The best known of all Victorian books for children is, of course the immortal fantasy Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1832-98).
Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and was educated at Rugby and at Christ Church College, University of Oxford. For 25 years, he was a member of the faculty of mathematics at Oxford. He was the author of several mathematical treatises. In 1865 he published under his pseudonym Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, appeared six years later. These were followed by The Hunting of the Snark, and a novel, Sylvie and Bruno.
Always a friend of children, particularly little girls, Carroll wrote thousands of letters to them, delightful flights of fantasy, many illustrated with little sketches. Carroll gained an additional measure of fame as an amateur photographer. Most of his camera portraits were of children in various costumes and poses, including nude studies; he also did portraits of adults, including the actress Ellen Terry and the poets Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Christina Rossetti.
"Some people", said Humpty Dumpty, looking away from her as usual, "have no more sense than a baby!"
Alice didn't know what to say to this: it wasn't at all like conversation, she thought, as he never said anything to her; in fact, his last remark was evidently addressed to a tree – so she stood and softly repeated to herself:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall:
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the King's horses and all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty in his place again.
"That last line is much too long for the poetry," she added, almost out loud, forgetting that Humpty Dumpty would hear her.
"Don't stand chattering to yourself like that," Humpty Dumpty said, looking at her for the first time, "but tell me your name and your business".
"My name is Alice, but – "
"It's a stupid name enough!" Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. "What does it mean?"
"Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully.
"Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: "my name means the shape I am – and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost."
The Alice stories, which have made the invented name – Lewis Carroll – famous throughout the world, and have been translated into many languages, were originally written for Alice Liddell, a daughter of Dean of Christ Church College. On publication, the works became immediately popular as books for children.
Their subsequent appeal to adults is based upon the ingenious mixture of fantasy and realism, gentle satire, absurdity, and logic. The names and sayings of the characters, such as the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, and the White Knight, have become part of everyday speech.
LECTURE 12
THE DECLINE OF THE EMPIRE, NOT OF THE LITERATURE (1876 – 1916)
12.1. Эпоха “тысячи течений” в английской литературе. Концепция трагического в романах Томаса Гарди, неприятие пуританской морали. Лирика Гарди. Социальная критика в трилогии Джона Голсуорси «Сага о Форсайтах».
To the opinion of the present writer, late Victorian literature is an amazing literary phenomenon. One might take the year 1891 as an example. That one year saw the publication of a great number of outstanding books – Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, The Light That Failed by Rudyard Kipling, The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw, News from Nowhere by William Morris, and a number of others. Each and every of those books represents a distinct school of writing – "dark" realism of Hardy, aesthetic writing of Wilde, new romanticism (and imperialism!) of Kipling, socialist writing of Morris, and what else. It was a time of "a thousand schools" in literature, indeed. This richness of ideas and concepts was produced by the development and diversification of the social structure.
12.1.1. The writer whose work is considered to be a bridge between the Victorian age and modern times is Thomas Hardy(1840-1928). Hardy's father, a stonemason, apprenticed him early to a local architect engaged in restoring old churches. In his early twenties, Hardy practiced architecture and was writing poetry. He then turned to novels as more salable.
Hardy published two early novels anonymously. The next two, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), in his own name, were well received. The novel is not invested with the tragic gloom of his later novels.
Along with Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy's best novels are The Return of the Native, which is his most closely knit narrative; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure. All are pervaded by a belief in a universe dominated by the determinism of the biology of Charles Darwin and the physics of the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. Occasionally the determined fate of the individual is altered by chance, but the human will loses when it challenges necessity. Through intense, vivid descriptions of the heath, the fields, the seasons, and the weather, Wessex attains a physical presence in the novels and acts as a mirror of the psychological conditions and the fortunes of the characters.
In Victorian England, Hardy seemed a blasphemer, particularly in Jude, which treated sexual attraction as a natural force unopposable by human will. Criticism of Jude was so harsh that Hardy announced he was “cured” of writing novels.
At the age of 55 Hardy returned to writing poetry, a form he had previously abandoned. Hardy's techniques of rhythm and his diction are especially noteworthy. The poem below was written on the last day of the 19th century – at the very end of the Victorian period, virtually several days before Queen Victoria died in January 1901. It characterizes Hardy's vision of his time very well.
THE DARKLING THRUSH
I leant upon a coppice gate
When frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar and nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
December 31, 1900
12.1.2. One of the most popular English novelists and dramatists of the early 20th century was John Galsworthy (1867-1933).It was in the early 1890s that he abandoned law (he had been admitted to the bar in 1890) and took up writing. Galsworthy wrote his early works under the pen name John Sinjohn.
His fiction is concerned principally with the realistic portrayal of English upper middle-class life; his dramas frequently find their themes in this stratum of society, but also often deal, sympathetically, with the economically and socially oppressed and with questions of social justice. Most of his novels deal with the history, from Victorian times through the first quarter of the 20th century, of an upper middle-class English family, the Forsytes. The principal member of the family is Soames Forsyte, who exemplifies the drive of his class for the accumulation of material wealth, a drive that often conflicts with human values.
(…) The happy pair were seated, not opposite each other, but rectangularly, at the handsome rosewood table; they dined without a cloth – a distinguishing elegance – and so far had not spoken a word.
(…) She had not looked at him once since they sat down; and he wondered what on earth she had been thinking about all the time. It was hard, when a man worked as he did, making money for her – yes, and with an ache in his heart – that she should sit there, looking – looking as if she saw the walls of the room closing in. It was enough to make a man get up and leave the table.
The light from the rose-shaded lamp fell on her neck and arms – Soames liked her to dine in a low dress, it gave him an inexpressible feeling of superiority to the majority of his acquaintance, whose wives were contented with their best high frocks or with tea-gowns, when they dined at home. Under that rosy light her amber-coloured hair and fair skin made a strange contrast with her dark brown eyes.
Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby-coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among Forsytes, who, competitive and full of common sense, had no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he could not, as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her heart.
Out of his property, out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none.
The Forsyte series includes The Man of Property (1906), the novelette “Indian Summer of a Forsyte”, In Chancery, Awakening, and To Let. These five titles were published as The Forsyte Saga (1922). The Forsyte story was continued by Galsworthy in The White Monkey, The Silver Spoon, and Swan Song, which were published together under the title A Modern Comedy (1929). Galsworthy was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in literature.
12.2. Эстетизм и символизм в литературе. Жизнь и творчество Оскара Уайльда. «Портрет Дориана Грея». Уайльд как драматург, поэт и критик.
During late Victorian times, the aesthetic movement flourished, based on the principle of art for art’s sake. English writers Walter Pater and John Ruskin were the authors who formulated the basic ideas of the movement. The author who happened to become the chief proponent of their ideas was Oscar Wilde.
12.2.1. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish-born writer and wit, was a novelist, playwright, poet, and critic. He was born in Dublin, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. As a youngster he was exposed to the brilliant literary talk of the day at his mother’s Dublin salon. Later, as a student at the University of Oxford, he excelled in classics, wrote poetry, and incorporated the Bohemian life-style of his youth into a unique way of life. The eccentric young Wilde wore long hair and velvet knee breeches. His rooms were filled with various objects of art. His wit, brilliance, and flair won him many devotees.
After a highly successful lecture tour of the United States, Wilde returned to England and settled in London. He married a wealthy Irish woman, with whom he had two sons. Thereafter he devoted himself exclusively to writing. In 1895, at the peak of his career, Wilde became the central figure in one of the most sensational court trials of the century. The results scandalized the Victorian middle class; Wilde was convicted of sodomy. Sentenced to two years of hard labor in prison, he emerged financially bankrupt and spiritually downcast. He spent the rest of his life in Paris, where he died of meningitis on November 30, 1900.
Wilde’s early works included two collections of fairy stories, which he wrote for his sons, and a group of short stories. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is a melodramatic tale of moral decadence, distinguished for its brilliant, epigrammatic style. Although the author fully describes the process of corruption, the shocking conclusion of the story frankly commits him to a moral stand against self-debasement.
Wilde’s most distinctive and engaging plays are the four comedies Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, all characterized by engaging plots and remarkably witty dialogue. Wilde, with little dramatic training, proved he had a natural talent for stagecraft and theatrical effects and a true gift for farce. The plays sparkle with his clever paradoxes, among them such famous inverted proverbs as “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes” and “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
While in prison Wilde composed De Profundis (From the Depths; 1905), an apology for his life. Some critics consider it a serious revelation; others, a sentimental and insincere work. The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written just after his release and published anonymously in England, is the most powerful of all his poems. The starkness of prison life and the desperation of people interned are revealed in beautifully cadenced language. Wilde, the artist, now is recognized as a brilliant social commentator, whose best work remains worthwhile and relevant.
12.2.2.Another Irishman contributed greatly to the school of symbolism in English literature. His name is William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).
He was a leader of the Irish Renaissance and one of the foremost writers of the 20th century. In his early twenties, he moved with his family to London and became interested in Hinduism, theosophy, and occultism. He wrote lyrical, symbolic poems on pagan Irish themes in the romantic melancholy tone he believed characteristic of the ancient Celts. On a visit to Ireland he met the beautiful Irish patriot Maud Gonne, whom he loved unrequitedly the rest of his life. She inspired much of his early work and drew him into the Irish nationalist movement for independence.
Yeats returned to Ireland in 1896. He helped found the famous Abbey Theatre. As its director and dramatist, he helped develop the theater into one of the leading theatrical companies of the world, and a center of the Irish literary revival called the Irish Renaissance.
INTO THE TWILIGHT
Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;
And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
In his poetry of this period, Yeats strove to abandon his earlier self-conscious softness and facility. His work, now less mystical and symbolic, became clearer and leaner. As Yeats grew older, he turned to practical politics, serving in the Senate of the new Irish Free State. He also accomplished the feat, rare among poets, of deepening and perfecting his complex styles as the years advanced. His later writings are generally acknowledged to be his best. He received the Nobel Prizein 1923.
12.3. Неоромантическая традиция в английской литературе. Творчество Роберта Льюиса Стивенсона. Неоромантизм Редьярда Киплинга. Тема «бремени белого человека» в его творчестве и ее аллегорическое осмысление в «Книге джунглей».
A second and younger group of novelists displayed two new tendencies. Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad tried in various ways to restore the spirit of romance to the novel, in part by a choice of exotic locale, in part by articulating their themes through plots of adventure and action. Kipling attained fame also for his verse and for his mastery of the single, concentrated effect in the short story.
12.3.1. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) is a Scottish novelist, essayist, and poet. He also contributed several classic works to children's literature. Born in Edinburgh, Stevenson studied engineering and then law at the University of Edinburgh. Since childhood, however, Stevenson's natural inclination had been toward literature, and he eventually started writing seriously.
Stevenson suffered from tuberculosis and often traveled in search of warm climates to ease his illness. His earliest works are descriptions of his journeys —for example, Travels with a Donkey in the Cavennes (1879), an account of a journey on foot through mountains in southern France. Later he traveled to California, where he married an American divorcee. Eventually they sailed from San Francisco on a cruise across the South Pacific and settled in Samoa in a final effort to restore Stevenson's health. The writer died there five years later.
Stevenson's popularity is based primarily on the exciting subject matter of his adventure novels and fantasy stories. Treasure Island is a swiftly paced story of a search for buried gold involving the boy hero Jim Hawkins and the evil pirates Pew and Long John Silver. In the horror story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the extremes of good and evil appear startlingly in one character when the physician Henry Jekyll discovers a drug that changes him, first at will and later involuntarily, into the monster Hyde. Stevenson's other adventure stories include The Black Arrow .
Stevenson wrote skillfully in a variety of genres. He employed the forms of essay and literary criticism, and wrote travel and autobiographical pieces.The collection A Child's Garden of Versescontains some of Stevenson's best-known and finest poems for children.
WHOLE DUTY OF CHILDREN
A child should always say what's true
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table:
At least as far as he is able.
12.3.2. (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), English writer and Nobel laureate, who wrote novels, poems, and short stories, mostly set in India and Burma during the time of British rule. Kipling was born in India, and at age six, was sent to be educated in England. He later returned to India and edited and wrote short stories for the Civil and Military Gazette. In his early twenties, he published Departmental Ditties, satirical verse dealing with civil and military barracks life in British colonial India, and a collection of stories called Plain Tales from the Hills.
Kipling's literary reputation was established by six stories of English life in India, that revealed his profound identification with, and appreciation for, the land and people of India. Thereafter he traveled extensively in Asia and the United States, married an American, lived briefly in Vermont, and finally settled in England. He was a prolific writer; most of his work attained wide popularity. He received the 1907 Nobel Prize in literature, the first English author to be so honored.
Kipling is regarded as one of the greatest English short-story writers. As a poet he is remarkable for rhymed verse written in the slang used by the ordinary British soldier. His writings consistently project three ideas: intense patriotism, the duty of the English to lead lives of strenuous activity, and England's destiny to become a great empire. His insistent imperialism was an echo of the Victorian past of England.
Among Kipling's important short fictional works are The Jungle Book, and The Second Jungle Book, collections of animal stories, which many consider his finest writing; and Just So Stories for Little Children. The highly popular novels or long narratives include The Light That Failed (1891), about a blind artist. Among his collections of verse are Barrack-Room Ballads.
THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN (extract)
Take up the White Man's burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Take up the White Man's burden –
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper –
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!
12.4. Утопии и антиутопии конца XIX века. Различные способы критики социальной действительности в произведениях Герберта Уэллса, Бернарда Шоу, Уильяма Морриса, Уильяма Сомерсета Моэма.
The critical and satirical streak in literature was becoming ever so intense in the writings of the late Victorian period.
12.4.1. One of them was Samuel Butler (1835-1902). Rather than becoming a clergyman, as his father wished, Butler immigrated to New Zealand, where he was a successful sheep rancher. At 30, he returned to England. Butler is best known for his satirical works. In Erewhon (1872), the story of an imaginary land, he criticized the customs and manners of contemporary England. His most important work is the novel The Way of All Flesh (1903), published posthumously. It is a satirical autobiographical study of mid-Victorian family life.
12.4.2. Not only was William Morris (1834-1896) a poet and artist but he was also a socialist reformer, who urged a return to medieval traditions of design, craftsmanship, and community. Morris devoted most of his time to architecture and painting. He even formed a decorating firm in partnership several Pre-Raphaelite painters. The firm designed and manufactured decorations such as carvings, metalwork, stained glass, and carpeting. These products were noted for their fine workmanship and natural beauty. Morris was active in politics but without losing interest in art and letters. He helped to establish the Socialist League, editing and contributing to its magazine. He described a fictitious socialist commonwealth in England in News from Nowhere (1891). In his political writings, he attempted to correct the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution by proposing a form of society in which people could enjoy craftsmanship and simplicity of expression.
12.4.3.Another tireless critic of the society wasGeorge Bernard Shaw(1856-1950). He is considered the most significant British dramatist since Shakespeare. In addition to being a prolific playwright (he wrote 50 stage plays), he was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since Jonathan Swift and the most readable music critic and best theater critic of his generation. Shaw was the antithesis of a romantic; he was ruthless as a social critic and irreverent toward institutions.
Shaw was born in Dublin. When his parents’ marriage failed, his mother and sisters went to London, and Shaw joined them there in 1876. The next decade was one of frustration and near poverty. Only two of the five novels Shaw wrote between 1879 and 1883 found publishers. By the mid-1880s Shaw discovered the writings of Karl Marx and turned to socialist polemics and critical journalism. He also became a firm (and lifelong) believer in vegetarianism, a spellbinding orator, and tentatively, a playwright. He was the force behind the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English government and society. Shaw became the champion of the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen, about whom he had already written his influential The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891).Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses (1892), combined Ibsenite devices and aims with a flouting of the romantic conventions that were still being exploited in the English theater. Many more plays followed. Shaw’s comic masterpiece, Pygmalion (1913), was claimed by its author to be a didactic play about phonetics; it is, rather, about love and class and the exploitation of one human being by another.
The intellectual watershed of World War I (1914-1918) caused the difference. Attempting to find his way out of postwar pessimism, Shaw next wrote five linked parable-plays which explore human progress from Eden to a science-fiction future. Despite some brilliant writing, the cycle is uneven in its theatrical values and seldom performed. For Saint Joan, Shaw received the 1925 Nobel Prize in literature. In Shaw’s hands Joan of Arc became a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius. Shaw continued to write into his 90s. His last plays turned, as Europe plunged into new crises, to the problem of how people might best govern themselves and release their potential. These were themes he had handled before, but he now approached them with a tragicomic and nonrealistic extravagance.
12.4.4. Most famous for his science-fantasy novels with their prophetic depictions of the triumphs of technology as well as the horrors of 20th-century warfare is Herbert George Wells (1866-1946). In 50 years he produced more than 80 books. As a young man, he worked as a draper's apprentice, bookkeeper, tutor, and journalist. His literary career began with the novel The Time Machine (1895). It mingled science, adventure, and political comment. Later works in this genre are The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds.
Wells also wrote novels devoted to character delineation which depict members of the lower middle class and their aspirations. Many of Wells' other books can be categorized as thesis novels. Among these are Ann Veronica, promoting women's rights, and Tono-Bungay, attacking irresponsible capitalists. Throughout his long life Wells was deeply concerned with and wrote voluminously about the survival of contemporary society. For a time he was a member of the Fabian Society. He envisioned a utopia in which the vast and frightening material forces available to modern men and women would be rationally controlled for progress and for the equal good of all. His later works were increasingly pessimistic. He castigated most world leaders and expressed the author's doubts about the ability of humankind to survive.
12.4.5.Another English author, whose works began to appear in late Victorian times, was William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). His first novel came out in 1897 based on his experience of living in South London as a young man. His partially autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage is generally acknowledged as his masterpiece and is one of the best realistic English novels of the early 20th century. The Moon and Sixpence is a story of the conflict between the artist and conventional society, based on the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin. He was also a brilliant short story writer.
12.5. Развлекательная литература. Литература для детей и юношества.
12.5.1. The variety of late Victorian literature was incredibly rich. There was room for everyone, especially for those who wanted to entertain in the first place. It was good, solid fiction, it was indeed.
In the early 1880s, Henry Rider Haggard(1856-1925) returned to England from South Africa. He devoted most of his time to agriculture, on his estate, and to writing novels. And popular writing it was! His King Solomon's Mines (1885) was an immediate success; its story, suggested by the ruins at Zimbabwe, dealt with the adventures of an English explorer among remote tribes. The characters who appeared in the book were featured in several others, including Sheand Allan Quatermain. Haggard wrote more than 40 novels.
The year 1887 saw the publication of the short story A Study in Scarlet, the first of 60 stories featuring the character of Sherlock Holmes.Thecreator of the unforgettable master sleuth was Arthur Conan Doyle(1859-1930). By the way, the characterization of Holmes, his ability of ingenious deductive reasoning, was based on one of the author's own university professors. Equally brilliant creations are those of Holmes's foils: his friend Dr. Watson, the good-natured narrator of the stories, and the master criminal Professor Moriarty. Conan Doyle was so immediately successful in his literary career that approximately five years later he abandoned his medical practice to devote his entire time to writing. The Holmes stories made Conan Doyle internationally famous and served to popularize the detective-story genre. Conan Doyle's literary versatility brought him almost equal fame for his historical romances such as Rodney Stone.
At that timeJerome Klapka Jerome(1859-1927) turned his attention to writing and editing after clerking, teaching, and acting without much success.It well may be that Three Men in a Boat (1889) represents his greatest success as a novelist. Reminiscent of Mark Twain's travel writings, this work combines wit and anecdote with common sense and compelling description.
Another important entertainer of the period is Irish-born Bram Stoker(1847-1912). His classic novel of horror, Dracula (1897), introduced the character of the vampire Count Dracula of Transylvania. Dracula has inspired numerous films, sequels, and retellings.
12.5.2.Literature for young readers really flourished during the period. Born in Manchester, Frances Burnett(1849-1924) immigrated to the United States at the close of the American Civil War. She is the author of the well-known children's books Little Lord Fauntleroy(1886) and The Secret Garden (1911). The books are still popular today.
Edith Nesbit(1858-1924) is best known for children's books such as The Story of the Treasure Seekers and The Railway Children (1906), both of which are stories about sets of brothers and sisters and their adventures. It is interesting to know that Nesbit and George Bernard Shaw were founding members of the socialist, educational Fabian Society. Although she mainly thought of herself as a poet, her poetry and novels have been largely forgotten, as her strength was writing for children. Many of Nesbit's books for children, which are classics, describe a fantastic dimension, where the protagonists, for example, travel through time, or conduct various experiments with magic talismans, as in Five Children and It (1902). The most memorable feature of Nesbit's writing for children, however, is the humor she achieves as a result of adopting a child's perspective toward adult behavior and the adult world.
The British authorKenneth Grahame(1859-1932) was a bank manager in his early life. He retired after the publication of his most successful work, The Wind in the Willows(1908), a fantasy about Mole, Rat, and other animals in the English countryside that appeals to both adults and children.
In the mid-1880s,James Matthew Barrie(1860-1937), Scottish dramatist and novelist, settled in London. The year 1891 saw the publication of The Little Minister,a romantic novel of love and adventure. The first performance of Barrie's now world-famous fairy-tale play, Peter Pan, took place in 1904. In this fantasy, Barrie dealt with his two favorite themes, the retention of childish innocence and what he conceived to be the feminine instinct for motherhood.
12.5.3. There was one other author whose life still captivates millions of people around the world. That woman, Ethel Lillian Voynich, was born in 1860 and lived to the age of 96. She was the daughter of a famous mathematician and a feminist writer. She was niece of the Himalayas explorer Sir Everest. She knew Wilde and Shaw in London. She traveled to Russia with a revolutionary mission. In 1897 she published The Gadfly, a highly romantic yet realistic treatment of the liberation period in Italy concerning the activities of the international republican agent Arthur Burton who successfully eludes the Austro-Hungarian policy and contributes to the revolutionary cause. The book sold 2,500,000 copies world-wide and an additional 5 million in Russian. In the USSR, it was the top best seller and compulsory reading there, and was seen as ideologically useful. But it really is a good book, indeed so. Many a young reader read the last pages of the book with misty eyes.
"… She stood still for a little while with the paper in her hand; then sat down by the open window to read. The letter was closely written in pencil, and in some parts hardly legible. But the first two words stood out quite clear upon the page; and they were in English:
"Dear Jim."
The writing grew suddenly blurred and misty. And she had lost him again – had lost him again! At the sight of the familiar childish nickname all the hopelessness of her bereavement came over her afresh, and she put out her hands in blind desperation, as though the weight of the earth-clods that lay above him were pressing on her heart.
Presently she took up the paper again and went on reading:
"I am to be shot at sunrise to-morrow. So if I am to keep at all my promise to tell you everything, I must keep it now. But, after all, there is not much need of explanations between you and me. We always understood each other without many words, even when we were little things.
"And so, you see, my dear, you had no need to break your heart over that old story of the blow. It was a hard hit, of course; but I have had plenty of others as hard, and yet I have managed to get over them, -- even to pay back a few of them, -- and here I am still, like the mackerel in our nursery-book (I forget its name), 'Alive and kicking, oh!' This is my last kick, though; and then, to-morrow morning, and--'Finita la Commedia!'
You and I will translate that: 'The variety show is over'; and will give thanks to the gods that they have had, at least, so much mercy on us. It is not much, but it is something; and for this and all other blessings may we be truly thankful!
"About that same to-morrow morning, I want both you and Martini to understand clearly that I am quite happy and satisfied, and could ask no better thing of Fate. Tell that to Martini as a message from me; he is a good fellow and a good comrade, and he will understand. You see, dear, I know that the stick-in-the-mud people are doing us a good turn and themselves a bad one by going back to secret trials and executions so soon, and I know that if you who are left stand together steadily and hit hard, you will see great things. As for me, I shall go out into the courtyard with as light a heart as any child starting home for the holidays. I have done my share of the work, and this death-sentence is the proof that I have done it thoroughly. They kill me because they are afraid of me; and what more can any man's heart desire?
"It desires just one thing more, though. A man who is going to die has a right to a personal fancy, and mine is that you should see why I have always been such a sulky brute to you, and so slow to forget old scores. Of course, though, you understand why, and I tell you only for the pleasure of writing the words. I loved you, Gemma, when you were an ugly little girl in a gingham frock, with a scratchy tucker and your hair in a pig-tail down your back; and I love you still. Do you remember that day when I kissed your hand, and when you so piteously begged me 'never to do that again'? It was a scoundrelly trick to play, I know; but you must forgive that; and now I kiss the paper where I have written your name. So I have kissed you twice, and both times without your consent.
"That is all. Good-bye, my dear."
There was no signature, but a verse which they had learned together as children was written under the letter:
"Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live
Or if I die."
_______________________________________________________________
LECTURE 13
BRAVE NEW WORLD OF LITERATURE (1916 – 1956)
13.1. Первая мировая война и усиление сатирических тенденций в литературе. Литература «потерянного поколения»: Ричард Олдингтон. Уилфред Оуэн, Роберт Грейвз. Антивикторианский пафос романа «Смерть героя». Обобщенный образ западной цивилизации в состоянии кризиса в поэме Томаса Элиота «Бесплодная земля».
World War I and the economic depression of great severity can explain the quality and direction of English literature in the first half of the 20th century. The traditional values of Western civilization, which the Victorians had only begun to question, came to be questioned seriously by a number of new writers. Those writers saw society breaking down around them. Traditional literary forms were often discarded, and new ones succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity, as writers sought fresher ways of expressing what they took to be new kinds of experience, or experience seen in new ways. The writers who had gone through the war came out with a new way of thinking about the world. The most well-known among them are Richard Aldington, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves.
13.1.1. Richard Aldington (1892-1962) wrote successfully in several literary genres, including poetry, fiction, translation, and biography. He began writing poetry prior to World War I. His early poems are considered representative of the imagist movement in poetry, a movement that flourished before the war whose adherents relied on the use of sharp, precise images as a means of expression. Aldington served on the Western Front during World War I. His war experiences led to his first novel and most popular book, Death of a Hero(1929), which was translated into many languages. After the war and beyond his imagist phase, Aldington continued to publish books of poetry. He also became a lively biographer. Aldington wrote accounts of such figures as Lawrence of Arabia, and English poet and novelist D. H. Lawrence. One of the most learned authors of his day, Aldington was also a translator of Greek, French, and Medieval Latin works. The epilogue to Death of a Hero gives the whole story quite a dimension.
Eleven years after the fall of Troy,
We, old men – some of us nearly forty –
Met and talked on the sunny rampart
Over our wine, while the lizards scuttled
In dusty grass, and the crickets chirred.
Some bared their wounds;
Some spoke of the thirst, dry in the throat,
And the heart-beat, in the din of battle;
Some spoke of intolerable sufferings,
The brightness gone from their eyes
And the gray already thick in their hair.
And I sat a little apart
From the garrulous talk and old memories,
And I heard a boy of twenty
Say petulantly to a girl, seizing her arm:
'Oh, come away, why do you stand there
Listening open-mouthed to the talk of old men?
Haven't you heard enough of Troy and Achilles?
Why should they bore us for ever
With an old quarrel and the names of dead men
We never knew, and dull forgotten battles?'
And he drew her away,
And she looked back and laughed
As he spoke more contempt of us
Being now out of hearing.
And I thought of the graves of desolate Troy
And the beauty of many young men now dust,
And the long agony and how useless it all was.
And the tank still clashed about me
Like the meeting of blade and blade.
And as they two moved away
He put an arm about her, and kissed her;
And afterwards I heard their gay distant laughter.
And I looked at the hollow cheeks
And the weary eyes and the grey-streaked heads
Of the old men – nearly forty – about me;
And I too walked away
In an agony of helpless grief and pity.
13.1.2. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) wrote poetry from early youth, much of it at first inspired by religion. He became increasingly disapproving of the role of the church in society, and sympathetic to the plight of the poor. At 20, he went to France and taught English there. Owen made the difficult decision to enlist in the army and fight in World War I. He entered the war in January 1917 and fought as an officer in the Battle of the Somme but was hospitalized for shell shock that May. In the hospital he met Siegfried Sassoon, a poet and novelist whose grim antiwar works were in harmony with Owen's concerns. Under Sassoon's care and tutelage, Owen began producing the best work of his short career; his poems are suffused with the horror of battle, and yet finely structured and innovative. Owen's use of half-rhyme (pairing words which do not quite rhyme) gives his poetry a dissonant, disturbing quality that amplifies his themes. He died one year after returning to battle and one week before the war ended in 1918. Full recognition as a highly esteemed poet came after Owen's death. Owen's considerable body of war poetry, traditional in form, is a passionate expression of outrage at the horrors of war and of pity for the young soldiers sacrificed in it.
13.1.3. Robert Graves(1895-1985) preferred to be known as a poet, and wrote vigorous, witty, and, at times, intellectual verse. His first volume of poetry, Fairies and Fusiliers, recounts his World War I experiences. Early in his career, Graves was considered a Georgian poet (one of a group of early 20th-century poets who wrote conventional lyric poetry and maintained a late-romantic style). As his career developed, he avoided identification with any school or poet and wrote with an intense, clear, and ordered voice. As a prose writer Graves produced a wide selection of books, ranging from Good-Bye to All That(1929), a satiric military memoir, to imaginative and historical fiction such as I, Claudius.
13.1.4. Thomas Eliot(1888-1965) didn't go to war. Nor was he a British-born author. Yet he is regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. His best-known poem, The Waste Land (1922), is a devastating analysis of the society of his time. Eliot also wrote drama and literary criticism and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.
Thomas Stearns Eliot received a very good education both in America and in the Old World. After leaving Oxford, Eliot stayed in England. Eliot earned international acclaim in 1922 with the publication of The Waste Land, a poem in five parts, was ground breaking in establishing the form of the so-called kaleidoscopic, or fragmented, modern poem. These fragmented poems are characterized by jarring jumps in perspective, imagery, setting, or subject. Despite this fragmentation of form, The Waste Land is unified by its theme of despair. Its opening lines introduce the ideas of life’s ultimate futility despite momentary flashes of hope: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / dull roots with spring rain.” The poem goes on to present a sequence of short sketches following an individual’s baffled search for spiritual peace. It concludes with resignation at the never-ending nature of the search. The poem is full of literary and mythological references that draw on many cultures and universalize the poem’s themes.
The Waste Land appeared in the aftermath of World War I, which was the most destructive war in human history to that point. Many people saw the poem as an indictment of postwar European culture and as an expression of disillusionment with contemporary society, which Eliot believed was culturally barren. Eliot eventually turned from poems and essays to the more public art of plays, all of which he wrote in verse. He also began giving lectures. In essays and lectures, Eliot profoundly influenced modern literary criticism. Sixteen years after he died, some of Eliot’s poems appeared in the unlikely form of a Broadway musical, when British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber (later Lord Lloyd Webber) brought out Cats(1981). Lloyd Webber based his production on a book of poetry Eliot wrote for children, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). In the 1980s and 1990s, Eliot and his poetry were increasingly criticized for elements of anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism. Despite these unfortunate prejudices, most people continue to regard Eliot as one of the most important figures in modern literature.
13.2. Модернизм в английской литературе. Творчество Джеймса Джойса. «Портрет художника в юности» и традиция символистского романа о художнике. «Улисс» Джойса как модернистский эпос.
The early 20th century saw the emergence of modernism. It manifested itself in all forms of art. Modernism responded to the world’s complexity by asserting that the individual had the potential to achieve a broader perspective than that offered by any one society or its history. Traditional literary forms were often discarded, and new ones succeeded one another with bewildering rapidity, as writers sought fresher ways of expressing what they took to be new kinds of experience, or experience seen in new ways. Experimental writing was focused more and more on portraying the natural and sometimes irrational flow of thoughts in a person's mind. The most widely used technique was stream of consciousness.
13.2.1. James Joyce(1882-1941) is theIrish author, whose writings feature revolutionary innovations in prose techniques. He was one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century. He used stream of consciousness.
As a youth, Joyce was educated at Roman Catholic lower schools and at home. In 1904 he and his companion, Nora Barnacle, left Ireland for good. To support the family, Joyce worked as a language instructor and received writing grants from patrons, but the family was never comfortable financially. During much of his adult life Joyce suffered from a series of severe eye troubles that eventually led to near blindness.
Joyce was a pioneer and a model for authors who believed in free written expression. Most of his works feature inventive language, and many of them have been criticized for being too obscure in their references or too blunt in their descriptions of intimate matters, including sexual activity. Most of his works deal with everyday life in 20th-century Dublin. His first book, Chamber Music (1907), consists of 36 love poems that reflect the influence of the lyricists of England’s Elizabethan Age (mid- and late 1500s) and of the English lyric poets of the 1890s. Joyce’s first prose work, Dubliners (1914), is a book of 15 short stories and sketches that revolve around the sad spirit of the ancient city of Dublin, and crucial episodes in the lives of its inhabitants. The last and most famous story of the collection, “The Dead,” centers on a schoolteacher and his wife, and their lost hopes and dreams.
Joyce also wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(1916) and Ulysses (1922), both of which experiment with ways of representing an individual’s interior consciousness while at the same time describing his exterior life. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows the character Stephen Dedalus as he grows into manhood. Many people consider Stephen to be a semi-autobiographical version of Joyce himself, an interpretation supported in part by Stephen’s decision at the end of the book to leave his home and country to become a writer. Portrait makes considerable use of the stream-of-consciousness technique.
13.2.2. Joyce attained international fame with the 1922 publication of Ulysses, which many people consider one of the greatest and most original books ever written. On a literal level, the book describes one day in the life of three people living in Dublin: Stephen Dedalus, who has the same name as the protagonist of Portrait but is not the same character; an Irish Jewish man named Leopold Bloom; and his wife, Molly Bloom. On a symbolic level, Ulysses is loosely based on the content and ten-year time frame of the ancient Greek epic the Odyssey, by the Greek poet Homer. The character of Stephen corresponds with Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, searching for his wandering father; Leopold Bloom corresponds with Odysseus; and Molly corresponds with Odysseus’s wife, Penelope.
As in Portrait, each chapter in Ulysses has a distinct style that reflects both the exterior and interior lives of the characters and their development as individuals. The final chapter gives Molly’s interior monologue as she is on the border of sleep. Molly reviews her life in what turns into a personal epiphany about what womanhood means to her. At the end of the passage, Molly accepts her love of life as well as her surviving love of her husband, and she repeats the affirmation: “... and yes I said yes I will yes.”
13.2.3. Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce's last and most complex work, is an attempt to embody in fiction a theory of history wherein everything is cyclical, repeating itself over and over again. Joyce worked on the book, which he first called Work in Progress, for more than 17 years. He wrote the four-part novel in the form of an interrupted series of dreams during one night in the life of the character Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Earwicker, his family, and his acquaintances symbolize all humanity, and they blend with one another and with various historical and mythical figures.
Joyce carried his linguistic experimentation to its furthest point in Finnegans Wake, in part by combining English words with parts of words from various other languages. Joyce’s inventive use of language also shows in the way many words slip and slide in amusing directions. After an allusion to the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, in which the ant works hard all summer while the grasshopper plays but then has food and fuel in the winter while the grasshopper freezes and goes hungry, the earnest ant becomes an “ondt” (anagram of “don’t”) while the grasshopper, hoping for grace, becomes a “gracehoper.”
Here's a passage from that work by Joyce. Rejoice – in reading it!
Stonewall Willingdone is an old maxy montrumeny. Lipoleums is nice hung bushellors. This is hiena hinnessy laughing alout at the Willingdone. This is lipsyg dooley krieging the funk from the hinnessy. This is the hinndoo Shimar Shin between the dooley boy and the hinnessy. Tip. This is the wixy old Willingdone picket up the half of the threefoiled hat of lipoleums fromoud of the bluddle nith. This is the hinndoo waxing ranjymad for a bombshoob. This is the Willingdone hanking the half of the hat of lipoleums up the tail on the buckside of his big white harse. Tip. That was the last Joke of Willngdone. Hit, hit, hit!
13.3. Вирджиния Вулф как теоретик модернизма.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is a British novelist, essayist, and critic, who helped create the modern novel. Her writing often explores the concepts of time, memory, and people’s inner consciousness, and is remarkable for its humanity and depth of perception.
13.3.1. Her contribution to literature is remarkable. Woolf's novels emphasized patterns of consciousness rather than sequences of events in the external world. As is known, before the early 1900s, fiction emphasized plot as well as detailed descriptions of characters and settings. Events in the external world, such as a marriage, murder, or deception, were the most important aspects of a story. Characters' interior, or mental, lives served mainly to prepare for or motivate such meaningful external occurrences.
Influenced by the works of French writer Marcel Proust and Irish writer James Joyce, among others, Woolf strove to create a literary form that would convey inner life. To this end, she elaborated a technique known as stream of consciousness. Her novels do not limit themselves to a single consciousness, but move from character to character, using interior monologues to present each person's differing responses, often to the same event. Her specific contribution to the art of fiction was this representation of multiple consciousnesses hovering around a common center.
Woolf's fiction was drawn largely from her own experience, so her characters are almost all members of her own affluent, intellectual, upper-middle class. Woolf had several major concerns other than her expressed desire to represent consciousness. She was, for example, fascinated with time—both as a sequence of moments and in terms of years and centuries—and with the differences between external and internal time. Woolf was also interested in defining qualities specific to the female mind. She saw female sensibility as intuitive, close to the core of things, and thus able to liberate the masculine intellect from what she viewed as its enslavement to abstract concepts. It is not surprising that her most memorable characters, such as Mrs. Dalloway, and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, are women.
13.3.2. Woolf was the daughter of biographer and critic Leslie Stephen (later Sir Leslie) who educated her at home. After his death in 1904, she, her sister Vanessa, and her brothers moved to Bloomsbury, then a bohemian section of London. She married Leonard Woolf, a critic and writer on economics and politics. Virginia Woolf, her husband, and their friends became known as the Bloomsbury Group. Although the group shared certain values, it had no common doctrine. It was simply a number of friends, "whose affection and respect for each other ... stood the test of thirty years, and whose intellectual candor made their company agreeable to each other." From the time of her mother’s death, Woolf suffered from a mental disorder. In 1941, Woolf drowned herself. She left her husband a note explaining that she feared she was going mad and this time would not recover.
13.3.3. Woolf's fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is considered by many to be her first great novel, revealing a mastery of the form and technique for which she would become known. The novel centers on the separate worlds and interior thought processes of two characters: Clarissa Dalloway, a gracious London hostess in her 50s whose husband is an uninspired politician, and Septimus Warren Smith, a young ex-soldier suffering a mental illness triggered by a friend’s death in battle during World War I. The two do not know each other and never meet, but their minds have curious parallels.
The story takes place on one June day in London after the war, and it explores the idea of time by including past memories and future hopes of the characters. The novel ends with a party given by Clarissa, at which Septimus’s cold but distinguished doctor tells Clarissa of Septimus’s suicide.
"Here is death, in the middle of my party," she thinks. Instinctively she feels she understands her symbolic double, Septimus—his sensitivity, despair, and defiance. Some critics maintain that Clarissa and Septimus represent two aspects of the same personality, and that both are semiautobiographical representations of Woolf.
The power of Woolf’s fifth novel, To the Lighthouse, lies in its brilliant visual imagery, extensive use of symbolism, and use of the characters’ stream of consciousness to evoke feeling and demonstrate the progression of both time and emotion. Behind the backdrop of ordinary domestic events, the novel’s real concern is with the impact of the radiant Mrs. Ramsay—representing the female sensibility—on the lives and feelings of the other characters, even long after her death.
13.3.4.Two of her later books are of great interest too. Orlando is a historical fantasy and an analysis of gender, creativity, and identity. The writing is a succession of brilliant parodies of literary styles, and the work satirically comments on society’s changing ideas and values. The story traces the life of Orlando, who is both a boy in 16th-century Elizabethan England and a 38-year-old woman four centuries later.
The Waves is Woolf's most experimental and difficult work. It is organized into nine units, each of which records a series of stream-of-consciousness monologues given entirely in the present tense by six characters, one after another. The monologues reveal the personalities of each character in their inner experiences of external events. Each of these nine units is introduced by an italicized passage describing the sea, the sky, a garden, hills, and a house during some imaginary day. As in her other novels, Woolf is primarily concerned with rendering the quality of inner life, but here inner life is presented in a highly stylized, unrealistic way. While the voices uttering the monologues have different names, sexes, and histories, the similar language of their monologues often seems more like different aspects of the same consciousness, perhaps representing the various aspects of humankind as a whole.
13.4. Романтическая традиция в творчестве Дэвида Лоуренса. Конфликт естественного, природного и «механического» в его романах; социально-конкретное и метафизическое в изображении общества и человека.
David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930