British Literature: Periods and Key Authors
Modernism (1918-1945)
Twentieth-century “Art for Art’s Sake.”
1918 Mass literacy, The Education Act 1870. People had lost their faith. W.B. Yeats (“The Second Coming”), psychoanalysis, and comparative mythology. The use of electricity.
Poetry: Radical new experiments to rid poetry of its Romantic and Victorian era superfluities. T.S. Eliot: “Modern poets must have an extensive knowledge of tradition.”
Fiction: 1900-1920 (a time of experimentation, allusiveness, and complexity); 1930, 1940, and 1950 (a time when novelists returned to social realism); and post-1960s (a period when important writers emerged from post-colonial contexts). James Joyce: Ulysses; George Orwell: Animal Farm; and Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse, The Waves.
Drama: Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot: in French), “plot-less” and devoid of resolution. Feeling of emptiness, cultural fatigue, and alienation. Theater of the Absurd. Social realism (John Osborne and Harold Pinter).
Anglo-Saxon Period (499-1066)
It stretches from the collapse of the Roman Empire in Britain (476) to the beginning of the Renaissance (1453). Feudal society (kings, nobles & lords, knights, peasants/serfs). Monasteries were the major producers of books until they were dissolved by King Henry. Nobles began purchasing and commissioning books during the Anglo-Norman period.
Beowulf: The longest epic poem in Old English. Language: Anglo-Saxon. 3000 lines. The exploits of its eponymous hero. Battles: Monster Grendel, Grendel’s revengeful mother, and a dragon. It is set in the pagan world of sixth-century Scandinavia, but it also contains echoes of Christian tradition. Unknown location in Anglo-Saxon England.
Middle-English Period (1066-1485)
Feudal society. Efforts to replace French as the language of government. Geoffrey Chaucer: To emulate French and Italian poetry. Wars and plague devastated England in the fourteenth century, but these calamities didn’t stem the growth of trade or the power of the merchant class. Saw the flowering of Middle English literature in the writings of G. Chaucer, William Langland, and the Gawain Poet.
The Canterbury Tales: A group of pilgrims engage in a tale-telling contest to pass the time. Interactions between the characters, read 24 tales. Writing in English was a big break with learned tradition.
The Renaissance (1485-1660)
Rebirth of learning. Renewal of interest in and study of classical antiquity. Perfect existence. The 14th and 15th centuries witnessed a deliberate break with feudal modes of living. Geographical and intellectual exploration.
Literature: Dominant forms: poem and drama. Lyric, elegy, tragedy, and pastoral.
John Milton: Paradise Lost.
Shakespeare: Brought Renaissance’s core values to the theater. Updated the simplistic, two-dimensional writing style, creating “human” characters with psychological complexity (Hamlet). 38 plays.
- Tragedies: His best. Real historical cases. The rise and fall of the Bard’s best-known characters. Macbeth, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet. The noble who rises to power but is brought crashing down by a tragic flaw in their character.
- Comedies: Aimed to entertain the audience. Include comic characters and scenes. More of a pastoral play, often incorporating cross-dressing, misunderstandings, and a love story at the heart of the plot. Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night.
- History Plays: Kings of England. The War of the Roses and allowed the general public and insight into court life and popular politics. Incredibly popular because the audience of Elizabethan England would have known the stories.
The Neoclassical Period (1660-1798)
Comfortableness. People met at coffee houses to chat about politics. British tradition of drinking afternoon tea.
It was the starting point of the middle class, and because of that, more people were literate. 50% of men were functionally literate (a dramatic rise). Factories began to spring up as the Industrial Revolution began. Impoverished masses began to grow as farming life declined and factories built. Coffee houses – where educated men spent evenings with literary and political associates.
Neoclassical Literature: Characterized by order, accuracy, and structure. In direct opposition to Renaissance attitudes, where man was seen as basically good, the Neoclassical writers portrayed man as inherently flawed. They emphasized restraint, self-control, and common sense. This was a time when conservatism flourished in both politics and literature.
The Augustan era of writers like Swift, Defoe, Pope, Addison, and Steele was rich in satire and new prose forms that blended fact and fiction, such as news, criminal biographies, travelogues, political allegories, and romantic tales.
Early eighteenth-century drama saw the development of “sentimental comedy” in which goodness and high moral sentiments are emphasized, and the audience is moved not only to laughter but also to sympathetic tears.
The theatre business boomed, celebrity performers flourished, and the authors of the plays were less important.
James Thomson’s poems on the seasons, beginning with “Winter” (1726), carried on the earlier poetic tradition of pastoral retreat and began a new trend of poetry focused on natural description.
Some popular types of literature included: parody, essays, satire, letters, fables, melodrama, and rhyming couplets.
The Romantic Period (1798-1832)
It is short, but still quite complex. Dates are identified differently by various scholars, though these dates always coincide with major literary, cultural, political, or social events.
“The big six” – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
Revolution and Reaction: Transforming from a primarily agricultural nation to one focused on manufacture, trade, and industry. Revolutions outside of England’s borders: revolutions in America and France. Early efforts to abolish slavery met with little success.
Two Nations: The rich and privileged and the poor and powerless.
Shopping reflected society’s newfound love for buying the goods that imperial colonization and industry could produce. Women authors, though they didn’t enjoy anything like social equality with their male counterparts, enjoyed greater prominence and wider readership. Bluestocking: to describe a certain class of educated women writers and intellectuals.
The New Poetry: Poetry was considered the most important. New modes of production and distribution. Problem of “overproduction” of written works. Many different “schools” of poetry; there were many competing visions for what good poetry should be and what its aims should be.
Lord Byron: His personality cult as for his poetry. He created the concept of the “Byronic hero” – a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his past. Byron’s influence on European poetry, music, novels, opera, and painting has been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by his contemporaries. Works: Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
The Victorian Period (Realism) (1830-1901)
19th Century. The population of London grew from 2 to 6 million. Changes in industrial production techniques. Unregulated industrialization: great misery for the masses. Writers: mixed in their reactions to industrialization. Some: promise, progress, triumph. Others: industrial growth being affected so negatively.
Queen Victoria: Values herself espoused: moral responsibility and domestic impropriety. Social dissolution and moral impropriety. Age of photography. Era of rapid transition and change.
Social background: Public railways and the British parliament passed a reform bill (1832): new age of political power. Time of troubles: industrialization producing such rapid. Conditions deplorable, women and children worked in mines and factories. Literature focused on the difficult situation of the poor and the new urban reality of industrial England. Wealthy and poor.
Role of women: Little progress for women’s rights. The Woman Question. 1848: First college. Women of the middle class. Problem of prostitution as a better choice.
Literature: Short fiction (the novel was the most popular genre). To capture the wide diversity of industrial life and the class conflict that industrialism created. Theme: protagonist who is trying to define himself or herself relative to class and social systems.
Writers:
- Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield
- Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure
- William Thackeray: Vanity Fair
- George Eliot: Middlemarch
Classroom Activities
The Happy Prince
Lastly, we will work on generosity. We will focus on the determination of both the prince and the swallow. We will focus on the dedication of our time to other people and the importance of helping the people around us. Therefore, we will make a table where each week a representative of each group will be chosen to carry on with certain duties such as: helping any teammate that needs help, taking care of the table and the books of their group, sharing, and so on. With this activity, we achieve that the students learn the importance of helping others.
First Activity (Romeo and Juliet)
In the first place, students from the fifth year of primary school will be shown a video of the story of R.J. The video is the following. The first activity consists of making a quiz for the students to see if they understood the story of Romeo and Juliet. The quiz will be done through the application named “Picklers”. This application allows to create an online quiz, where given by students are interactive, this will be explained later on. There are three ways to answer these questions, using a tablet or using a blueprint given by the teacher. The way this blueprint works is through the orientation of itself. In other words, changing the orientation of the blueprint means you are giving different answers. To check the student’s answers the teacher will scan the blueprints with their mobile phone. In the picture below we can see an example of a blueprint.
Second Activity (Prepositions of Place)
To introduce the prepositions of place we will play the following song to the kids: It will be played for several days in the English classes so the kids can listen to the song multiple times. To determine whether or not they have acquired the knowledge, the first activity will be “Teacher Maria says”. The students only have to follow the orders when the teacher says, “Teacher Maria says”. The gimmick of the activity is that only prepositions of place will be used. For example: “Teacher Maria says: put the eraser on the table” or “Teacher Maria says: Move behind the chair” The second activity consists of answering a quiz through the website “Educaplay”. The students will answer as a group. The quiz has ten questions, to pass the activity the children will have to answer all the questions correctly.
Third Activity (The Five Senses)
To introduce the five senses to the class of 1º primary, we will play the following song: After listening to the song the activity consists of: Making a lapbook of the five senses. In other words, use cardboard to display the knowledge that they have of the five senses. The teachers have to help them by giving guidance on how to approach the activity. Also, the students will be given a document with extra information about the five senses. For example: you can smell flowers with your smelling sense, images of the five senses…. This activity will be done in groups of 4 or 5 students.
Fourth Activity (Five Senses Game)
Consists of a game about the five senses with all students. First, we split the class into five groups; each group will be assigned to a sense. Each group has to think of an activity to play with the sense assigned. For example:
- Group 1 got the smelling sense assigned, so they have to think of ways to stimulate this sense. Can be done by bringing: vinegar, cinnamon powder, a lemon slice, Nenuco’s fragrance, and a flower.
- G2 got the taste sense assigned, so they have to think of ways to stimulate this sense. Can be done with: chocolate, a lemon slice, salt, sugar, banana, and orange.
- G3 got the touching sense assigned, so they have to think of ways to stimulate this sense. Can be done by bringing: a piece of sandpaper, cotton, modeling clay, aluminum foil, sand, and a tennis ball.
- G4 got the seeing sense assigned, so they have to think of ways to stimulate this sense. Can be done by playing I Spy or using a mirror and watching themselves.
- G5 got the hearing sense assigned, so they have to think of ways to stimulate this sense. Can be done by bringing: tambourine, bell, flute, xylophone, triangle, and jingle bells. (We take the instruments of the classroom)
When all the groups have finished preparing, the activity will begin. Each group will show to the rest of the class what they have prepared, either an activity or the items. This will be done in turns. In other words, if smelling is the first one, the whole class will go to group 1’s table and smell all the items group 1 brought to class. Once we are finished with group 1, we repeat this process with all the groups. In addition, the students will have their eyes closed while doing this activity, except when it’s the turn of the seeing group. With this activity, we achieve the stimulation of all the senses and the students get to learn more about them.
The Happy Prince (Continued)
First of all, the tale “The Happy Prince” will be read by the students of the fourth year of primary school. Said tale can be read through the following link. After reading the tale, students with the help of their parents have to research statues of their town. With this research, the students will have a debate about whether the people portrayed in the statues deserve to be there or not. After that, the students will be asked who they would put on a statue and why. The second activity consists of making a statue of the chosen person. The purpose of this statue is the same as the statue in the tale, to display our concerns or sadness. In other words, when the students feel worried or sad, they will write it down on a piece of paper and they will place it at the bottom of the statue. Once they don’t feel worried or sad anymore the students will remove that piece of paper. All the statues will be placed on a shelf inside the classroom. After working on the importance of giving value to good people because they helped us in the past to improve our lives, or the people around us that help us and make us feel good, we will work on the swallow. First, we will make a wall about migratory birds. Each student will study in their houses with the help of their parents. They have to bring to the class: name, scientific name, a brief description of the bird, where they live, the size, the weight, the size of the wings, and what they eat. Also, they have to bring a photo of their bird. To make sure we have different birds each student will be assigned to a migratory bird. The wall will be created once every student has brought the information.