A Lecture on Lolita (NIVEL AVANZADO)

The New Novelists of the 1950s (NIVEL AVANZADO)

(from The Short Oxford History of English Literature, by Andrew Sanders)

Samuel Beckett's trilogy, pulished together in London in 1959 under the English titles Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, was in every sense the most radically innovative fictional statement of the 1950s. The edition bore the announcement that the three novels had been 'translated from the original French by the author'. Beckett's pre-war fiction in English—the episodic novel A Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written in 1932, but published posthumously in 1992), the ten interconnected stories derived from it and given the title More Pricks than Kicks (1934) and the novel Murphy (1938)—had responded with a gauche confidence to the challenge of Joyce's experimental 'work in progress', Finnegans Wake. The titles of the first two of his pre-war works (one being loosely adapted from Chaucer, the other bawdily punning on a phrase of St. Paul's) also suggest the degree to which Beckett was self-consciously attempting to regenerate and re-energize the literary traditions of his native language. Murphy is the most substantial of the three. Its solitary title character, who 'sat it out, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton', is an Irishman in London, precisely placed in time and space (it is Thursday, 12 September 1935) and he has an unbroken view from his window to the northwest). His 'mew' (a bird-coop, originally one designed for moultin falcomry) is condemned (we presume as unfit for human habitation) and Murphy must contemplate the upheaval of removal ('Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings'). Ostensibly, Murphy is constructed around the drab rituals and the vacuous repetitions of a largely inert life passed in a confined urban space. More profoundly, it seeks to represent a man's energetic inner life which finds its own repetitive rhythms and patterns and its own time-scheme distinct from those of the outside world.

When Beckett returned to fiction after the Second World War, he opted for the discipline of writing in French rather than in English. He also chose the form of a fluid monologue, a positively gushing 'stream of consciousness', rather than that of a third-person narrative. Molloy (written in 1947, published in Paris in 1951, and subsequently translated into English in 1955) shares a deliberate ambiguity of telling with its two successors. Each of the ageing narrators in the trilogy habitually contradicts himself, stumbles over the contortions of his syntax, and is obliged to pause in order to reflect on precisely how he has to express himself or on what he feels pressed to say. Both the flow of narrative and the language employed threaten to break under the strain. Beginnings are vexed or subverted, tenses shift between past and present, and what seem to be digressions or interpolations assume a vital momentum. Molloy (the very title of which may possibly, with the addition of one simple vowel, glance back to Joyce's superlatively fluid consciousness, Molly) is built around two self-explorative consciousnesses, the one seeking the other. Much as the disabled Molloy melts disconcertingly into his contemporary other half, the self-abused, decayed Moran, in the first novel, so both Molloy and Moran are subsumed in the other compulsive story-tellers of the trilogy, Malone and the isolated, unnamed narrator of The Unnamable. The last anguished and lachrymose teller recognizes the extent to which he has assimilated and now disowns the experiences of his narrative forebears: 'All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing . . . I though I was right in enlisting these sufferers in my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it . . . these creatures have never been, only I and this black void have ever been.' Whereas Murphy sits it out 'as though he were free', this man of sorrows, the Unnamable, wrenches phrases from himself in his isolation and probes the implications of the perception that he is neither truly alone nor free of a larger humanity ('the little murmur of unconsenting man, to murmur what it is their humanity stifles'). The trilogy ends with an ultimate contradiction in terms: 'in silence you don't know, you must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.' 

Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narrative form had few immediate echoes in the more popular fiction of the 1950s. The one British writer of the period who keenly responded to the idea of creating an avowedly 'Modernist' fiction, and whose experiments were enthusiastically received by a wide public, was Lawrence Durrell (1912-90). Durrell was born in India of parents whose families had made the sub-continent their home for several generations. Although he became briefly acclimatized to bohemian (as opposed to 'respectable') England in the early 1930s, Durrell found what he regarded as his spiritual home in the Mediterranean, moving first to Corfu and then, after the German invasion of Greece, to Egypt. As a young man he also responded to the liberating influence of two modern writers in particular, D. H. Lawrence (with whom he shared an antipathy to British reserve as much as to British rain) and the Paris-based American novelist Henry Miller (with whom he embarked on a long correspondence). Miller's influence can be felt on Durrell's The Black Book: An Agon, 'a savage charcoa sketch of spiritual and sexual etiolation', which was privately printed in Paris in 1938 (its overt eroticism precluded its publication in Britain until 1973). In 1944, as Press Officer of the British Information Service in Egypt, Durrell was posted to Alexandria, the city of 'five races, five languages, a dozen creeds' which inspired the four novels of his 'Alexandria Quartet'— Justine (1957), Balthazar, Mountolive (both 1958), and Clea (1960). Durrell's dusty, sweaty, multi-layered Aleandria, a city he described in Balthazar as 'half-imagined (yet wholly real), [which] begins and ends in us', is a phantasmagoric, Eliotic place in which men and women dissolve into one another and ancient splendours melt into modern inconveniences. The city's real and imagined disconnections provide the setting for a series of interlocked fictions describing interconnected, unfulfilling love-affairs. The narrator, Darley, is both a self-conscious, self-referential teller and an incorporator of the narrative voices of other tellers, notably that of a fellow-writer, Pursewarden. In one of the 'workpoints'—sentences, ideas, and occasionally poems or translations seemingly discarded from the main narrative of Justine and then appended to it as a kind of afterthought—Pursewarden's 'n-dimensional novel' is described by its author as having a forward narrative momentum which is 'counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern'. Readers are doubtless meant to read Darley's actual narrative as somehow shadowing Pursewarden's speculative one. The Alexandria Quartet, in common with Durrell's yet more ambitious 'Avignon Quintet'—Monsieur (1974), Livia (1978), Constance (1982), Sebastian (1983), and Quincx (1985)—attempts to break down preconceptions of time as much as it assaults inherited prejudices in favour of fictional realism. Durrell's literary reputation, so buoyant in the breezy, liberal climate of the early 1960s, tended to sag thereafter. Where his contemporary, Beckett, was economical, he was prodigal; where Beckett saw the force of scrupulous compression, he indulged in a passion for words which is more often libertine than it is liberating.

William Golding's first and most enduringly popular novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), gives a surer indication of his continuing concern with moral allegory than it does of his subsequent experiments with fictional form. Golding (1911-93) set the novel on a desert island on which a marooned party of boys from an English cathedral choir-school gradually falls away from the genteel civilization that has so far shaped it and regresses into dirt, barbarism, and murder. The island is cut off both from the disciplined harmony of the boys' musical background and from a disharmonious world of grown-ups at war. The novel is shaped intellectually by an intermixture of the Christian concept of original sin, a post-Darwinist and post-Wellsian pessimism, and a systematic undoing of R. M. Ballantyne's adventure story of plucky and resourceful boys, The Coral Island (1857). At the end of the story an officer from the warship that rescues the boys dejectedly remarks, 'I should have thought that a pack of British boys . . . would have been able to put up a better show than that'. The sudden shift of viewpoint and the dejection were re-explored, with subtle variations and darker ramifications, in each of Golding's subsequent novels. As the range of his fiction shows, Golding emerged as a major successor to an established line of Modernist mythopoeists. Unlike Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, or Jones, however, he was not content with a reanimation of ancient myth; he was intent on overturning and superseding a variety of modern rationalist formulations and on replacing them with charged, unorthodox moral shapes. It is not just British boys who reveal their innate depravity, but the whole human race. The Inheritors (1955) moves back into an anthropological, rather than Adamic, prehistory in which the talented, if thoroughly nasty and brutish, progenitors of Homo sapiens exterminate their gentler, simpler-minded Neanderthal precursors. The dense, difficult Pincher Martin (1956) has as its greedy egotistical 'hero' a drowned sailor, lost from a torpedoed destroyer, whose body is rolled by the Atlantic. But the 'Pincher' is also a survivor, one whose consciousness tries desperately to hold on to its fragmented identity in a watery purgatory. This identity attaches itslf to an imagined rock, one that Martin names 'Rocall' and one which he also recognized in its rhymed naval transmogrification as 'Buggerall' (a hellish nothing). Golding experimented with a similar metaphorical structue in Free Fall (1959), a tortuous exploration of free will and fallen humanity in relation to the scientific idea of the unrestrained movement of a body under the force of gravity. The subject of  The Spire of 1964 was both more concrete and more elusive. Jocelin, the ambitious Dean of an unnamed English cathedral at an unspecified point in the Middle Ages, is a fallen man obsessed with raising a tall stone spire above his cathedral. His obsession is determined by a serpentine knot of motives—architectural, theological, visionary, psychological, sexual, self-deprecating, and self-aggrandizing. Jocelin both achieves his desire and fails in it; he builds and awe-inspiring structure on shaky foundations, but he is also forced to experience its maiming; he erects an airy reflection of heavenly glory, but he is also obliged to recognize the hot, distracting force of the phallus; he periodically escapes upwards, with a vertiginous thrill, into a Gothic fretwork, but he is held earthbound by the overloaded, creaking pillars that have to support his aspiration. Finally struck down by a mortal paralysis, and attended by a priest known as Father Adam, the dying Jocelin struggles to find the meaning of his life's work, a meaning which gradually forms itself around the metaphoric core of the lost earthly paradise: 'In the tide, flying like a bluebird, struggling, shouting, screaing to leave behind the words of magic and incomprehension—It's like the appletree!'

Golding's The Pyramid (1967) was followed by what appeared to be an abstention from fiction, an abstention broken in 1979 by Darkness Visible. All Goldint's opening scenes, suggestions, and sentences are disconcertingly striking. None is more so than that of Darkness  Visible, a compelling evocation of an intense fire-storm in the London Blitz out of which walks a fearfully burned child: 'He was naked and the miles o light lit him variously . . . The brighness of his left side was not an effect of light. The burn was even more visible on the left side of his head.' From the terrible beauty of this beginning there develops an intense and sometimes confusing exploration of the polarities of redemptive saintliness and destructive malignity, of disinterested love and calculated terrorism. The four novels published since Darkness Visible—Rites of Passage (1980), its sequels Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989), and The Paper Men (1984)—have extended what can be seen as an established rhythm of contrasted sea-stories and land-stories all of which are concerned with extremity and isolation. The most successful is Rites of Passage, the first volume of a sea-trilogy set on a decayed man-of-war bound for Australia in the opening years of the nineteenth-century. Its cocky, journal-writing narrator, Edmund Talbot, is alerted to the problems of 'too much understanding' but can himself comprehend littls of 'all that is monstrous under the sun'. Talbot, like all Golding's central characters, is rawly exposed both to his darker self and to the grinding despair of one of his fellow-passengers. Although Golding's work has sometimes been compared to that of Conrad, it is often closer in spirit, and in its aspirations to the condition of poetry, to that of Eliot. Each of Golding's male protagonists seemes obliged to re-articulate the agonized, incomprehending, unspecific question of Gerontion: 'After such knowledge, what forgiveness?'

Yet more novelists of the 1950s-1980s

Nabokov, Vladimir

 (from the Oxford Companion to American Literature, 6th ed.):

 

NABOKOV, VLADIMIR (1899-1977), born in Russia of a patrician family, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, came to the U.S. (1940) and was naturalized in 1945. He was a professor of Russian literature at Cornell (1948-59) until his own literary success allowed him to retire. 

His ingenious, witty, stylized, and erudite novels include Laughter in the Dark (1938), published in England as Camera Obscura (19346), after the original Russian title, about the moral deterioration of a respectable Berliner; The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), in which the narrator, a young Russian in Paris, discovers the true nature of his half-brother, an English novelist, by writing his biography; Bend Sinister (1947), about a politically uncommitted professor in a totalitarian state who tries to maintain personal integrity; Pnin (1957), amusing sketches about the experiences of an exiled Russian professor of entomology at an up-state New York college; 

*Lolita (Paris, 1955; U.S., 1958), a farcical and satirical novel of the passion of a middle-aged, sophisticated European émigré for a 12-year-old American "nymphet," and their wanderings across the US.; 

Lolita, novel by Nabokov, published in Paris (1955) and in the U.S. (1958).

In the psychopathic ward of a prison while awaiting trial for murder, 37-yearold Humbert Humbert writes out his life story. Though once wed to a woman about his age, he has long been obsessed by a passion for nymphets: girls between the age of nine and 14. Coming from Europe to the U.S. on business, he meets and marries the widowed Charlotte Haze only to be near her 12-year-old daughter Lolita. To achieve this he considers murdering Charlotte, but when she is killed by accident he takes Lolita on a cross-country junket, planning to seduce her, only to be seduced by her, for she is no longer a virgin. Lolita escapes from his jealous protection, and he does not learn of her again until she is 17, married, and pregnant. Then she tells him that during her days with him she had loved Clare Quilty, a famous playwright. Even though their affair is long in the past, the infuriated Humbert Humbert murders Quilty and is jailed but dies of a heart attack before his trial.

*Invitation to a Beheading (Russia, 1938; U.S., 1959), a Kafkaesque story of a man sentenced to die for some unknown expression of individuality and his resultant discovery that he has a real soul; 

Invitation to a Beheading, novel by Nabokov, published in Russia in 1938, and in the U.S. in 1959. 

Cincinnatus C. is in prison awaiting execution for his crime of "gnostical turpitude" or "opacity" since his soul has been impenetrable and not open to other people. There he recalls his past life, including marriage to Marthe, a nymphomaniac mother of two deformed children, and his own teaching of crippled children in a kindergarten. He also spends time thinking of ways to escape or talking with the prison director, Rodrig Ivanovich, and M'sieur Pierre, ostensibly another prisoner but actually his executioner. In time he learns to avoid his confusion of dreams of the past with present reality and discovers how to surround his soul with a structure of words that permits him to communicate with others. Nevertheless he is led to his execution, but as one part of him puts his head on the block, another part leaves to join the onlooking crowd of people who are "beings akin to him."

*Pale Fire (1962), a satirical fantasy called a novel, which is a witty, ironic, and complex tour de force concerning a poem about an exiled Balkan king in a New England college town and the involved critical commentary on the poem by the king himself;

Pale Fire, a novel by Nabokov, published in 1962. 

An unfinished poem of 999 lines of heroic couplets, titled "Pale Fire," by John Shade is the subject of an inept but lengthy exegesis of 160 pages by Charles Kinbote. Although ostensibly a literary scholar, Kinbote admits he is actually Charles Xavier, last king of Zembla (1936-58), overthrown in a revolution. One of the revolutionary leaders, Gradus, has pursued the monarch in New Wye, Appalachia, in the AU.S., where as Kinbote he is teaching at Wordsmith College. There Kinbote has made friends with the poet John Shade in the hope of persuading him to write an epic immortalizing Zembla and its last monarch. However, Gradus accidentally kills Shade while trying to assassinate the ex-king. Charles makes off with the manuscrip of the unfinished poem that he persuades himself is a cryptic version of the desired epic, and therefore is editing the work for publication he creates the very elaborate commentary that forms the body of the novel.

The Gift (Russia, 1937; U.S., 1963), a pseudo-autobiography about Russian expatriates in Berlin after World War I; The Defense (Germany, 1930: U.S., 1964), about a young Russian master of chess who treats life as another game; The Eye (1965), about a Russian émigré living in Berlin; Despair (1966), about a man who contrives his own murder; King, Queen, Knave (1968), his second novel, originally published in Germany (1928), also the setting for the story of a young man's affair with his married aunt; Ada or Ardor (1969), a witty parody whose involved plot, set in a fanciful land, deals with a man's lifelong love for his sister Ada; Mary (1970), the author's first novel (Germany, 1926), about a young Czarist officer exiled in Berlin and his first love affair; Glory (1971), the fifth (Paris, 1932) of his nine novels written in Russian, a comic portrait of a Russian émigré's wanderings; Transparent Things (1972), a novella about a rootless American's marriage and murder of his wife; and Look at the Harlequins! (1974), a novel about an author who very much resembles Nabokov himself.

His stories have been gathered in several collections; his light, witty verse appears in Poems (1959) and Poems and Problems (1971), the latter including also problems in chess, and The Waltz Invention (1967) is a play.  

Conclusive Evidence (1951), revised as Speak, Memory (1966), gathers autobiographical sektches of life in Imperial Russia. Strong Opinions (1973) prints replies to journalists' questions about himself, literature, and public issues. 

He wrote a study of Nikolai Gogol (1944) and made a translation with commentary of Eugene Onegin (4 vols., 1964, revised 1977). 

The correspondence of Edmund Wilson and Nabokov, much of it about his translation of Pushkin, appeared in 1979. Other posthumous publications include Lectures on Literature (1980) and Lectures on Russian Literature (1981).

 

 

 

 

Especiación y retrospección: El diseño inteligente de Nabokov

—oOo—

Thomas More, Une vie, une œuvre (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Un programa de FRANCE CULTURE sobre Tomás Moro, Canciller de Inglaterra, autor de Utopía, y santo católico, mártir víctima de la Reforma anglicana. En francés, claro (NIVEL AVANZADO).

THOMAS MORE (vers 1477-1535) – Une vie, une œuvre [2006]

Nivel avanzado: Yeats

 

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SECCIÓN B, NIVEL AVANZADO: YEATS

A video lecture on W. B. Yeats by Langdon Hammer (Yale University):

http://youtu.be/ixs5AvKaB4E

Beckett and Osborne

(From The Short Oxford History of English Literature, by Andrew Sanders)

With benefit of hindsight, it is arguable that by far the most significant 'foreign' novelty to be performed in London in the years immediately preceding the appearance of Look Back in Anger was Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The play opened to largely dismayed reviews at the small Arts Theatre in August 1955, but reports of the sensation it had caused in Paris two years earlier, coupled with a real enough and discriminating curiosity, allowed it to transfer for a longer run at the Criterion Theatre a month later. The success of Waiting for Godot in London cannot be simply put down to a yearning for innovation on the part of a theatre-going intelligentsia; the play also contained distinct echoes of a truly 'alternative', but often despised, British theatrical tradition, that of music-hall comedy. In Beckett's hands, however, that tradition had been transformed by a sparse, but none the less definitive, musicality and by a dialogue rich in literary resonance. Beckett (1906-89), born near Dublin, educated (like Wilde before him) at Portora Royal School and at Trinity College, and since 1937 permanently resident in Paris, cannot be slickly or imperially fitted into a narrowly 'English' tradition of English writing and English theatre. He was an English-speaking, Protestant Irishman, and, as the full range of his work demonstrates, his highly literate, cricket-playing, Bible-reading, Irish background had a profound bearing on what and how he wrote. Having worked closely with James Joyce and his international circle in Paris in the late 1920s, Beckett also remained part of a polyglot and polyphonic world of literary innovation. His earliest publications (which, apart from his work as a translator and a novelist, include an essay on Joyce and a study of Proust) also testify to his espousal of a Modernism which transcended frontiers and what were often presumed to be the impassible barriers between languages. Beckett continued to work in both English and French, with French often taking precedence over his native tongue. His work, however, ceased to be tied to a monoglot environment once it had undergone the scrupulous linguistic metamorphosis which marks his own acts of translation (his puns, for example, are often exclusively and inspiredly English).

Although his trilogy of novels, Molloy and Malone meurt (1951) and L'Innommable (1953) had established Beckett as amongst the most discussed and respected of the avant-garde Parisian writers in the early 1950s, it was Godot (also originally written in French) that gave him a wide international reputation. That reputation was cemented by his later work for the theatre, notably the plays known by their English titles as Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1960), and Happy Days (1962). He also wrote innovatively for the radio (All that Fall of 1957, Embers of 1959, Words and Music of 1962, and Cascando of 1963) and for BBC television (Eh, Joe of 1965 and Ghost Trio of 1977). His one foray into the cinema, Film (a complex 'script' designed as a tribute to Buster Keaton in 1964), was remarkable not simply for its nods to a cinematic comedy rooted in music-hall and for its visual puns on the philosophical ideas of being and seeing but also for its silence broken only by the sound of a voice saying 'sssh'.

Beckett was consistent in his use of drama as an extension of his wider interest in the gaps, the jumps, and the lurches which characterize the functioning and the malfunctioning of the human mind. In his plays—as much as in his novels—ideas, phrases, images, and minds overlap; voices both interrupt and inherit trains of thought begun elsewhere or nowhere and separate consciousnesses both impede and impress themselves on one another. Beckett's dialogue, for which Waiting for Godot is particularly remarkable, is the most energetic, densely layered, and supple written by any twentieth-century playwright; his comedy, whether visual, verbal, ritual, or even, at times, slapstick is amongst the most subtle and surprising. The set of Waiting for Godot may, for example, require simply the suggestion of 'a country road' and 'a tree'; Endgame  may take place in a 'bare interior' and the designer of Happy Days may be instructed to aim for a 'maximum of simplicity and symmetry' in the representation of an 'expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound' but the static baldness of Beckett's visual statements serves both to counterpoise and complement the animation of his verbal ones. When Beckett uses blindness, as he does with Hamm in Endgame, he suggests that one kind of deprivation may alert audiences to the force of alternative ways of perceiving. When, by contrast, he uses silence, as in Film and the mime play Act without Words II (1967), he seems to be directing his audiences to explore the value of new sensory and physical formulations. Beckett never plays with minimalism and reductionism simply for the sake of the aesthetic effects he could achieve. In parallel to the work of certain Modernist architects and composers, if without their Puritan frugality, he was exploring the radical potential of the idea that 'less is more'.







Time-present, as when Beckett represents it in his plays, is broken, inconsistent, and inconsequential. Nevertheless, in each play he allows for the intrusion of a past which is oppressively rich in the larger inconsistencies of private and public history. Krapp's Last Tape and the two far sparser later plays, Footfalls and That Time (both 1976), make much out of the involuntary, untidy, quirky, and even ghost-haunted memories of the old. These memories negate linear concepts of time and of ageing as much as they disturb old assumptions about 'plot'. The structural principles on which he built both his plays and his novels can be related back to the pattern of ideas explored in 1931 in the dense critical essay on Proust. When, for example, he insists on Proust's 'contempt for a literature that "describes"', or when he affirms that 'there is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us', or when he describes 'the attempt to communicate where no communication is possible' as 'merely a simian vulgarity, or horribly comic', it is possible to recognize the extent to which his theatrical innovation was rooted both in a literary precedent and in a coherent Modernist philosophical statement. Beckett continued to be fascinated by what he saw as Proust's concern with the protective significance of habit: 'Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.'  His own dramatic repetitions and iterations, his persistent echoes and footfalls, emerge not from a negative view of human existence, but from an acceptance of 'dull inviolability' as a positive, if minimally progressive, force. As his inviolable and unsentimental Krapp also seems to have discovered, a path forward lay in exploring the resonances of the circumambient darkness.

Although Beckett gradually came to be recognized as the most important dramatist writing in English in the latter half of the twentieth century, his work initially struck many early critics as emerging from a largely foreign tradition of symbolic and philosophically based drama. If the purely British shock waves radiating from John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956 need to be accounted for, it was because Osborne's work was more obviously a response to, as much as a reaction against, an established native theatrical tradition. His was the rebellion of an insider. Osborne (b. 1929) had served his apprenticeship as an actor in provincial touring companies and his plays show an appreciation both of the craftsmanship that went into the making of the respectable 'well-made play' and of the art that allows a Wilde, a Shaw, a Coward, and a Rattigan to transcend conventions while exploiting them. Osborne's sometimes painful witticisms can be as carefully and devastatingly placed as are those of Wilde and Coward, his confrontations and surprises can be as telling as those of Rattigan, his invectives and monologues can be as provocative as Shaw's. However, the origins of Osborne's style do not lie exclusively in what was once known as 'the legitimate theatre' but are also found in the noisier, often impromptu and far more various world of vaudeville. Where Beckett's debts to an inherited tradition of music-hall lie in his appreciation of dead-pan humour and careful timing, Osborne's are revealed in his love of the outrageous, of the suggestive and, above all, of loud-mouthed repartee. It was a debt acknowledged in his forceful juxtaposition of a shabby and increasingly outdated type of theatre with a faded and redundant British imperialism in The Entertainer (1957).

Look Back in Anger introduced the noisiest of what contemporary journalists dubbed the 'angry young men' to theatre audiences. Osborne's hero, Jimmy Porter, is 25 and 'a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freeboting; restless, importunate, full of pride, a combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike'. He was for the 1950s what the restless, idealistic, public-school misfits had been to the 1930s (Porter's father, we learn, had fought in Spain, but Porter himself is neither an idealist nor an ex-public schoolboy). He is, and his wife's friend Alison recognizes, 'born out of his time.' He is a revolutionary without a revolution, or, to put it in terms readily grasped in the 1950s, he is a rebel without a cause. He fulminates against the crumbling authority of what he identifies as Establishment values; his wife's middle-class and ex-Indian army parents; his Sandhurst-educated, Member of Parliament brother-in-law (characterized as 'the platitude from outer space'); bishops and church bells; the intellectually pretentious Sunday newspapers; English music (Vaughan Williams) and English literature (Shakespeare, Eliot, 'Auntie Wordsworth'). Nevertheless, Jimmy Porter is the protagonist in an otherwise affirmative play, one in which love and loyalty are tested and are found, despite the strains, not to be wanting. He may be a new type of character, classless, restless, and aimless, but his dramatic context was largely conventional. When a middle-aged Jimmy Porter returned to the stage in Osborne's play Déjà Vu in 1992, the force of those dramatic and philosophical conventions became self-evident.

In many ways Osborne's most impressive 'angry young man' is the title character in his historical play Luther (1961). When Martin utters his clasic avowal of personal integrity—'Here I stand; God help me; I can do no more. Amen'—we sense that it has been refined by his latent anger: anger with his parents, his Church, and even with the demands of his God. Osborne's Martin may periodically clutch his bowels in agonies of constipation, and he may have flashes of theological insight in the latrine, but he is the quintessential Protestant, the lonely rebel whom God has graced with a cause. In Inadmissible Evidence (1964) Osborne asked for a location 'where a dream takes place . . . a site of helplessness, of oppression and polemic', in essence an office-cum-courtroom in which an angry, sex-obsessed, middle-aged solicitor lurches rhetorically towards a private and professional breakdown. In the first volume of his pungently observant, and equally pungently spiteful, autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981), Osborne observed of himself as a schoolboy that he already had a gift for smoking out 'the prigs, hedgers and dissemblers' and that he had a complementary talent to vex rather than to entertain, a talent 'not to amuse but to dissent, although I possibly thought I could do both'. The anger, the dissent, the vexatiousness, the protest, and the theatricality of Osborne's characters has always been an extension of his perception of himself.

In Our Time: Samuel Beckett (NIVEL AVANZADO)

The Faerie Queene (Oxford Companion) (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

The Faerie Queene, the greatest work of *Spenser, of which the first three books were published 1590, and the second three 1596.

The general scheme of the work is proposed in the author's introductory letter addressed to *Ralegh. By the Faerie Queene the poet signifies Glory in the abstract and *Elizabeth I in particular (who also figures under the names of *Britomart, *Belphoebe, *Mercilla, and *Gloriana). Twelve of her knights, the 'patrons' or examples of 12 different virtues, each undertake an adventure, on the 12 successive days of the queen's annual festival, and an account of their origins was to have been given in the last of 12 books. Prince Arthur symbolizes 'magnificence', in the Aristotelian sense (says the author) of the perfection of all the other virtues (he must have meant not 'magnificence' but 'magnanimity', or 'gentlemanliness'). Arthur has a  vision of the Faerie Queene and, determining to seek her out, is brought into the adventures of the several knights and carries them to a successful issue. This explanation, given in the introduction,does not appear from the poem itself, for the authors starts at once with the adventures of the knights; as we have it the poem does not conform to his scheme. Of the six books Spenser published, the subjects are:

I, the adventures of the *Redcrosse Knight of Holiness (the Anglican Church), the protector of the virgin *Una (truth, or the true religion), and the wiles of *Archimago and *Duessa.

the Redcrosse Knight, in Bk I of Spenser's *Faerie Queene, St. George, the patron saint of England. He is separated from *Una (the true religion) by the wiles of *Archimago (hypocrisy) and is led away by *Duessa (the Roman Catholic religion) to the House of Pride. He drinks of an enchanted stream, loses his strength, and is made captive by the giant *Orgoglio (pride). Orgoglio is slain by Prince *Arthur, and Una leads her knight to the House of Holiness, to learn repentance and be healed. The Knight and Una are finally betrothed, after he has killed the dragon which besieged her parents' castle.

Una, in Bk. I of Spenser's *Faerie Queene, typifies singleness of the true religion. She is separated from the *Redcrosse Knight of Holiness (the Anglican Church) by the wiles of *Archimago, but meets and is protected by a lion, until the latter is killed by *Sansloy, who carries Una off to a forest. She is rescued by fauns and satyrs, and is finally united to the Redcrosse Knight.

Archimago, or Archimage, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, is the great enchanter, symbolizing Hypocrisy, who deceives *Una by assuming the appearance of the *Redcrosse Knight (I.i). His deceits are exposed and Archimago is 'layd full low in dungeon deepe' (I.xii.36). From this he emerges in Bk II to seek vengeance on Sir *Guyon for what he has suffered at the hands of the Redcrosse Knight, and employs *Braggadochio for the purpose. 

Duessa, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, the daughter of Deceit and Shame, Falsehood in general, in Bk I signifies in particular the Roman Catholic Church, and in V.ix, Mary Queen of Scots.

Orgoglio (Italian, signifying haughtiness), in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (I. vii, viii) captures the *Redcrosse Knight, and is slain by Prince *Arthur.

Arthur, Prince, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene. He symbolizes 'Magnificence' (Magnanimity), in the Aristotelian sense of the perfection of all the virtues. He enters into the adventures of the several knights and brings them to a fortunate conclusion. His chief adventures are the slaying of the three-bodied monster *Geryoneo and the rescue from him of Belge (the Netherland) V. x, xi); and, jointly with *Artegall, the slaying of the *soldan (Philip II) in his 'charret hye' (the Armada) (V. viii).

Sansfoy, Sansjoy, and Sansloy, three brothers in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (I. ii. 25 et seq.). Sansfoy ('faithless') is slain by the *Redcrosse Knight, who also defeats Sansjoy ('joyless') but the latter is saved from death by *Duessa. Sansloy ('lawless') carries off *Una and kills her lion (I. iii). This incident is supposed to refer to the suppression of the Protestant religion in the reign of Queen Mary.

II, the adventures of Sir *Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, his encounters with *Pyrochles and *Cymochles, his visit to the Cave of *Mammon and the House of Temperance, and his destruction of *Acrasia and her *Bower of Bliss. Canto x of this Book contains a chronicle of British rulers from *Brut to Elizabeth;

Guyon, Sir, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, the knight of Temperance. His various exploits, the conquest of *Pyrochles, the visit to the cave of *Mammon, the capture of *Acrasia, and the destruction of her *Bower of Bliss, are related in II. v-xii.

Braggadochio, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, the typical braggart. His adventures and final exposure and humiliation occur in II. iii; III. viii, x; IV iv, v, ix; V. iii. Cf. *Trompart.

Trompart, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (II. iii),

wylie witted, and growne old

In cunning sleights and practick knavery.

attends *Braggadochio as his squire, and with him is finally exposed and beaten out of court.

Pyrochles, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, symbolizes rage. He is the brother of *Cymochles, the son of 'old Acrates and Despight' (II. iv. 41). On his shield is a flaming fire, with the words 'Burnt do I burne'. He is overcome by Sir *Guyon (II. v), and tries to drown himself in a lake to quench his flames. He is rescued and healed by *Archimago (II. vi. 42-51), and finally killed by Prince *Arthur (II. viii).

Cymochles, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (II. v, vi, and viii), 'a man of rare redoubted might', given all to lust and loose living, the husband of *Acrasia and brother of *Pyrochles. He sets out to avenge on Sir *Guyon the supposed death of his brother, but *Phaedria intervenes. He is finally slain by Prince *Arthur

Phaedria, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (II. vi), the Lady of the Idle Lake, symbolizing immodest mirth.

Mammon, theCave of, described in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (II. vii). It is the treasure-house of the god of wealth, visited by Sir Guyon. Milton in his *Areopagitica uses the example of Spenser making Guyon visit the cave of Mammon, 'that he might see and know, and yet abstain'.

Acrasia, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, II. xii, typifies Intemperance. She is captured and bound by Sir *Guyon, and her *Bower of Bliss destroyed.

Bower of Bliss, the, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (II. xii), the home of *Acrasia, demolished by Sir *Guyon.

 

III, the legend of Chastity, exemplified by *Britomart and *Belphoebe;

Britomart, the heroine of Book III of Spenser's *Faerie Queene, the daughter of King Ryunce of Britain and the female knight of chastity. She has fallen in love with *Artegall, whose image she has seen in a magic mirror, and the poet recounts her adventures in her quest for him. She is the most powerful of several types of Queen Elizabeth in the poem. 

Belphoebe, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, the chaste huntress, daughter of the nymph Chrysogone and twin sister of *Amoret; she partly symbolizes Queen Elizabeth. Belphoebe puts *Braggadochio to flight (II. iii), finds herbs to heal the wounded *Timias ('whether it divine Tobacco were, / Or Panachae, or Polygony', III. v), and rescues Amoret from *Corflambo (IV. vii).

Artegall, Sir, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, V, the champion of Justice. *Britomart, to whom his image has been revealed by a magic mirror, is in love with him, and her quest of him ends in their union. Representing Lord Grey de Wilton, he undertakes the rescue of Irena (Ireland) from the tyrant Grantorto. Jointly with Prince *Arthur he slays the *soldan (Philip II of Spain). His name perhaps signifies 'equal to Arthur'.

Timias, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, Prince *Arthur's squire, may represent *Ralegh. When wounded (III. v), he is healed by *Belphoebe. The incident of Timias and *Amoret, in IV vii. 35 and 36, may allude to Ralegh's relations with Elizabeth Throckmorton.

Amoret, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, III. vi, xii and IV. vii, daughter of the nymph Chrisogone and twin sister of *Belphoebe. She is 'Of grace and beautie noble Paragone', and has been married to Sir *Scudamour, but carried off immediately after by the enchanter *Busirane and imprisoned by him until released by *Britomart. *Timias loves her, but being reproved by Belphoebe leaves her. This incident refgers to the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth at the relations of  *Ralegh with Elizabeth Throckmorton.

Busirane, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (III. xi and xii) the 'vile Enchaunter' symbolizing unlawful love. He is struck down by *Britomart in his castle and forced to release *Amoret. On the door of one of the rooms of the castle was written:

Be bold, be bold, and every where Be bold.

But on another iron door,

Be not too bold.

 

IV, the legend of *Triamond and *Cambell, exemplifying Friendship; together with the story of *Scudamour and *Amoret.

Triamond, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (IV. iii, iv), the Knight of Friendship. After an inconclusive fight with *Cambello  in the contest to decide which of her suitors *Canacee (Cambello's sister) is to be awarded, Triamond and Cambello swear eternal friendship. IN the tournament arranged by *Satyrane, Triamond, though wounded, returns to rescue Cambello. He marries Canacee.

Cambell, or Cambello, the name given by Spenser in The Faerie Queene, IV. iii, to *Cambalo, whose tale he borrows from 'Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled', and completes. Cambell is brother of *Canacee, for whom there are many suitors. It is arranged that the stronges of these, three brothers, shall fight with Cambell and the lady be awarded to the victor. Two of the brothers are defeated: the contest between the third, *Triamond, and Cambell is undecided, each wounding the other.They are reconciled by Cambina, Triamond's sister; Canacee is awarded to Triamond and Cambell marries Cambina. The magic ring of Canacee in the 'Squire's Tale' reappears in the Faerie Queene, with the power of healing wounds.

Canacee, the daughter of King Cambuscan in Chaucer's 'Squire's Tale' (see CANTERBURY TALES, 11) and in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, Bk IV. 

Cambalo, one of the two sons of King Cambuscan, in Chaucer's 'Squire's Tale': see CANTERBURY TALES, 11; see also *Cambell for the continuation of his story in Spenser's *Faerie Queene.

V, the adventures of *Artegall, the Knight of Justice, in which allegorical reference is made to various historical events of the reign of Queen Elizabeth: the defeat of the Spaniards in the Netherlands, the recantation of Henry IV of France, the execution of *Mary Queen of Scots, and the administration of Ireland by Lord Grey de Wilton;

soldan (from the Arabic sultan). The soldan or souldan, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (V. viii) represents Philip II of Spain. He is encountered by Prince *Arthur and Sir *Artegall with a bold defiance from Queen *Mercilla (Elizabeth), and the combat is undecided until the prince unveils his shield and terrifies the soldan's horses, so that they overturn his chariot and the soldan is torn 'all to rags'. The unveiling of the Shield signifies divine interposition.

Geryoneo, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (V. x and xi), a three-bodied giant who represent's Philip II's power which controlled Spain, Portugal, and the Low Countries.

Mercilla, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene (V., viii), 'a mayden Queene of high renowne' (Queen *Elizabeth I), whose crown the *soldan seeks to subvert.

VI, the adventures of Sir *Calidore, exemplifying Courtesy. 

Calidore, Sir, the Knight of Courtesy, the hero of Bk VI of Spenser's *Faerie Queene. He pursues and chains the *Blatant Beast. One of Keats's earliest poems, the fragment 'Young Calidore is paddling o'er the lake' (1816) was inspired by him.

Blatant Beast, in Spenser's *Faerie Queene, Bk VI, a monster, the personification of the calumnious voice of the world, begotten of Envy and Detraction. Sir *Calidore pursues it, finds it despoiling monasteries and defiling the church, overcomes it, and chains it up. But finally it breaks the chain, 'So now he raungeth through the world againe.' Cf. *Questing Beast. (Glatysaunt Beast, the creature in Malory's *Morte D'Arthur which is the original of *Spenser's 'blatant beast'. The word is from an Old French term meaning 'baying', 'barking'. In Malory it is pursued by Palomydes the Saracen).

There is also a fragment on *Mutabilitie, being the sixth and seventh cantos of the legend of Constancie, which was to have formed the seventh Book. This fragment contains a charming description of the seasons and the months.

'Mutabilitie Cantos', name given to the fragmentary 'Book VII' of Spenser's *Faerie Queene: two cantos only, first published with the folio edition of The Faerie Queene in 1609. They describe the challenge of the Titaness Mutabilitie to the cosmic government of Jove. (The first canto includes the charming topographical fable of Faunus and Molanna, which reflects Spenser's affection for his Irish home.) The goddess Nautre vindicates Jove's rule, displaying its orderly beauty in a procession of Seasons and Months, asserting finally that natural things 'are not changed from their first estate / but by their change their being doe dilate'. The cantos can be seen as an epilogue to The Faerie Queene, ending with the poet's prayer. 

The work as a whole, modelled to some extent on the *Orlando furioso of Ariosto, suffers from a certain monotony, and its chief beauties lie in the particular episodes with which the allegory is varied and in descriptions, such as those of the Cave of Mammon and the temptation of Sir Guyon by the Lady of the Idle Lake, in Bk. II. The meaning of many of the allusions, which must have added to the interest of the work for contemporaries, is now lost. The poem is written in the stanza invented by Spenser (and since utilized by James *Thomson, *Keats, *Shelley, and *Byron), in which a ninth line of twelve syllables is added to eight lines of ten syllables, rhyming  a b a b b c b c c.

Edmund Spenser

—oOo—

W. H. Auden

 

(From the Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble):

AUDEN, W[ystan] H[ugh] (1907-73), the youngest son of a doctor, brought up in Birmingham and educated at Gresham's School, Holt. He began to be taken seriously as a poet while still at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was much influenced by Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry, but also began to explore the means of preserving 'private spheres' (through poetry) in 'public chaos'. 

Among his contemporaries, who were to share some of his left-wing near-Marxist response to the public chaos of the 1930s were MacNeice, Day-Lewis, and Spender, with whom his name is often linked (See PYLON SCHOOL).  After Oxford, Auden lived for a time in Berlin; he returned to England in 1929 to work as a schoolteacher, but continued to visit Germany regularly, staying with his friend and future collaborator Isherwood. 

His first volume, Poems (including some previously published in a private edition, 1928) was accepted for publication by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber and appeared in 1930; it was well received and established him as the most talented voice of his generation. The Orators followed in 1932, and Look Stranger! in 1936. In 1932 he became associated with Rupert Doone's Group Theatre, which produced several of his plays (The Dance of Death, 1933; and, with Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skin, 1935); these owe something to the early plays of Brecht. (See also EXPRESSIONISM). Working from 1935 with the GPO Film Unit he became friendly with Britten, who set many of his poems to music and later used Auden's text for his opera Paul Bunyan. 

In 1935 he married Erika Mann to provide her with a British passport to escape from Nazi Germany. A visit to Iceland with MacNeice in 1935 produced their joint Letters from Iceland (1937); Journey to a War (1939, with Isherwood) records a journey to China. 

Meanwhile in 1937 he had visited Spain for two months, to support the Republicans, but his resulting poem 'Spain' (1937) is less partisan and more detached in tone than might have been expected, and in January 1939 he and Isherwood left Europe for America (he became a US citizen in 1946) where he met Chester Kallman, who became his lifelong friend and companion. 

Another Time(1940), containing many of his most famous poems (including 'September 1939' and 'Lullaby'), was followed in 1941 by The Double Man (1941), published in London asNew Year Letter), a long transitional verse epistle describing the 'baffling crime' of 'two decades of hypocrisy', rejecting political simplifications, accepting man's essential solitude, and ending with a prayer for refuge and illumination for the 'muddled heart'. 

From this time Auden's poetry became increasingly Christian in tone (to such an extent that he even altered some of his earlier work to bring it in line and disowned some of his political pieces); this was perhaps not unconnected with the death in 1941 of his devout Anglo-Catholic mother, to whom he dedicated For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (1944). This was published with The Sea and the Mirror, a series of dramatic monologues inspired by The Tempest. The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1948) is a long dramatic poem, reflecting man's isolation, which opens in a New York bar at night, and ends with dawn on the streets.

Auden's absence during the war led to a poor reception of his works in England at that period, but the high quality of his later work reinstated him as an unquestionably major poet; in 1956 he was elected professor of poetry at Oxford, and in 1962 he became a student (i.e. fellow) of Christ Church. 

His major later collections include Nones (1951, NY; 1952, London), The Shield of Achilles (1955), which includes 'Horae Canonicae' and 'Bucolics' and is considered by many his best single volume; and Homage to Clio (1960), which includes a high proportion of light verse. Auden had edited The Oxford Book of Light Verse in 1938, and subsequently many other anthologies, collections, etc.; his own prose criticism includes The Enchafèd Flood (1950, NY; 1951, London), The Dyer's Hand (1962, NY; 1963, London), and Secondary Worlds (1968, T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures). He also wrote several librettos, notably for Stravinsky's The  Rake's Progress (1951, with Kallman).  

About the House (1965, NY; 1966, London), one of his last volumes of verse, contains a tender evocation of his life with Kallman at their summer house in Austria. Auden spent much of the last years of his life in London, and died suddenly in Vienna. His Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendleson, were published in 1991. A volume of Juvenilia, edited by Katherine Bucknell, appeared in 1994.

Auden's influence on a succeeding generation of poets was incalculable, comparable only with that, a generation earlier, of Yeats, to whom Auden himself pays homage in 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats' (1939). His progress from the engaged, didactic, satiric poems of his youth to the complexity of his later work offered a wide variety of models—the urbane, the pastoral, the lyrical, the erudite, the public, and the introspective mingle with great fluency. He was a master of verse form, and accomodated traditional patterns to a fresh, easy, and contemporary language. 

A life by Humphrey Carpenter was published in 1981. See also The Auden Generation by S. Hynes (1976).

Memento Auden-Spender

—oOo—

The Metaphysical Poets and the Metaphysical Conceit

 

En literatura inglesa no se suele emplear el término "barroco" (baroque). El estilo que aquí llamaríamos barroco o exageradamente complicado y alambicado lo llaman allí "metaphysical": the metaphysical poets, los poetas metafísicos o conceptistas; el "concepto" o juego de ideas conceptista o barroco es el "metaphysical conceit":

 

 Conceit,  an elaborate metaphor comparing two apparently dissimilar objects or emotions, often with an effect of shock or surprise. The *Petrarchan conceit, much imitated by Elizabethan sonneteers and both used and parodied by Shakespeare, usually evoked the qualities of the disdainful mistress and the devoted lover, often in highly exaggerated terms; the *Metaphysical conceit, as used by *Donne and his followers, applied wit and ingenuity to, in the words of  Dr. *Johnson, 'a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike' e.g. Donne's famous comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses.

 

Metaphysical  Poets. Poets generally grouped under the label include *Donne (who is regarded as founder of the 'school'), George *Herbert, *Crashaw, *Henry Vaughan, *Marvell and *Traherne, together with lesser figures like *Benlowes, *Herbert of Cherbury, Henry *King, Abraham *Cowley and *Cleveland. The label was first used (disparagingly) by Dr. *Johnson in his 'Life of Cowley' (written in 1777). *Dryden had complained that Donne 'affects the metaphysics', perplexing the minds of the fair sex with 'nice speculations of philosophy'. Earlier still William *Drummond censored poetic innovators who employed 'Metaphysical Ideas and Scholastical Quiddities'. The label is misleading, since none of these poets is seriously interested in metaphysics (except Herbert of Cherbury, , and even he excludes the interest from his poetry). Further, these poets have in reality little in common: the features their work is generally taken to display are sustained dialectic, paradox, novelty, incongruity, 'muscular' rhythms, giving the effect of a 'speaking voice', and the use of 'conceits', or comparisons in which tenor and vehicle can be related only by ingenious pseudo-logic.

With the new taste for clarity and the impatience with figurative language that prevailed after the *Restoration, their reputation dwindled. Their revival was delayed until after the First World War when the revaluation of metaphysical poetry, and the related downgrading of *Romanticism and *Milton, was the major feature of the rewriting of English history  in the first half of the 20th cent. Key documents in the revival were H. J. C. *Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1921) and T. S. *Eliot's essay 'Metaphysical Poets', which first appeared as a review of Grierson's collection (TLS, 20 Oct. 1921). According to Eliot these poets had the advantage of writing at a time when thought and feeling were closely fused, before the *'dissociation of sensibility' set in about the time of Milton. Their virtues of difficulty and togh newness were felt to relate them closely to the modernists—*Pound, *Yeats, and Eliot himself.

(From The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature)

 

Fotocopias (Lecturas)

 

Lecturas para la asignatura 30432: Introducción a la literatura inglesa
3º de Grado en Lenguas Modernas -

 José Angel García Landa

 

SECCIÓN A (hasta 1900)

 

Este  bloque de fotocopias contiene selecciones de textos de:

 

Beowulf,

- The Fight with Grendel / Celebration at Heorot (Norton, pp 35-43)

 

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,

- Norton, pp. 114-23

 

Chaucer,

- The Canterbury Tales (The General Prologue - Norton, 170-190)

 

Spenser,

- The Faerie Queene (Introd.; I.i-xxviii)

 

Sidney,

- Astrophil and Stella (1 and 45)

 

Shakespeare,

- Sonnets (60, 77, 116)

- Richard II (4.1)

- Henry IV (2.4, 340-436, Norton 1186-87)

- Henry V (3.0, 3.1)

- Hamlet (from 2.2, 3.2)

- As You Like it (from 2.7)

- Twelfth Night (1.5, 137-266)

- Macbeth (5.1)

- The Tempest (from Act IV, from Act V)

 

Jonson,

- To the memory of … Shakespeare

 

Donne,

- The Good-Morrow

- The Canonization

- Heroicall Epistle: Sapho to Philaenis

- Sonnet XIX

 

Marvell,

- To His Coy Mistress

 

Milton,

- Methought I saw my late espoused saint

- Paradise Lost (from Book I and III, beginning; IV, Satan's soliloquy)

 

Rochester,

- The Fall

 

Dryden,

- Annus Mirabilis (On the Great Fire of London)

- Absalom and Achitophel (Beginning 1-36; Achitophel, 134-85)

 

Egerton,

- The Emulation

 

Pope,

- Essay on Man (I.iii, iv, v; II.i)

 

Defoe,

- Robinson Crusoe (1-9, pp. 214-23)

 

Swift,

- Gulliver's Travels (1.7, 173-79; 4.5, pp. 290-97)

 

Richardson,

- Pamela (letters i-xii, pp. 43-57)

 

Fielding,

- Tom Jones  (I.1-5, pp. 51-61; I.9-10, 144-49; VII.1-3, 299-305)

 

Sterne,

- Tristram Shady (I.1-7, pp. 5-11)

 

Gray,

- An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

 

Johnson,

- The Preface to Shakespeare (Shakespeare as a classic)

- Lives of the Poets (Life of Cowley)

 

Blake,

- The Clod and the Pebble

- London

- Auguries of Innocence

 

Wollstonecraft,

- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Norton, pp. 166-85)

 

Austen, 

- Mansfield Park, I-IV

 

Scott,

- Woodstock, II

 

Wordsworth,

- The Solitary Reaper

- Expostulation and Reply

- The Prelude (from X, XI)                                                    

- The World Is Too Much with Us

- Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways

- A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

- Intimations of Immortality (I, II, V, IX, X, XI)

 

Keats,

- Ode on a Grecian Urn

 

Byron,

- Darkness

 

Mary Shelley,

- Frankenstein (IV, V)

 

Dickens,

- Great Expectations (I-IV)

 

George Eliot,

- Middlemarch (Prelude, I.1, I.2)

 

Tennyson,

- In Memoriam AHH  (5, 7, 22, 24, 71, 130,

- Song from The Princess

 

Hopkins,

- No worst, there is none

 

Wilde,

- The Decay of Lying

 

Wells,

- The Time Machine (I, XI, XII)

 

Irving,

- Rip Van Winkle

 

Cooper,

- The Last of the Mohicans (33)

 

Poe,

- Dreamland

- The Fall of the House of Usher

 

Emerson,

- The Poet

 

Thoreau,

 - Walden (Solitude)

 

Hawthorne,

- The Scarlet Letter (I, II, III)

 

Melville 

- Moby Dick (1, 59, 61, 64, 79)

 

Dickinson,

- A light exists in spring

- Because I could not stop for Death

 

Whitman,

- O Captain! My Captain!

- Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand

- Years of the Modern       

 

Mark Twain,

- Huckleberry Finn (X, XI)

 

Stephen Crane,                  

- The Red Badge of Courage (4, 5, 11)

- The Black Riders (I Stood upon a high Ppace; In the desert; A man saw a ball of gold)

 

Henry James.

- The Middle Years

 

Los textos completos pueden encontrarse en Project Gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.org/

 

Lecturas para la asignatura 30432: Introducción a la literatura inglesa
3º de Grado en Lenguas Modernas -

José Angel García Landa

 

 

SECCIÓN B (desde 1900)

 

 

Este  bloque de fotocopias contiene selecciones de textos de:

 

Yeats,

- An Irish Airman foresees his death

- Easter 1916

 

Joyce,

- Ulysses (Bloom's first chapter, p. 53-55;  Molly Bloom's monologue, p. 647-649)

 

Frost,

- The Road Not Taken

- An Old Man's Winter Night

 

T. S. Eliot,

- The Waste Land, lines 1-122

 

Woolf,

- A Room of One's Own (ch. 6, p.1976-81)

 

Hemingway,

- Hills Like White Elephants

 

Cummings,

- so many selves

 

Auden,

- Spain 1937

 

Faulkner,

- A Rose for Emily

 

Beckett,

- Krapp's Last Tape

 

Nabokov,

- Signs and Symbols

 

Larkin,

- Aubade

- Toads Revisited

 

Pinter,

- Night

 

Stoppard,

- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Act 2)

 

Rushdie,

- The Satanic Verses (The Angel Azrael I, 397-419)

Barth,

Life-Story

 

Sexton,

- The Abortion

- Cripples and Other Stories

 

Oates,

- Secret Observations on the Goat-Girl

 

Roth,

- The Human Stain (1, Everyone Knows, 1-75)

 

Morrison,

- Beloved (ch. 3, 239-75)

 

—y una reseña sobre DeLillo. (Toby Litt, The Guardian)

 

 

 

 

Introducción a la Literatura Inglesa

 

 

—oOo—