of the English Novel
- Defoe: Adventures
- Richardson: Psychological novel
- Fielding: Realist novel
- Sterne: Experimental novel
The Education of Women
- Satire
- Attempts to persuade with arguments
- Presents Defoe’s particular point of view
- Advocates for equal rights for women
- Places men in a superior position, while women are relegated to domestic tasks in their youth.
- Uses rhetorical questions
- Employs pronouns to make the text more personal
- Argues that if God wants women to be educated, it’s moral and correct.
- Tone: Protective of women
- Believes women should be educated for the benefit of men, not for their own sake.
- Not very objective; uses hyperbole
Henry Fielding – Tom Jones
The Author
- Criticized hypocrisy, vanity, and corruption.
- Used short scenes and dialogue.
- Used Biblical references to give moral authority.
Tom Jones
- Presents the first anti-hero with an impulsive and temperamental character, but who is sincere.
- Portrays a world of outdoor adventures.
- Features a wide range of characters in motion.
Samuel Richardson – Pamela
The Author
- Started novel traditions like the marriage plot and the double standard about sex.
- Used detailed descriptions and a slow rhythm.
- Emphasized Puritan morals and serious characters.
Pamela
- Sentimental novel
- Pamela is a strong and virtuous Catholic girl, presented as a model to imitate.
- She eventually marries her master, Mr. B.
- She is also cunning and hypocritical, using her virtue to achieve her goal of marrying Mr. B.
- She uses “the art of women” to elevate her social status.
- While independent, she is ultimately subject to the will of her husband, to whom she must always be grateful.
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein & Ozymandias (Romantic Period)
Context: English society during the Industrial Revolution, marked by class division (working class vs. entrepreneurs).
Romanticism: Spirit of freedom, emphasizing imagination, poetry, nature, and irrationality.
Late 18th Century: Rationalism was no longer satisfying, and emotions became more important.
Frankenstein
- Recovery of the irrational
- Gothic novel and horror story
- Frankenstein’s monster: Green, childish (vulnerable and innocent)
- Extract 1: The monster is brought to life.
- Extract 2: The monster dreams and encounters Elizabeth, his adopted sister, whom he eventually kills along with William.
Ozymandias
- Structure: ABAB ACDC EDE FEF
- Focuses on the sculpture of a king, presented from three points of view.
- Ironic
- Explores the relationship between art and nature.
- Evokes emotions
- Political sonnet
- Dichotomy between life and death (the meaning)
Jane Austen – Sense and Sensibility
Context: Belongs to the Romantic period but contains elements of the 18th century.
Romantic Elements: Contradictions and tensions in the society of her time.
Social Portrait: Represents upper-middle-class tensions.
Irony: Used to denounce social issues.
Characters: Small group of characters.
Marianne: Innocent, shy, and fanciful.
Narrator: Not entirely objective; admires Marianne but ridicules her through irony, encouraging the reader to seek balance.
Focus: Based on the clutter of everyday life.
Charles Dickens (Victorian Period)
Context: Proletarian class living in poor conditions; idealism of everyday life for both the middle and lower classes.
Three Stages of the Victorian Period:
- Change and crisis
- Stability and British prime
- Disappointment and skepticism
The Author
- Describes the city as a place of contrasts between employer and worker.
Hard Times
- Describes a city that is both infernal and fantastic.
- Attacks unions.
- Criticizes the utilitarian philosophy that was the basis of industrial society.
Bleak House
- Criticizes the English legal system and its focus on foreign missions, neglecting the poor living conditions of the working class.
- General Features: Mixes realism and idealism, recreates everyday life in an interesting way, and presents a raw vision of reality.
- Uses melodrama and fairy tale myths.
Thomas Hardy – The Oxen
The Author
- Transition between the realist novel and the modernist model.
- Pessimistic view of reality.
- Questioned Victorian morals.
- Mixed his rural origins with his university education.
- Experienced a loss of faith, leading to fatalism.
The Oxen
- Contains Romantic reminiscences.
- Includes elements of modernism (vision of reality).
- Simple poem in form but deep and complex in content.
- Uses direct speech to reproduce the words of elders, suggesting the authorial voice remembers the extract years later.
- Tone (first two stanzas): Melancholic
Virginia Woolf – Professions for Women (The Georgian Period)
Professions for Women: An essay where Woolf discusses two impediments to her work as a professional woman writer.
- The first impediment was the “Angel in the House,” a personal phantom named after the heroine of a famous poem, who represented societal expectations of women’s behavior.
- This phantom tried to convince Woolf that women should not openly address issues of human relations, morality, or sex, but instead should charm, conciliate, and even lie to succeed.
- Woolf speaks in the third person.
The Legacy
- Concepts: Person, individual, subject (I), the expression “to be subjected to something.”
- The story is told in the third person.
- Symbolic Meaning of Mirrors: Women have served as looking glasses, reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
- Contains references to Marxism.
- Protagonist: Angela, who is conflicted and lacks the courage to divorce Gilbert, ultimately commits suicide.