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MAJORSHIP

Area: ENGLISH

Focus: English and American Literatures

LET Competencies:

1. Trace the major literary works produced in English and American literatures.
2. Explain the tenets of specific literary movements in English and American
literatures.
3. Define literary terms and concepts exemplified in selected literary texts.

A. OLD ENGLISH PERIOD

1. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Written by The Venerable Bede
(673-735) who is considered as the Father of English History and regarded as the
greatest Anglo-Saxon scholar.
2. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Different monks traces the annals that chronicle Anglo-
Saxon history, life and culture after the Roman invasion
• Alfred the Great (848?-899) who was King of the southern Anglo-Saxon
kingdom of Wessex from 871-899 championed Anglo-Saxon culture by writing in
his native tongue and by encouraging scholarly translations from Latin into Old
English (Anglo-Saxon). It is believed that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was begun
during his reign.
3. Cædmon’s Hymn. (7th century). An unlearned cowherd who was inspired by a
vision and miraculously acquired the gift of poetic song produced this nine-line
alliterative vernacular praise poem in honor of God.
4. Fates of the Apostles, Juliana, Elene, and Christ II or The Ascension. These Old
English Christian poems were popularized by Cynewulf in the 8th century.
5. Beowulf. The National epic of England which appears in the Nowell Codex
manuscript from the 8th to 11th century. It is the most notable example of the earliest
English poetry, which blends Christianity and paganism.
• Epic is a long narrative poem written about the exploits of a supernatural hero.
6. Dream of the Rood. One of the earliest Christian poems preserved in the 10th
century Vercelli book. The poem makes use of dream vision to narrate the death
and resurrection of Christ from the perspective of the Cross or Rood itself.
7. The Battle of Brunanburg. This is a heroic old English poem that records, in
nationalistic tone, the triumph of the English against the combined forces of the
Scots, Vikings and Britons in AD 937.
8. The Battle of Maldon. Another heroic poem that recounts the fall of the English
army led by Birhtnoth in the hands of the Viking invaders in AD 991.
9. The Wanderer. The lyric poem is composed of 115 lines of alliterative verse that
reminisces a wanderer’s (eardstapa) past glory in the company of his lord and
comrades and his solitary exile upon the loss of his kinsmen in battles.
10. The Seafarer. An Old English lyric recorded in the Exeter Book that begins by
recounting in elegiac tone the perils of seafaring and ends with a praise of God.

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B. MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD

1. Everyman is regarded as the best of the morality plays. It talks about Everyman
facing Death. He summons the help of all his friends but only Good Deeds is able to
help him. Characters in this morality play are personifications of abstractions like
Everyman, Death, Fellowships, Cousins, Kindred, Goods, Good Deeds, etc. which
makes the play allegorical in nature.

• Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons,

and actions in a narrative, have meanings that lie outside the narrative itself.
The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance,
and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or
envy.
2. English and Scottish ballads preserved the local events, beliefs, and characters in
an easily remembered form. One familiar ballad is Sir Patrick Spens, which
concerns Sir Patrick’s death by drowning.
• Ballad. A narrative poem meant to be sung. It is characterized by repetition
and often by a repeated refrain (a recurrent phrase or series of phrases). The
earliest ballads were anonymous works transmitted orally from person to
person through generations.
3. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The best example of the romance of the Middle
Ages attributed to the Pearl Poet (14th century).
• Medieval Romance is a long narrative poem idealizing knight errantry. As
such, it pictures chivalrous knights engaged in a number of adventures to
protect their King, to pay homage to their lady love and to prove their honor.
4. The Canterbury Tales. Geoffrey Chaucer’s frame narrative (story within a story)
which showcases the stories told by 29 pilgrims on their way to the shrine of the
martyr Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury - the seat of religious activities during the
Middle English period. The collection of tales presents a microcosm of the Middle
English society composed of the nobility, the religious, the merchant class and the
commoners.
5. Le Morte d'Arthur. Originally written in eight books, Sir Thomas Mallory’s collection
of stories revolves around the life and adventures of King Arthur and the Knights of
the Round Table.

C. THE RENAISSANCE (16th Century)

1. Doctor Faustus. Christopher Marlowe (Father of English Tragedy) powerfully
exemplifies the sum total of the intellectual aspirations of the Renaissance through his
play Dr. Faustus. In the play, Faustus sells his soul to the devil in exchange of power and
knowledge.
2. The Faerie Queene. Edmund Spenser composed this elaborate allegory in honor of
the Queen of Fairyland (Queen Elizabeth I).
• Each verse in the Spenserian stanza contains nine lines: eight lines of iambic
pentameter, with five feet, followed by a single line of iambic hexameter, an
"alexandrine," with six. The rhyme scheme of these lines is ababbcbc-cdcdee.
• Spenserian sonnet consists of three quatrains and a concluding couplet in iambic

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pentameter with the rhyme pattern abab-bcbd-cdcd-ee

3. Song to Celia. A love poem written by Ben Jonson - a poet, dramatist, and actor
best known for his lyrics and satirical plays.
Drink to me, only with thine eyes,/ And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,/ And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst, that from the soul doth rise,/ Doth ask a drink divine:
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,/ I would not change for thine.
4. The King James Bible. One of the supreme achievements of the English
Renaissance. This translation was ordered by James I and made by 47 scholars
working in cooperation. It was published in 1611 and is known as the Authorized
Version. It is rightly regarded as the most influential book in the history of English
civilization.
5. Shakespearean Sonnets. Also known as the Elizabethan or English sonnets,
Shakespearean sonnets are composed of three quatrains and one heroic couplet with
the rhyme scheme - abab-cdcd-efef-gg.
6. Elizabethan Tragedies, Comedies and Historical Plays
• William Shakespeare is the great genius of the Elizabethan Age (1564-
1616). He wrote more than 35 plays as well as 154 sonnets and 2 narrative
poems –Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

Examples of Shakespearean Plays

Tragedies Comedies Historical Plays
a. Antony and Cleopatra a. All's Well That Ends a. Henry IV, part 1
b. Coriolanus Well b. Henry IV, part 2
c. Hamlet b. As You Like It c. Henry V
d. Julius Caesar c. The Merchant of Venice d. Henry VI, part 1
e. King Lear d. A Midsummer Night's e. Henry VI, part 2
Dream
f. Macbeth f. Henry VI, part 3
e. Much Ado About
g. Othello Nothing g. Henry VIII
h. Romeo and Juliet f. Taming of the Shrew h. King John
i. Timon of Athens g. The Tempest i. Richard II
j. Titus Andronicus h. Twelfth Night j. Richard III
i. Two Gentlemen of
Verona
j. Winter's Tale

Some quotable quotes from Shakespeare

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a. The play’s the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king - Hamlet
b. All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits
and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts" - As You Like It
c. Good Night, Good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be
morrow. - Romeo and Juliet
d. What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. -
Romeo and Juliet
e. If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we
not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? - The Merchant of Venice
f. Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. -
Julius Caesar
g. How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child! - (King Lear, Act I,
Scene IV).
h. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his
hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound
and fury, signifying nothing. - Macbeth

i. But love is blind, and lovers cannot see/ The petty follies that themselves commit. -
Merchant of Venice

j. The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. - As You Like
It

D. THE AGE OF REASON (17TH Century)

1. The Essays (Francis Bacon). The greatest literary contribution of the 17th century is
the essay. Francis Bacon is hailed as the Father of Inductive Reasoning and the
Father of the English Essay.
Some quotable quotes from Bacon
a. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed
and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but
not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. - Of
Studies
b. He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are
impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. - Of Marriage and
Single Life
c. Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s
nurses. - Of Marriage and Single Life

d. Children sweeten labors; but they make misfortunes more bitter. They increase the
cares of life; but they mitigate the remembrance of death. The perpetuity by
generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works, are proper to
men.- Of Parents and Children
e. If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to
begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.- Advancement of Learning

2. The Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan). An allegory that shows Christian

tormented by spiritual anguish. Evangelist, a spiritual guide visits him and urges him
to leave the City of Destruction. Evangelist claims that salvation can only be found in

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the Celestial City, known as Mount Zion. Christian embarks on a journey and meets
a number of other characters before he reaches the Celestial City.
• Allegory is a story illustrating an idea or a moral principle in which objects and
characters take on symbolic meanings external to the narrative.
3. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (John Milton)
• Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse that tells of the fall of the angels
and of the creation of Adam and Eve and their temptation by Satan in the
Garden of Eden ("Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit/ Of that forbidden
tree . . . ").
• Paradise Regained centers on the temptation of Christ and the thirst for the
word of God.
4. Holy Sonnets (John Donne)
• Metaphysical Poetry makes use of conceits or farfetched similes and
metaphors intended to startle the reader into an awareness of the relationships
among things ordinarily not associated.

Holy Sonnets XIV

John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

5. Easter Wings and the Altar (George Herbert). Concrete poems that deal with
man's thirst for God and with God's abounding love.
The Altar

A broken A L T A R, Lord, thy servant reares,

Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch’d the same.
A H E A R T alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow’r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name;
That, if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.

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O let thy blessed S A C R I F I C E be mine,

And sanctifie this A L T A R to be thine.

6. Cavalier Poems. Popularized by Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, Sir John

Suckling and Robert Herrick, cavalier poems are known for their elegant, refined and
courtly culture. The poems are often erotic and espouse carpe diem, "seize the
day."

From To the Virgins to Make Much of Time

Robert Herrick

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.

E. THE RESTORATION (18th Century)

1. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
• A Modest Proposal is a bitter pamphlet that ironically suggests that the Irish babies
be specially fattened for profitable sale as meat, since the English were eating the
Irish people anyhow – by heavy taxation.
• Gulliver's Travels is a satire on human folly and stupidity. Swift said that he wrote it
to vex the world rather than to divert it. Most people, however, are so delightfully
entertained by the tiny Lilliputians and by the huge Brobdingnagians that they do not
bother much with Swift's bitter satire on human pettiness or crudity.
2. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) published an exposition of the rules of the classical
school in the form of a poem An Essay on Criticism.
• The Rape of the Lock mockingly describes a furious fight between two families
when a young man snips off a lock of the beautiful Belinda's hair. Pope wrote in
heroic couplets, a technique in which he has been unsurpassed. In thought and
form he carried 18th-century reason and order to its highest peak.
3. Thomas Gray (1716-71) wrote Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which is
a collection of 18th-century commonplaces expressing concern for lowly folk.
4. Henry Fielding (1707-54) is known for his Tom Jones, which tells the story of a
young foundling who is driven from his adopted home, wanders to London, and
eventually, for all his suffering, wins his lady.
5. Laurence Sterne (1713-68) wrote Tristram Shandy, a novel in nine volumes
showcasing a series of loosely organized funny episodes in the life of Shandy.
6. Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74)
• She Stoops to Conquer is a comedy of manners that satirizes the 18 th
Century aristocracy who is overly class conscious.

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F. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

1. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
declared that “poetry should express, in genuine language, experience as
filtered through personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to
be found in nature.”
2. The most important tenets of Romanticism include:
• Belief in the importance of the individual, imagination, and intuition
• Shift from faith in reason to faith in the senses, feelings, and imagination; from
interest in urban society and its sophistication to an interest in the rural and
natural; from public, impersonal poetry to subjective poetry; and from concern with
the scientific and mundane to interest in the mysterious and infinite.
3. Because of this concern for nature and the simple folk, authors began to take an
interest in old legends, folk ballads, antiquities, ruins, "noble savages," and rustic
characters.
• Many writers started to give more play to their senses and to their imagination.
• They loved to describe rural scenes, graveyards, majestic mountains, and roaring
waterfalls.
• They also liked to write poems and stories of such eerie or supernatural things as
ghosts, haunted castles, fairies, and mad folk.

Romantic Writers
1. Robert Burns (1759-96) is also known as the national poet of Scotland because he
wrote not only in Standard English, but also in the light Scot’s dialect.
2. Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho)
and Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk) are Gothic writers who crafted stories of
terror and imagination.
• Gothic Literature is a literary style popular during the end of the 18th century and the
beginning of the 19th. This style usually portrayed fantastic tales dealing with horror,
despair, the grotesque and other “dark” subjects.
3. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) followed Gothic tradition in her
Frankenstein.
4. William Blake (1757-1827) was both poet and artist. He not only wrote books, but he
also illustrated and printed them. He devoted his life to freedom and universal love.
He was interested in children and animals the most innocent of God's creatures.

from The Lamb

William Blake

Little Lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,

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Making all the vales rejoice?

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

from The Tyger

William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
______

When the stars threw down their spears,

And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

The Sick Rose

William Blake

O ROSE, thou art sick!

The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote a long narrative poem about sinning
and redemption in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
6. William Wordsworth (1770-1850), together with Coleridge, brought out a volume of
verse, Lyrical Ballads, which signaled the beginning of English Romanticism.
Wordsworth found beauty in the realities of nature, which he vividly reflects in the
poems: The World is Too Much with Us, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, She Dwelt
Among the Untrodden Ways, and She was a Phantom of Delight.
7. Charles Lamb (1775-1834) wrote the playful essay Dissertation on Roast Pig. He
also rewrote many of Shakespeare's plays into stories for children in Tales from
Shakespeare.
8. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) wrote poems and novels. The Lay of the Last Minstrel
and The Lady of the Lake are representative of Scott's poems. Between 1814 and
1832 Scott wrote 32 novels which include Guy Mannering and Ivanhoe
9. Jane Austen (1775-1817) a writer of realistic novels about English middle-class
people. Pride and Prejudice is her best-known work. Her other novels include:
Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility.
10. George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was an outspoken critic of the evils of his time.
He hoped for human perfection, but his recognition of man's faults led him frequently
to despair and disillusionment. He is much remembered for his poems: Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage, She Walks in Beauty, and The Prisoner of Chillon.

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11. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), together with John Keats, established the
romantic verse as a poetic tradition.
• Many of his works are meditative like Prometheus Unbound; others are exquisitely
like The Cloud, To a Skylark, and Ode to the West Wind. Adonais, an elegy he
wrote for his best friend John Keats, ranks among the greatest elegies.
• In Ode to the West Wind, Shelley shows an evocation of nature wilder and more
spectacular than Wordsworth described it.
12. John Keats (1795-1821) believed that true happiness was to be found in art and
natural beauty.
• His Ode to a Nightingale spoke of what Keats called “negative capability,”
describing it as the moment of artistic inspiration when the poet achieved a kind of
self-annihilation – arrived at that trembling, delicate perception of beauty.

From A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever

John Keats

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

G. THE VICTORIAN AGE

Major Victorian Poets - shifted from the extremely personal expression (or
subjectivism) of the Romantic writers to an objective surveying of the problems of human
life.
1. Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) wrote seriously with a high moral purpose.
• Idylls of the King is a disguised study of ethical and social conditions. Locksley
Hall, In Memoriam, and Maud deal with conflicting scientific and social ideas.
2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) wrote the most exquisite love poems of
her time in Sonnets from the Portuguese. These lyrics were written secretly while
Robert Browning was courting her.

Sonnet 43
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

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With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

3. Robert Browning (1812-89) is best remembered for his dramatic monologues. My

Last Duchess, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Andrea del Sarto are excellent examples.
• Dramatic monologue is a long speech by an imaginary character used to expose
pretense and reveal a character’s inner self.
4. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is a group of painters and poets who rebelled
against the sentimental and the commonplace. They wished to revive the artistic
standards of the time before the Italian painter Raphael. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(1828-1882) and Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) wrote in this tradition.

Victorian Novelists
1. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) became a master of local color in The Pickwick
Papers. He is considered as England's best-loved novelist. His works include:
Great Expectations, Hard Times, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of
Two Cities.
2. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) disliked sham, hypocrisy, stupidity,
false optimism, and self-seeking. The result was satire on manners like Vanity Fair
with its heroine, Becky Sharp.
3. Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Emily Bronte (1818-1848) and Anne Bronte (1820-
1849) wrote novels romantic novels.
• Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights, especially, are powerful
and intensely personal stories of the private lives of characters isolated from the
rest of the world.
4. George Eliot (1819-80) was one of England's greatest women novelists. She is
famous for Silas Marner and Middlemarch.
5. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is a naturalist writer who brought to fiction a
philosophical attitude that resulted from the new science.
• Hardy’s Wessex novels from The Return of the Native, Tess of d’Urbervilles,
Mayor of Casterbridge to Jude the Obscure sought to show the futility and
senselessness of human’s struggle against the forces of natural environment,
social convention, and biological heritage.
6. Samuel Butler (1835-1902) believed that evolution is the result of the creative will
rather than of chance selection. His novel The Way of All Flesh explores the
relationships between parents and children where he reveals that the family restrains
the free development of the child.

Romance and Adventure

1. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) wrote stories in a light mood. His novels of
adventure are exciting and delightful: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Master
of Ballantrae.
• Stevenson also wrote David Balfour and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde which endear him to adult readers as well.
2. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) satirized the English military and administrative

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classes in India. He stirred the emotions of the empire lovers through his delightful
children's tales. He is known for Barrack Room Ballads, Soldiers Three, The
Jungle Books, and Captains Courageous.
3. Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-98) combines fantasy and satire in
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through a Looking Glass.

19th-Century Drama
1. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is a poet and novelist who became famous for his
Importance of Being Earnest.
2. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) wrote plays known for their attacks on Victorian
prejudices and attitudes. Shaw began to write drama as a protest against existing
conditions slums, sex hypocrisy, censorship, and war. Because his plays were not
well received, Shaw wrote their now-famous prefaces.

H. MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Early 20th-Century Prose
1. John Galsworthy (1867-1933) depicted the social life of an upper-class English
family in The Forsyte Saga, a series of novels which records the changing values of
such a family.).
2. H.G. Wells (1866-1946) wrote science fiction like The Time Machine, The Island of
Dr. Moreau, and The War of the Worlds. He also wrote social and political satires
criticizing the middle-class life of England. A good example is Tono-Bungay which
attacks commercial advertising.
3. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) wrote remarkable novels as The Nigger of the
Narcissus and Lord Jim where he depicts characters beset by obsessions of
cowardice, egoism, or vanity.
4. E.M. Forster (1879-1970) is a master of traditional plot. His characters are ordinary
persons out of middle-class life. They are moved by accident because they do not
know how to choose a course of action. He is famous for A Passage to India, a
novel that shows the lives of Englishmen in India.
Early 20th-Century Poetry
1. A.E. Housman (1859-1936) was an anti-Victorian who echoed the pessimism found
in Thomas Hardy. In his Shropshire Lad, nature is unkind; people struggle without
hope or purpose; boys and girls laugh, love, and are untrue.
2. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), John Millington Synge (1871-1909), and Lord
Dunsany (1878-1957) worked vigorously for the Irish cause. All were dramatists and
all helped found the famous Abbey Theatre.
Writers after the World Wars
World War I brought discontent and disillusionment. Men were plunged into gloom at
the knowledge that "progress" had not saved the world from war. In fiction there was
a shift from novels of the human comedy to novels of characters. Fiction ceased
to be concerned with a plot or a forward-moving narrative. Instead it followed the
twisted, contorted development of a single character or a group of related
characters
1. William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) focused on the alienation and despair of
drifters. His Of Human Bondage portrays Philip Carey struggling against self-

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consciousness and embarrassment because of his cub-foot.

2. D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) explored highly psychological themes as human desire,
sexuality, and instinct alongside the dehumanizing effects of modernity and
industrialization in such great novels as Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, The
Plumed Serpent, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
3. James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish expatriate noted for his experimental use of
the interior monologue and the stream of consciousness technique in landmark
novels as Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and in his semi-autobiographical novel The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.
• Stream of consciousness is a technique pioneered by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia
Woolf and James Joyce. It presents the thoughts and feelings of a character as they
occur.
• Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of the most notable
bildungs-roman in English literature. A bildungsroman is a novel of formation or
development in which the protagonist transforms from ignorance to knowledge,
innocence to maturity.
4. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) also believed that reality, or consciousness, is a stream.
Life, for both reader and characters, is immersion in the flow of that stream. Mrs.
Dalloway and To the Lighthouse are among her best works.
5. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) wrote Point Counter Point, Brave New World, and
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan where he showed his cynicism of the
contemporary world.
6. William Golding (born 1911) was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983.
His first novel, Lord of the Flies tells of a group of schoolboys who revert to
savagery when isolated on an island. In the novel, Golding explores naturalist and
religious themes of original sin.
7. George Orwell (1903-50) is world-renown, for the powerful anti-Communist satire
Animal Farm. This was followed in 1949 with an anti-totalitarian novel entitled
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
8. Graham Greene (1904-91) is known for novels of highly Catholic themes like
Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair and The Power
and the Glory. Among his better-known later novels are The Quiet American, Our
Man in Havana, A Burnt-Out Case, The Human Factor, and Monsignor Quixote.
9. Kingsley Amis is considered by many to be the best of the writers to emerge from
the 1950s. The social discontent he expressed made Lucky Jim famous in England.
Lucky Jim is the story of Jim Dixon, who rises from a lower-class background only
to find all the positions at the top of the social ladder filled.
10. Anthony Burgess (born 1917) was a novelist whose fictional exploration of modern
dilemmas combines wit, moral earnestness, and touches of the bizarre. He is known
for A Clockwork Orange. His other novels include Enderby Outside, Earthly
Powers, The End of the World News, and The Kingdom of the Wicked.
11. Doris Lessing (born 1919) is a Zimbabwean-British writer, famous for novels The
Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook. She won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 2007.
12. Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian novelist and essayist noted for his Midnight's
Children and The Satanic Verses which prompted Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini to
issue a fatwa against him, because Muslims considered the book blasphemous. In

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July 2008 Midnight's Children won a public vote to be named the Best of the
Booker, the best novel to win the Booker Prize in the award's 40-year history.

AMERICAN LITERATURE
A. THE LITERATURE OF EXPLORATION
1. Christopher Columbus the famous Italian explorer, funded by the Spanish rulers
Ferdinand and Isabella, wrote the "Epistola," printed in 1493 which recounts his
voyages.
2. Captain John Smith led the Jamestown colony and wrote the famous story of the
Indian maiden, Pocahontas.

B. COLONIAL PERIOD IN NEW ENGLAND

1. William Bradford (1590-1657) wrote Of Plymouth Plantation and the first
document of colonial self-governance in the English New World, the
Mayflower Compact.
2. Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672) wrote the first published book of poems by an
American which was also the first American book to be published by a woman.
• She wrote long, religious poems on conventional subjects, but she is well loved
for her witty poems on subjects from daily life and her warm and loving poems to
her husband and children.
• She was inspired by English metaphysical poetry, and her book The Tenth
Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) shows the influence of Edmund
Spenser, Philip Sidney, and other English poets as well.
3. Edward Taylor (c. 1644-1729) was an intense, brilliant poet, teacher and minister
who sailed to New England in 1668 rather than take an oath of loyalty to the Church
of England.
• He wrote a variety of verses: funeral elegies, lyrics, a medieval "debate," and a
500-page Metrical History of Christianity (mainly a history of martyrs). His best
works, according to modern critics, are the series of short Preparatory
Meditations.
4. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) a Puritan minister best known for his frightening,
powerful sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
• Puritans refer to two distinct groups: "separating" Puritans, such as the Plymouth
colonists, who believed that the Church of England was corrupt and that true
Christians must separate themselves from it; and non-separating Puritans, such as
those in Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed in reform but not separation.
• Puritans believed in God’s ultimate sovereignty in granting grace and salvation;
therefore, their lives center on three important covenants – covenants of Works,
Grace, and Redemption.

C. THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT

Enlightenment thinkers and writers were devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty, and
equality as the natural rights of man. Thus, the18th-century American Enlightenment
was a movement marked by -

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 an emphasis on rationality rather than tradition,

 scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious dogma, and
 Representative government in place of monarchy.

1. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was America's "first great man of letters," who
embodied the Enlightenment ideal of humane rationality.
• He used the pseudonym Poor Richard or Richard Saunders in Poor Richard’s
Almanack – a yearly almanac he released from 1732-1758. The almanac was a
repository of Franklin’s proverbs and aphorisms.
2. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) is America’s greatest pamphleteer.
• His pamphlet Common Sense sold over 100,000 copies in the first three months
of its publication.
• He wrote the famous line, "The cause of America is in a great measure the cause
of all mankind."
3. Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was the Poet of the American Revolution who
incorporated the new stirrings of European Romanticism in his lyric The Wild
Honeysuckle.
4. Washington Irving (1789-1859) published his Sketch Book (1819-1820)
simultaneously in England and America, obtaining copyrights and payment in both
countries.
• The Sketch Book of Geoffrye Crayon (Irving's pseudonym) contains his two best-
remembered stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
5. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
• Leather Stocking tales in which he introduced his renowned character Natty
Bumppo, who embodies his vision of the frontiersman as a gentleman, a
Jeffersonian "natural aristocrat."
• Natty Bumppo is the first famous frontiersman in American literature and the literary
forerunner of countless cowboy and backwoods heroes.
6. Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784) is the first African-American author who wrote of
religious themes.
• To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works and On Being Brought
from Africa to America. These poems boldly confront white racism and assert
spiritual equality.

D. THE ROMANTIC PERIOD, 1820-1860

Transcendentalists

• The Transcendentalist movement was a reaction against 18th century

rationalism and a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of 19th
century thought.
• The movement was based on the belief in the unity of the world and God.
• The doctrine of self- reliance and individualism developed through the belief in the
identification of the individual soul with God.

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1. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was a leading exponent of the transcendentalist

movement who called for the birth of American individualism inspired by nature.
• In his essay Self-Reliance, Emerson remarks: "A foolish consistency is the
hobgoblin of little minds."
• Most of his major ideas – the need for a new national vision, the use of personal
experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the doctrine of
compensation – are suggested in his first publication, Nature.
2. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) wrote Walden, or Life in the Woods, which
was the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent
living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on property owned by Emerson.
• In Walden, Thoreau not only tests the theories of transcendentalism, but he
also re-enacts the collective American experience of the 19th century by living
on the frontier.
• He also wrote Civil Disobedience, with its theory of passive resistance based
on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws. This was an
inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi's Indian independence movement and Martin
Luther King's struggle for black Americans' civil rights in the 20th century.
3. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) incorporated both transcendentalist and realist ideas in
his works. He championed the individual and the country's democratic spirit in his
Leaves of Grass.
• Leaves of Grass, which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains
Song of Myself, the strongest evocation of the transcend list ideals.
From Song of Myself
Walt Whitman

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
4. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was a radical individualist who found deep inspiration
in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the New England countryside.
She wrote 1,775 poems but only one was published in her lifetime.
• She shows a terrifying existential awareness. Like Poe, she explores the dark
and hidden part of the mind, dramatizing death and the grave.

The Brahmin Poets

Boston Brahmin poets refer to the patrician, Harvard-educated literati who sought to
fuse American and European traditions in their writings.
1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was responsible for the misty,
ahistorical, legendary sense of the past that merged American and European
traditions.
• He wrote three long narrative poems popularizing native legends in European meters
Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish.
• He also wrote short lyrics like The Jewish Cemetery at Newport, My Lost Youth,
and The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls.
2. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) was a physician and professor of anatomy and
physiology at Harvard. Of the Brahmin poets, he is the most versatile. His works
include collections of humorous essays (The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table),

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novels (Elsie Venner), biographies (Ralph Waldo Emerson), and verses (The
Deacon's Masterpiece, or The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay).

The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Fiction

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) set his stories in Puritan New England. His
greatest novels, The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables; and his
best-known shorter stories The Minister's Black Veil, Young Goodman Brown,
and My Kinsman, Major Molineux, all highlight the Calvinistic obsession with
morality, sexual repression, guilt and confession, and spiritual salvation.
2. Herman Melville (1819-1891) went to sea when he was just 19 years old. His
interest in sailors' lives grew naturally out of his own experiences, and most of his
early novels grew out of his voyages.
• Moby-Dick is Melville's masterpiece. It is the epic story of the whaling ship Pequod
and its "ungodly, god-like man," Captain Ahab, whose obsessive quest for the white
whale Moby-Dick leads the ship and its men to destruction.
3. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) refined the short story genre and invented detective
fiction. Many of his stories prefigure the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy
so popular today.
• His famous works The Cask of Amontillado, Masque of the Red Death, The Fall
of the House of Usher, Purloined Letter, and the Pit and the Pendulum, all center
on the mysterious and the macabre.
• He also wrote poetry like Anabel Lee, The Raven, and The Bell.
4. Sojourner Truth (c.1797-1883) epitomized the endurance of the women reformers.
• Born a slave in New York, she escaped from slavery in 1827, settling with a son and
daughter in the supportive Dutch-American Van Wagener family, for whom she
worked as a servant.
• She worked with a preacher to convert prostitutes to Christianity and lived in a
progressive communal home. She was christened "Sojourner Truth" for the mystical
voices and visions she began to experience. To spread the truth of these visionary
teachings, she sojourned alone, lecturing, singing gospel songs, and preaching
abolitionism through many states over three decades
5. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the
Lowly which became the most popular American book of the 19th Century. Its
passionate appeal for an end to slavery in the United States inflamed the debate
that, within a decade, led to the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865).
• Uncle Tom, the slave and central character, is a true Christian martyr who labors to
convert his kind master, St. Clare, prays for St. Clare's soul as he dies, and is killed
defending slave women.
• Slavery is depicted as evil not for political or philosophical reasons but mainly
because it divides families, destroys normal parental love, and is inherently un-
Christian.

E. REALIST WRITERS
1. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835-1910)
• Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew up in the

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Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri.

• Ernest Hemingway's famous statement that all of American literature comes from
one great book, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, indicates this author's
towering place in the tradition.
• Twain's style is vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave American
writers a new appreciation of their national voice.

• Huckleberry Finn has inspired countless literary interpretations. Clearly, the novel is
a story of death, rebirth, and initiation. The escaped slave, Jim, becomes a father
figure for Huck; in deciding to save Jim, Huck grows morally beyond the bounds of
his slave-owning society. It is Jim's adventures that initiate Huck into the complexities
of human nature and give him moral courage.
2. Bret Harte (1836-1902) is remembered as a local colorist and author of
adventurous stories such as The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts of
Poker Flat set along the western mining frontier.
3. Henry James (1843-1916) wrote that art, especially literary art, "makes life, makes
interest, makes importance."
• With Twain, James is generally ranked as the greatest American novelist of the
second half of the 19th century.
• James is noted for his "international theme" -- that is, the complex relationships
between naive Americans and cosmopolitan Europeans, which he explored in the
novels The American, Daisy Miller, and a masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady.
4. Edith Wharton (1862-1937) descended from a wealthy family in New York society
and saw firsthand the decline of this cultivated group and, in her view, the rise of
boorish, nouveau-riche business families. This social transformation is the
background of many of her novels.
• Wharton's best novels include The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country,
Summer, The Age of Innocence, and the novella Ethan Frome.
5. Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was a journalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry,
and plays.
• Crane saw life at its rawest, in slums and on battlefields. His short stories like The
Open Boat, The Blue Hotel, and The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky exemplify such
realism.
• He wrote a haunting Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage which explores
the psychological turmoil of a self-confessed coward.
• Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is one of the best naturalistic American
novels. It is the harrowing story of a poor, sensitive young girl whose alcoholic
parents utterly fail her. In love and eager to escape her violent home life, she allows
herself to be seduced into living with a young man, who soon deserts her. When her
self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute to survive, but soon
commits suicide out of despair.
6. Jack London (1876-1916) is a naturalist who set his collection of stories, The Son
of the Wolf in the Klondike region of Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. His best-
sellers The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf made him the highest paid writer in
the United States of his time.
7. Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) explores the dangers of the American dream in his
1925 work An American Tragedy, The novel relates, in great detail, the life of Clyde

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Griffiths, who grows up in great poverty in a family of wandering evangelists, but

dreams of wealth and the love of beautiful women.
• An American Tragedy is a reflection of the dissatisfaction, envy, and despair that
afflicted many poor and working people in America's competitive, success-driven
society. As American industrial power soared, the glittering lives of the wealthy in
newspapers and photographs sharply contrasted with the drab lives of ordinary
farmers and city workers.
• Muckraking novels used eye-catching journalistic techniques to depict harsh
working conditions and oppression. Populist Frank Norris's The Octopus exposed
big railroad companies, while socialist Upton Sinclair's The Jungle painted the
squalor of the Chicago meat-packing houses. Jack London's dystopia The Iron Heel
anticipates George Orwell's 1984 in predicting a class war and the takeover of the
government.
8. Willa Cather (1873-1947) grew up on the Nebraska prairie among pioneering
immigrants - later immortalized in O Pioneers!, My Antonia, and her well-known
story Neighbour Rosicky.
• During her lifetime she became increasingly alienated from the materialism of
modern life and wrote of alternative visions in the American Southwest and in the
past.
• Death Comes for the Archbishop evokes the idealism of two 16th-century priests
establishing the Catholic Church in the New Mexican desert.
9. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) was a poet, historian, biographer, novelist, musician,
essayist, but a journalist by profession. To many, Sandburg was a latter-day Walt
Whitman, writing expansive, evocative urban and patriotic poems and simple, childlike
rhymes and ballads.

Fog
Carl Sandburg

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

10. Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) is the best U.S. poet of the late 19th
century. Unlike Masters, Robinson uses traditional metrics.
• Some of the best known of Robinson's dramatic monologues are Luke Havergal,
about a forsaken lover; Miniver Cheevy, a portrait of a romantic dreamer; and
Richard Cory, a somber portrait of a wealthy man who commits suicide.

F. MODERNISM AND EXPERIMENTATION

1. Gertrude Stein termed this age as the "Period of the Lost Generation." Many
young Americans lost their sense of identity because of the instability of traditional
structure of values brought about by the wars and the growing industrialization of
cities.

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2. The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of the United
States. Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down; businesses and banks
failed; farmers, unable to harvest, transport, or sell their crops, could not pay their
debts and lost their farms.
3. Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier Darwinian
theory of evolution) became popular.
4. Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other American writers experimented
with fictional points of view. James often restricted the information in the novel to
what a single character would have known. Faulkner's novel The Sound and the
Fury (1929) breaks up the narrative into four sections, each giving the viewpoint of a
different character (including a mentally retarded boy).
5. To analyze such modernist novels and poetry, New Criticism arose in the United
States.

MODERNIST POETS
1. Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was one of the most influential American poets of this
century. His poetry is best known for its clear, visual images, fresh rhythms, and
muscular, intelligent, unusual lines, such as the ones inspired by Japanese haiku - "In a
Station of the Metro" (1916):
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
3. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) wrote influential essays and dramas, and championed the
importance of literary and social traditions for the modern poet. As a critic, Eliot is
best remembered for his formulation of the "objective correlative," as a means of
expressing emotion through "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events" that
would be the "formula" of that particular emotion.

• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock embodies this approach, when the
ineffectual, elderly Prufrock thinks to himself that he has "measured out his life
in coffee spoons," using coffee spoons to reflect a humdrum existence and a
wasted lifetime.
4. Robert Frost (1874-1963) combines sound and sense in his frequent use of rhyme
and images. Frost's poems are often deceptively simple but suggest a deeper
meaning.
5. Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a double life, one as an insurance business
executive, another as a renowned poet.
• Some of his best known poems are "Sunday Morning," "Peter Quince at the
Clavier," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,"
and "The Idea of Order at Key West."
• Stevens's poetry dwells upon themes of the imagination, the necessity for
aesthetic form, and the belief that the order of art corresponds with an order in
nature. His vocabulary is rich and various: He paints lush tropical scenes but also
manages dry, humorous, and ironic vignettes.
6. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) championed the use of colloquial speech
• His sympathy for ordinary working people, children, and every day events in
modern urban settings make his poetry attractive and accessible. The Red

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Wheelbarrow, like a Dutch still life, finds interest and beauty in everyday objects.

The Red Wheelbarrow

William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
• He termed his work "objectivist" to suggest the importance of concrete, visual
objects. His work influenced the "Beat" writing of the early 1950s.
• Beat Generation refers to a group of American writers who became popular in
the 1950s and who popularized the “Beatniks" culture. The “Beatniks” rejected
mainstream American values, experimented with drugs and alternate forms of
sexuality, and focused on Eastern spirituality.
• The major works of Beat writing are Allen Ginsberg's Howl, William S.
Burroughs's Naked Lunch and Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
6. Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962), commonly known as e.e. cummings, wrote
innovative verse distinguished for its humor, grace, celebration of love and eroticism,
and experimentation with punctuation and visual format on the page.
8. Langston Hughes (1902-1967) embraced African- American jazz rhythms in his
works. He was one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance responsible for the
flowering of African-American culture and writings.

MODERNIST WRITERS
1. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is known for novels whose protagonists are
disillusioned by the great American dream.
• The Great Gatsby focuses on the story of Jay Gatsby who discovers the
devastating cost of success in terms of personal fulfillment and love.
• Tender Is the Night talks of a young psychiatrist whose life is doomed by his
marriage to an unstable woman.
• The Beautiful and the Damned explores the self-destructive extravagance of
his times

2. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) received the Nobel Prize in 1954 for his The Old
Man and the Sea – a short poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman who heroically
catches a huge fish devoured by sharks. This also won for him the Pulitzer Prize in
1953
• Hemingway wrote of war, death, and the "lost generation" of cynical survivors.

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His characters are not dreamers but tough bullfighters, soldiers, and athletes. If
intellectual, they are deeply scarred and disillusioned.

3. William Faulkner (1897-1962) experimented with narrative chronology, different

points of view and voices (including those of outcasts, children, and illiterates), and a
rich and demanding baroque style built of extremely long sentences full of
complicated subordinate parts.
• Created an imaginative landscape, Yoknapatawpha County, mentioned in
numerous novels, along with several families with interconnections extending
back for generations.
• His best works include The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, two
modernist works experimenting with viewpoint and voice to probe southern
families under the stress of losing a family member;
• Faulkner's themes are southern tradition, family, community, the land, history and
the past, race, and the passions of ambition and love.
4. Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) is the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1930.
• Lewis's Main Street satirized the monotonous, hypocritical small-town life in
Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. His incisive presentation of American life and his
criticism of American materialism, narrowness, and hypocrisy brought him
national and international recognition.
• In 1926, he was offered and declined a Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith, a novel
tracing a doctor's efforts to maintain his medical ethics amid greed and
corruption.
5. John Steinbeck (1902-1968) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963 for
his realist novel The Grapes of Wrath, the story of a poor Oklahoma family that
loses its farm during the Depression and travels to California to seek work.
6. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was an American poet, novelist, short story and children’s
author. She became famous for her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar,
which pictures a woman trapped between the dictates of marriage, mother, and
wifehood and the demands of a creative spirit that.
• Confessional poetry was popularized by Robert Lowell, Richard Snodgrass,
Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath. It is a kind of poetry which reveals the poet’s
personal life in poems about illnesses, sexuality, and despondence.
7. Richard Wright (1908-1960) was the first African-American novelist to reach a
general audience, despite his little education. He depicted his harsh childhood as a
colored American in one of his best books, his autobiography, Black Boy. He later
said that his sense of deprivation, due to racism, was so great that only reading kept
him alive.
8. Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960) is known as one of the lights of the Harlem
Renaissance. She first came to New York City at the age of 16 - having arrived as
part of a traveling theatrical troupe.
• Her most important work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a moving, fresh
depiction of a beautiful mulatto woman's maturation and renewed happiness as
she moves through three marriages.

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9. Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) is the first American playwright to be honored with the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.
• O'Neill's earliest dramas concern the working class and poor, but his later works
explore subjective realms, such as obsessions, sex and other Freudian themes.
• His play Desire Under the Elms recreates the passions hidden within one
family; The Great God Brown uncovers the unconsciousness of a wealthy
businessman; and his Strange Interlude, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, traces
the tangled loves of one woman.
• O'Neill continued to explore the Freudian pressures of love and dominance within
families in a trilogy of plays collectively entitled Mourning Becomes Electra,
based on the classical Oedipus trilogy by Sophocles.
10. Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) is known for his plays Our Town and The Skin of
Our Teeth, and for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
• Our Town has all the elements of sentimentality and nostalgia – the archetypal
traditional small country town, the kindly parents and mischievous children, the
young lovers.
• It shows Wilder’s innovative elements such as ghosts, voices from the audience,
and daring time shifts.
11. Arthur Miller (1915- ) is New York-born dramatist-novelist-essayist-biographer.
• He reached his personal pinnacle in 1949 with Death of a Salesman, a study of
man's search for merit and worth in his life and the realization that failure
invariably looms.
• Miller also wrote All My Sons and The Crucible – both political satires.
12. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) focused on disturbed emotions and unresolved
sexuality within families - most of them southern.
• As one of the first American writers to live openly as a homosexual, Williams
explained that the sexuality of his tormented characters expressed their
loneliness. He was known for incantatory repetitions, a poetic southern diction,
weird Gothic settings, and Freudian exploration of sexual desire. He became
famous for his The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.

THE 1950s
• The 1950s saw the delayed impact of modernization and technology in everyday
life left over from the 1920s - before the Great Depression.
• World War II brought the United States out of the Depression, and the 1950s
provided most Americans with time to enjoy long-awaited material prosperity.
• Loneliness at the top was a dominant theme. The 1950s actually was a
decade of subtle and pervasive stress. Novels by John O'Hara, John Cheever,
and John Updike explore the stress lurking in the shadows of seeming
satisfaction.
• Some of the best works portray men who fail in the struggle to succeed, as in

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Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Saul Bellow's novella Seize the Day.
• Some writers went further by following those who dropped out, as did J.D.
Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye, Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man, and Jack
Kerouac in On the Road.
• Philip Roth published a series of short stories reflecting his own alienation from
his Jewish heritage – Goodbye, Columbus.
• The fiction of American Jewish writers Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Isaac
Bashevis Singer – are most noted for their humor, ethical concern, and portraits
of Jewish communities in the Old and New Worlds.

1. Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-1994) is known for his one highly-acclaimed book the
Invisible Man (1952) which is a story of a black man who lives a subterranean
existence in a hole brightly illuminated by electricity stolen from a utility company. The
book recounts his grotesque, disenchanting experiences.
2. Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) created fiction organized around a single
narrator telling the story from a consistent point of view. Her first success, the story
Flowering Judas, was set in Mexico during the revolution.
3. Eudora Welty (1909-2001) modeled after Katherine Ann Porter, but she is more
interested in the comic and grotesque characters like the stubborn daughter in her
short story Why I Work at the P.O., who moves out of her house to live in a tiny post
office.
5. Saul Bellow (1915-2005) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.
• Bellow's Seize the Day is a brilliant novella noted for
its brevity. It centers on a failed businessman, Tommy Wilhelm, who tries to hide
his feelings of inadequacy by presenting a good front. Seize the Day sums up
the fear of failure that plagues many Americans.
6. J.D. Salinger (1919- ) achieved huge literary success with the publication of his novel
The Catcher in the Rye (1951).
• The novel centers on a sensitive 16-year-old, Holden
Caulfield, who flees his elite boarding school for the outside world of adulthood,
only to become disillusioned by its materialism and phoniness. When asked what
he would like to be, Caulfield answers "the catcher in the rye," In his vision, he is
a modern version of a white knight, the sole preserver of innocence.
• His other works include Nine Stories, Franny and
Zooey, and Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters, a collection of stories
from The New Yorker.
7. Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was the son of an impoverished French-Canadian family;
Jack Kerouac questioned the values of middle-class life.
• Kerouac's best-known novel, On the Road, describes "beatniks" wandering
through America seeking an idealistic dream of communal life and beauty.
• The Dharma Bums focuses on counterculture intellectuals and their infatuation
with Zen Buddhism.
• Kerouac also penned a book of poetry, Mexico City Blues, and volumes about
his life with such beatniks as experimental novelist William Burroughs and poet
Allen Ginsberg.

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8. John Barth (1930- ) is more interested in how a story is told than in the story itself.
Barth entices his audience into a carnival fun-house full of distorting mirrors that
exaggerate some features while minimizing others. Many of his earlier works were in
fact existential.
• In Lost in the Funhouse, he collects14 stories that constantly refer to the
processes of writing and reading. Barth's intent is to alert the reader to the artificial
nature of reading and writing, and to prevent him or her from being drawn into the
story as if it were real.
9. Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was a novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter,
and film director. He is considered as an innovator of narrative nonfiction called New
Journalism in Miami and the Siege of Chicago. He is also famous for The
Executioner's Song, Ancient Evenings, and Harlot's Ghost.
10. Toni Morrison (1931- ) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for her skillful
rendition of complex identities of black people in a universal manner. Some of her
novels include: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved.
11. Alice Walker (1944- ) is an African-American who uses lyrical realism in her
epistolary dialect novel The Color Purple where she exposes social problems and
racial issues.
12. Maya Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) which celebrates
mother-daughter connection.

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