1. Period Study Literary History Literatures in English

2. Literature in Context Period Study, Literary History
Literatures in English,
Postcolonial Studies
Literary Translation
and Cultural Memory
are interrelated notions or approaches to the study of
literature.
They are attempts at a scientific approach to
literature, they propose related ways of a systematic
study of literature and its phenomena.

3. Literature in Context University curricula: based on literary kinds
based on literary periods
based on individual authors
based on literary theories
based on social context

4. Literary Periods Dominant Qualities
Defining literary periods: based on dominant qualities.
Dominant qualities colour most elements of intellectual
life in a given culture at a certain time – also influence
art, music, architecture, landscape gardening,
philosophy, politics, etc.
a few broad tendencies in common at a high level of
abstraction
with individual, temporal, local variations
subordinate currents exist as well as dominant ones
declining and emergent energies
e.g. New Historicism takes this line of study

5. How to examine a literary period: how is it framed by a set of significant events
The Renaissance in England, for example:
the first visit of Erasmus (1499),
Caxton's printing press at Westminster (1476),
the discovery of America (1492),
the court of the young Henry VIII
(on the throne: ),
the Protestant Reformation,
Copernicus's new astronomy (1543),
the reign of Elizabeth I ( )

6. How to examine a literary period: priorities in its views
features certain priorities in its views concerning the world and art
e.g., in Classicism: balance, form, proportion, propriety (good taste, good manners correctness, otherwise known as decorum), dignity, simplicity, objectivity, rationality, restraint, responsibility (rather than self-expression), unity (rather than diversity)

7. How to examine a literary period: views of humans, favourite genres
promotes a certain view of humankind
e.g., in Romanticism: the celebration of the individual
uses specific genres (rather than others)
e.g., in 19th c. Realism: the novel with its details, its particularisation of the lives of ordinary people

8. How to examine a literary period: favourite subjects, favourite forms
favours certain subjects for art
e.g., in Modernism: inner individual perception
(impressionistic presentation, stream of
consciousness technique, such as in James
Joyce’s Ulysses)
shows characteristic formal elements (including the
example above)
e.g., in Postmodernism: Narcissistic narrative:
intruding into one's own fiction to ponder upon
its powers
A literary trend may not correspond exactly to a cultural
period, e.g. Postmodernism and the Post-Modern Period.

9. Literary period: horizontal or vertical study
The study of High Modernism
James Joyce: Ulysses, T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land
Both published in 1922
1922 in literature in England
in the historical context of the UK
in the artistic or social or political context of
continental Europe
in the life of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot

10. Ulysses – in the context of
Irish literature (Dublin, 16 June, 1904)
European Modernism
Ancient Greek literature Homer’s Odyssy
The Waste Land – in the context of
English Literature
Post-First World War
Literary allusions such as the Legend of the Holy Grail
Chrétien de Troyes: Perceval, le Conte du Graal
(The Story of the Grail) 12th century, French
Wolfram von Escgenbach: Parzival, 12th–13th century, German
Thomas Malory: Le Morte d’Arthur, 15th century, English

11. James Joyce (1882–1941)

16. T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)

19. The history of literature
history of literature: a series of literary periods
connections may be established among texts
(see “Leda and the Swan”)
allusion, intertextuality: interdependence of texts through genre, conventions vs
traditional notions of influence: study of direct sources

20. How is literature read, or judged?
Yet another way of looking at literature: how it was read, by whom, how it was judged
readership, horizon(s) of expectations
(Hans Robert Jauss)
How do you judge a piece of literature? Do you have to? Should you? Can you avoid doing so? How do you select a work or period to be studied? Can evaluation change reading? Can evaluation prevent reading?
How are literary canons formed?
Literary canon – selection, exclusion, promotion

21. Chris Baldwick: Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. OUP, 2001
canon, a body of writings recognized by authority. Those books of holy scripture which religious leaders accept as genuine are canonical, as are those works of a literary author which scholars regard as authentic. The canon of a national literature is a body of writings especially approved by critics or anthologists and deemed suitable for academic study. Canonicity is the quality of being canonicaL Verb: canonize. See also corpus, oeuvre.

22. J. A. Cuddon: The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Penguin, 1992
canon A body of writings stablished as authentic. The term usually refers to biblical writings accepted as authorized – as opposed to the Apocrypba (q.v.). The term can also apply to an author's works which are accepted as genuine .For example: the Shakespeare Canon.

23. The Victorian Web http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/canon/litcan.html
George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University
The Literary Canon
The American Heritage Dictionary has eleven separate definitions of the term canon, the most relevant of which is "an authoritative list, as of the works of an author" and "a basis for judgment; standard; criterion." Canon is also defined as "the books of the Bible officially recognized by the Church," and the idea of a literary canon also implies some such official status. To enter the canon, or more properly, to be entered into the canon is to gain certain obvious privileges. The gatekeepers of the fortress of high culture include influential critics, museum directors and their boards of trustees, and far more lowly scholars and teachers.

24. Indeed, a chief enforcer of the canon appears in middlebrow anthologies, those hangers on of high culture that in the Victorian period took the form of pop anthologies like Golden Treasury and today that of major college anthologies in America. To appear in the Norton or Oxford anthology is to have achieved, not exactly greatness but what is more important, certainly – status and accessibility to a reading public. And that is why, of course, it matters that so few women writers have managed to gain entrance to such anthologies.

25. Literary history and literary canon
establishing a body of writings
to be accepted as representative
of a culture, a period, a movement, an author
canonization, canon formation
by critics, writers, readers, politicians
an act of authorization
canon as a construction
manipulative, arbitrary
shaping the public taste
advancing authors, promoting ideas
canon and counter-canon

26. Literary history is the history of canonization,
de-canonization, re-canonization
Some examples
John Donne (1573–1631) versus
Ben Jonson (1573–1637)
William Blake (1757–1827) versus
Thomas Chatterton (1752–1771) and
James Macpherson (1736?–1796)
G. M. Hopkins (1844 –1889) versus
Robert Bridges (1844–1930)

27. Thirties poets, the ’Auden Group’
W. H. Auden (1907–1973)
Stephen Spender (1909 -
Louis MacNeice (1907–1963)
Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972)
The re-canonization of Louis MacNeice as the father-figure of the Ulster poets of the 1960s (Derek Mahon, Michael Longley)

28. 17th Century ’Metaphysical’ Poetry
Grierson, Herbert J. C., ed.: Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler. Oxford: Clarendon, 1921
Eliot, T. S.: The Metaphysical Poets. TLS, 20 October 1921
“The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), ‘Abraham Cowley’, in: Lives of the Poets, 1779–1781
This is precisely the quality 20th century critics and poets appreciated in their poetry.

29. John Donne (1572–1631)

30. Conceit An extended metaphor (conceit, concetto)
establishes a principal subject (comparison)
and subsidiary subjects (comparisons).
Used extensively by English metaphysical
poets of the seventeenth century.

31. A VALEDICTION OF WEEPING
                Let me pour forth My tears before thy face, whilst I stay here, For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear, And by this mintage they are something worth,                 For thus they be                 Pregnant of thee; Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more, When a tear falls, that thou falls which it bore, So thou and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shore.

32. On a round ball A workman, that hath copies by, can lay An Europe, Afric, and an Asia, And quickly make that, which was nothing, All;               So doth each tear                 Which thee doth wear, A globe, yea world, by that impression grow, Till thy tears mix'd with mine do overflow This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven, dissolvèd so.

33. O more than Moon, Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere, Weep me not dead, in thine arms, but forbear To teach the sea, what it may do too soon;                 Let not the wind                 Example find To do me more harm than it purposeth; Since thou and I sigh one another's breath, Whoe'er sighs most, is cruellest, and hastes the other's death.
Published 1633

34. Period Study. Literary History.
"Dates and periods are necessary to the study and
discussion of history, for historical phenomena are
conditioned by time and are produced by the sequence
of events. […] But, unlike dates, ‘periods’ are not facts.
They are retrospective conceptions that we form about
past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often
leading historical thought astray.”
G. M. Trevelyan: English Social History.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1942) 1970, 107

35. Literary Histories
A few examples

36. Michael Alexander: A History of English Literature. Third Edition
Michael Alexander: A History of English Literature. Third Edition. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

37. Saintsbury, George: A Short History of English Literature
Saintsbury, George: A Short History of English Literature. London: Macmillan, (1898) 1953
The Preliminaries of English Literature
The Earliest Anglo-Saxon Poetry
Caedmon, Cynewulf, and Those about Them
Angol-Saxon Prose
The Decadense of Anglo-Saxon
The Making of English Literature
The Transition
First Middle English Period ( )
Second Middle English Period ( )
Early Romances – Metrical
Early Romances – Alliterative

38. Saintsbury, cont. Chaucer and His Contemporaries
Chaucer’s Life and Poems
Langland and Gower
Chaucer’s Prose – Wyclif, Trevisa, Mandeville
The Fifteenth Century
The English Chaucerians – Lydgate to Skelton
The Scottish Poets – Historical, Political, and Minor
The Four Great Scottish Poets (The King’s Quair, Henryson, Dunbar, Douglas)
Later Romances in Prose and Verse
Minor Poetry and Ballads
Miscellaneous Prose

39. Saintsbury, cont. Elizabethan Literature to the Death of Spenser
Preliminaries – Drama
Preliminaries – Prose
Prelminaries – Verse
Spenser and His Contemporaries
The University Wits (Peele, Green, Marlowe, Kyd, Lodge, Nash)
Lyly and Hooker – The Translators, Pamphleteers and Critics
Later Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature
Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s Contemporaries in Drama
The Schools of Jacobean Poetry
Jacobean Prose – Secular
The Golden Age of English Pulpit - I

40. Saintsbury, cont. Caroline Literature Blank Verse and the New Couplet
The Metaphysicals – The Lyric Poets – The Miscellansts, etc.
The Drama till the Closing of the THeatres
The Golden Age of the English Pulpit – II
Miscellanous Prose
Scots Poetry and Prose
The Augustan Ages
The Age of Dryden – Poetry
The Age of Dryden – Drama
The Age of Dryden - Prose

41. Saintsbury, cont. Queen Anne Prose (Swift, Steele, Addison, etc.)
Pope and His Elder Contemporaries in Verse
Middle and Later Eighteenth-Century Literature
The Poets from Thomson to Crabbe
The Eighteenth-Century Novel
Johnson, Goldsmith, and the Later Essayists
The Graver Prose
Eighteenth-Century Drama
Miscellaneous Writers
The Triumph of Romance
1. The Poets from Coleridge to Keats

42. Saintsbury, cont. 2. The Novel – Scott and Miss Austen
The New Essay (Lamb, Hunt, Hazlitt, De Quincey, etc.)
The Last Georgian Prose
The Minor Poets of
Victorian Literature
Tennyson and Browning
The Victorian Novel (Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, etc.)
History and Criticism (Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, etc.)
Poetry since the Middle of the Century
Miscellaneous (J. S. Mill, Darwin, etc.)

43. Baugh, Albert C. : A Literary History of England
Baugh, Albert C.: A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948
Book I. The Middle Ages
The Old English Period (to 1100)
The Middle English Period ( )
Book II. The Renaissance
The Early Tudors ( )
The Reign of Elizabeth ( )
The Early Stuarts and The Commonwealth ( )
Book III. The Restauration and Eighteenth Century ( )
The Rise of Classicism
Classicism and Journalism
The Disintegration of Classicism
Book IV. The Nineteenth Century and After

44. Dodsworth, Martin, ed. : The Penguin History of Literature
Dodsworth, Martin, ed.: The Penguin History of Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, (1970) 1994
The Middle Ages
English Poetry and Prose
English Drama to 1710
Dryden to Johnson
The Romantic Period
The Victorians
The Twentieth Century
[8. American Literature to 1900
9. American Literature since 1900]

45. Ford, Boris, ed. : The New Pelican Guide to English Literature
Ford, Boris, ed.: The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, (1983) 1990
Medieval Literature
Part One: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition
Part Two: The European Inheritance
The Age of Shakespeare
From Donne to Marvell
From Dryden to Johnson
From Blake to Byron
From Dickens to Hardy
From James to Eliot
The Present
[9. American Literature]

46. Penguin Pelican

47. From the Beginnings to the Sixteenth Century Shakespeare to Milton
Daiches, David: A Critical History of English Literature. 4 vols. London: Secker and Warburg, (1960) 1969
From the Beginnings to the Sixteenth Century
Shakespeare to Milton
[Shakespeare
Drama from Jonson to the Closing of the Theatres
Milton
Prose in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Scottish Literature to 1700]
3. The Restoration to 1800
4. The Romantics to the Present Day
+ The Present Age in British Literature
(Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, (1958) 1969

48. David Daiches (1912–2005)

49. 1. Poetry around the Turn of the Century
Perkins, David: A History of Modern Poetry. From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976
1. Poetry around the Turn of the Century
2. Poetry in Rapport with a Public
3. Popular Modernism
[The New Poetry of America
Imagism
Poetry for Democracy
Conservative and Regional Poets of America
Black Poets of America: The First Phase
British Poetry after the War, ]
4. The Beginnings of the High Modernist Mode

50. The Age of High Modernism [The Ascendancy of T. S. Eliot, 1925-1950
Perkins, David: A History of Modern Poetry. Modernism and After. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987
The Age of High Modernism
[The Ascendancy of T. S. Eliot,
Eliot’s Later Career
Modes of Modern Style in the United States
Hart Crane
The Poetry of Critical Intelligence
The Period Style of the 1930s in England
W. H. Auden
The English Romantic Revival]
The Resurgence of Pound, Williams, and Stevens
Postmodernism

51. Period Studies Innes, Christopher: Modern British Drama 1890-1990.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992
Proceeds by a mixture of chronological, generic, cultural and theoretical features
Bradbury, Malcolm: The Modern British Novel 1878
2001. London: Penguin Books, 2001
Proceeds by chronology, each decade a characteristic quality is attributed to

52. Period Studies Childs, Peter: The Twentieth
Century in Poetry. A Critical
Survey. London and New York:
Routledge, 1999
Proceeds by a mixture of
chronological, generic, cultural
and theoretical features.

53. Period Studies Bradbury, Malcolm; McFarlane, James, eds.:
Modernism. A Guide to European Literature
London: Penguin Books (1976) 1991
1. The Name and nature of Modernism
2. The Cultural and Intellectual Climate of Modernism
3. A Geography of Modernism
4. Literary Movements
5. The Lyric Poetry of Modernism
6. The Modernist Novel
7. Modernist Drama

54. Histories of Genres Allen, Walter: The English Novel. Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books (1954) 1958
Grierson, Herbert J. C.; Smith, J. C.: A Critical History
of English Poetry. New Jersey: Humanities Press,
London: Athlone Press (1944) 1983

55. Literatures in English
English literary texts representing other cultures
– the living conscience and public depository of the
cultural memories of the world,
telling the story,
incorporating the way of thinking,
and mirroring the language of other cultures.

56. Some examples
V. S. Naipaul: A Bend in the River (1979), narrated by an Indian Muslim in an unnamed African country after independence, observing the rapid changes in his homeland with an outsider's distance.
Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children (1981), key events in the history of India.
Kazuo Ishiguro: A Pale View Hills (1982), narrated by a Japanese widow living in England.
Tibor Fischer: Under the Frog (1992), the 1950s and 1956 in Hungary.

57. Some more examples R. K. Narayan: The Guide (1958), a novel based in
Malgudi, the fictional town in South India. The novel
describes the transformation of the protagonist, Raju
from a tour guide to a spiritual guide and become one of the greatest holy man of India.
Derek Walcott: Omeros (1990), an epic poem set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, drawing on Homer, Virgil, and Dante, presenting themes such as colonialism, historiography, homecoming, paternity.

58. Derek Walcott (1930)

59. Salman Rushdie (1947)

60. Kazuo Ishiguro (1954)

61. Postcolonial Studies See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism
Post-colonialism (postcolonial theory, post-colonial
theory) is an intellectual discourse that consists of
reactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy of
colonialis.
Postcolonialism comprises a set of theories found
amongst anthropology, architecture, philosophy,
film, political science, human geography, sociology,
feminism, religious and theological studies, and
literature.