Literature
Almost all is taken from a great book
'English Literature' by Anthony Burgess
English Literature
A Simplified Survey
Introduction:
After the fall of the Roman Empire, people
emigrated from the east of Europe. These people included the Angels and
Saxons; who still give their names to what is sometimes called the Anglo-Saxon
race. The Angels and the Saxons and the Jutes were barbarians, in other
words, they were not Christians. They were farmers, seamen, they knew something
of law and the art of government, and it seems that they brought a literature
with them from Europe to England. By the end of the sixth century, the
new masters of England had become a Christian people. All the records of
that time belong to Christian England. We must think of this literature
as being passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. Moreover,
the creators of this orally passed literature are, usually, unknown. The
language used at that time was called Old-English. That was a language
rich in consonants, fond of clustering them together so that the mouth
seems to perform a swift act of violence. The word ‘s t r e n g th’ could
serve as an example of the Old-English clustering of consonants. Literature
was divided into verse and prose works. Poetry, for the most part, is anonymous,
but there is very little of anonymous prose.
Poetry (Verse):
The oldest poem in the English language
is Beowulf . It was not composed in England and it was not written until
the end of the ninth century. It is a warlike, violent poem of over three
thousand lines. The poem is, essentially, a warrior’s story. It tells of
the hero who gives his name to the poem and his struggle with a monster
called Grendel and his terrifying mother. The poem shows a great skill
in its construction, its imagery and its language. The reader of the poem
could notice that its music is the crunching of bones and its colour is
the grey of northern winter shot by the red of blood. Much of the violence
of Beowulf derives from the nature of Old-English itself. The violence
of the language is emphasised in the technique that the Old-English poet
employs. The line is divided into two halves, and each half has two heavy
stresses. Two of the stresses of the whole line are made even more emphatic
or strong by the use of head rhyme. This old head rhyme always had its
influence on English writers. This use of head rhyme in Old-English verse
was responsible for the need to find words beginning with the same sound.
English words, thus, have the quality of riddles and it is not surprising
that riddling was a favourite Old-English pursuit.
The second, important, work to examine
is the first piece of Christian literature to appear in Anglo-Saxon England.
It is a poem composed by Caedmon and it is called The Song of Creation.
The poem has the same features as Beowulf; the division of the line, the
stresses and the head rhyme. There is a good deal of Old-English verse,
some dealing with war like The Battle of Maldon, and other melancholic
poems full of powerful description of nature like The Seafarer and The
Wanderer. In these works, the sense of melancholy is there all the time,
it is a characteristic of much Old-English verse.
Prose:
The Old-English language was a group of
dialects; that was due to the division of England into three main kingdoms.
At the end of the ninth century, there were Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex.
After the Danes had invaded England and destroyed Northumbria, Wessex,
the kingdom of Alfred the Great, became England’s cultural centre. When
Alfred came to the throne of Wessex, he was not happy about the state of
learning. After he had established a peaceful Kingdom, he began to improve
the state of education, founding colleges, importing teachers from Europe,
translating Latin books into West-Saxon English, and, so, showed writers
of English how to handle foreign ideas. With helpers, Alfred translated
much Latin into English. His remarkable prose work is the translation of
the Ecclesiastical History of the Venerable Bede. Another important prose
work is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is a record of the main happenings
of the country, at the same time, shows how Old-English is moving steadily
towards Middle-English. Finally, Alfred may be said to have established
the cultural tradition of England, despite the foreign invasions that were
still to come.
Normans
Introduction:
The Normans means ‘The North Men’ and
they spoke that off shoot (kind) of Latin we call French. The Norman
way of life looked south; towards the Mediterranean, towards the sun, towards
sun and laughter. On the other hand, the Anglo-Saxon way of life looked
towards the gray northern seas-grim, heavy, melancholy and humorless. The
Normans in England wrote a literature that was neither true English nor
a true French literature. As a result, Latin, rather than Norman French
or Old English tended to be employed as a kind of compromise. At that time,
the culture of the north has begun to mix with the culture of the south.
The south represented the masculine side, while, the north represented
the feminine. Out, of the mingling of masculine and feminine, was to come
something like an ideal language.
Poetry (Verse):
Mythology was one of the sources of literary
works during the Normans’ race. ‘Robin Hood’ and ‘King Arthur and The Knights
of The Round Table’ are good examples of the Myths that influenced the
literary works written in Middle English. This period had its religious
writings and non-religious writings. The non-religious works were mainly
verse. First, we can point to certain lyrics written with great delicacy
and skill, but signed by no name. There is, also, love poetry like the
fine song Alison. Moreover, there are patriotic songs, carols for Christmas
and Easter and even political songs. Longer poems are The Owl and The Nightingale,
which is a story of a dispute between the two birds as to which has the
finer song. Another remarkable work, written in the Lancashire dialect,
is called Sir Gawayn and The Green Knight. The poem is written in head-rhyme,
in a language that shows little Norman influence but is, nevertheless,
notable for a lightness of touch, a certain humor, and great power of description.
Finally, we mention William Langland, the last writer to use the Old-English
technique of head rhyme for a long poem. It is The Vision of Piers Plowman,
it attacks the abuses of the Christian church in England. The poem is allegorical,
that is to say, we meet figures with names like Envy and Theology. Langland,
in many ways, sums up the past. The future lies with regular rhyme-patterns,
French stanza-forms, classical learning, wit and colour. At the end of
the age the way was paved for Chaucer to create the English language we
know today.
Prose:
The first piece of Norman writing in England
is a catalogue of the King’s property. This book was a prose work that
was called Domesday Book and it belonged to William the Conqueror. After
the Norman Conquest, heroic figures from Latin writings started to appear
in English literature, but, at the same time, there were religious works
such as Ormulum. It is a translation of some of the Gospels made by a monk
called Orm. Ancrene Riwle, an advice given by a priest to three religious
ladies living in a little house near a church. There is, also, a curious
book translated from the French spoken in England, called Handlyng Synne;
setting out in stories the various paths of sin. Another religious work
is Pricke of Conscience, probably written by Richard Rolle. It deals with
the pains of hell in horrifying detail.
Of the other works of the fourteenth century,
we must mention a very strange book of travel written by Sir John Mandeville.
The writer wrote in Latin first, then in French and, finally, in English.
It is an interesting book where Mandeville introduces a great number of
French words into English. It represents fantastic tales of cannibals and
men with only one foot, it also fed the hunger for knowledge of strange
lands.
Chaucer
Introduction:
Geoffrey Chaucer lived in an eventful
age, when the Hundred Year’s war with France had already begun. When he
was in his twenties, the English language was established as the language
of law-courts. Chaucer belonged to that growing class from which so many
great writers sprang. He was the son of a man engaged in trade; his father
was a wine merchant. Moreover, he had intelligence, a strong sense of humor,
a fine musical ear and the ability to tell a story. He has many achievements,
in which he did not use the East Midland dialect of English that was spoken
in London. He found this dialect lacking in words and in knowledge of literature
that he can learn. That is why he had to create the English language we
know today and to establish its literary traditions. He speaks to us today
with his voice during his own age. Chaucer is modern in that the language
he uses is the language of our time. That modernity of Chaucer’s English
is proved by the number of phrases, from his works, that have become part
of every day speech. In his works he has his own spelling and pronunciation,
and he gave the vowels a universal quality. He has different verse and
prose achievements, the verse works are his most important achievements.
Poetry (Verse):
Chaucer’s master piece is The Canterbury
Tales, he stood on his own feet and gave literature something it had never
seen before. Observation of life as it is really lived, pictures of people
who are real, and a modern view of life full of love, humor, passion and
love of humanity. When reading Chaucer we can find out that his brilliant
descriptive gifts and his humor carry us along and make us forget that
we are reading a poet who lived six hundred years ago. The Canterbury Tales
is a long work but still unfinished at Chaucer’s death. It is a collection
of short stories that had been popular for a long time on the continent.
What had never been done before was to take a collection of human beings,
of all temperaments and social positions, and mingle them together, make
them tell stories and make these stories illustrate their characters. The
prologue to the tales is a marvelous portrait gallery of typical people
of the age, but we have timeless human beings.
The next greatest work of Chaucer is Troilus
and Criseyde; a love story taken from the history of the Trojan War. It
reads in some ways like a modern novel, and it can be called the first
full-length piece of English fiction. Chaucer opened the way to a new age
of literature, but it was a long time before any poet, as great as he is,
to come along to build on his foundations. The only considerable poet that
England seems to have produced in the fifteenth century is John Skelton.
He seems to owe nothing to Chaucer or to any body else. He is fond of a
short line, a lose rhyme-pattern and the simplest of words.
Prose:
Concerning prose, Chaucer’s works were
of no importance. His Paston Letters cannot properly be classed as literature.
William Caxton, a businessman who aimed to make money out of printing,
realized that the English prose was chaotic and the language was changing
rapidly. He wrote prose as he spoke, often giving alternatives for certain
words that he thought might not be generally understood. He, usually, translated
from French romances. The most important prose work Caxton printed was
Morte D’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. It is the fullest record we have of
the work of the ‘Mythical Knights of the Round Table’. The stories are
written in a simple prose style that is dignified and clear.
The Bible
The Bible is the sacred book of Christianity.
The Bible’s artistic qualities had its great influence on English writing.
It consists of two main sections; the Old Testament which is written in
Hebrew, and the New Testament written in Greek. The Old Testament is a
collection of poems, plays, proverbs, prophecy, philosophy, history and
theology. On the other hand, the New Testament contains the story of the
spreading of Christianity.
Europe, in the Middle Ages, knew the Bible
in Latin. It had been translated into Old English. The church was against
those translations and it feared common people could understand the Bible
in their own way. John Wyclif was a clergyman who found many defects in
the church of his time and also wanted the Bible to be available to any
one in the street. To him, we owe the first complete translation of the
Bible. After more than a hundred years William Tyndale was another famous
writer who translated the Bible far from the Church’s authority but he
fell into the hands of the Papal authorities and was condemned to death.
The Authorized Version of the Bible is
that of King James I of England. He appointed forty-seven learned men to
produce an English version of the Bible. In 1970 a complete modern version
of the Bible was represented. Unfortunately, it cannot compare for majesty,
beauty or homeliness with the King James Version.
Beginnings of Drama
Introduction:
Drama is the most natural of the arts,
being based on one of the most fundamental of the human and animal faculties,
the faculty of imitation. It is through imitation that human children learn
to talk and to perform a great number of complicated human functions. Children
play at being doctors, cowboys, spacemen, and kings or queens. To learn
about the first drama we have to go to the study of primitive human societies.
Primitive societies believed in magic, and magic required some sort of
acting. Many people believe that the first drama was based on four things;
the mimetic faculty, sympathetic magic, belief in gods and fear of starvation.
Religion and drama were closely mixed throughout the early history of the
art in Europe.
The True Beginning:
Drama with the Greeks was divided into
two types. The first is ‘Tragedy’ which comes from ‘Tragos’ meaning
a goat. It deals with the fall of man from power, a fall brought about
by some flaw in his character or by a specific sin. The function of tragedy,
according to Aristotle, is to arouse pity and terror, the audience must
feel pity for the hero’s downfall and terror from being in his situation.
The hero in Greek tragedy had no free will. The gods controlled man’s destiny.
The second type was ‘Comedy’ which comes from ‘Comos’ meaning a rough country
party. This kind laughed at human follies and had a moral purpose. What
was notable is that the Greeks confined themselves to unities of action
and time. Their plays had one plot that did not last for more than twenty-four
hours.
Plautus and Terence
Short Notes:
Human manners change rapidly, and hence
comedies have a habit of becoming quickly out of date. However, Plautus
and Terence, in ancient Rome, have dated far more than their tragic counterparts.
Plautus and Terence gave something to the English comedy; stock comic types
like Plautus’s ‘Boastful Soldier’, complicated plots, in which mistaken
identity plays a big part, and the division of a play into five acts. This
influence could be clearly seen in one of the early Elizabethan comedies,
Ralph Roister Doister by Nicholas Udall. The play is arranged into five
acts and several scenes. Moreover, the hero, ‘Ralph’, is modeled on the
‘Boastful Soldier’ of Plautus, and the plot, which is full of misunderstandings,
owes something to the Roman master. Plautus and Terence were fond of gaining
laughs from the theme of twins who, separated from birth, suddenly turned
up to the same place unknown to each other. Shakespeare used the same theme
but he added a second set of twins in the same play. However, we can still
say that English comedy owes less to these writers than English tragedy
owes to Seneca.
The Influence of Seneca on Drama
Greek drama believed in fate. The heroes
of Greek tragedy had no free will. The gods control man’s destiny and no
one can fight the gods. That is why Greek tragedy had so little influence
on English drama. A Roman playwright called Seneca influenced the English
drama. In his plays, the gods are still in complete power and control but
man can feel that he is better than they are. The gods have the monopoly
of power, but that does not mean that they have, also, the monopoly of
virtue. Due to Seneca’s influence, the first true English tragedy owes
everything, except the plot, to him. Seneca reserved horror and violence
to the language and not to be acted on stage. There were three ways to
be influenced by Seneca. One was to read him in the original, the second
was to read certain French plays which acknowledged his influence. The
third, and most popular way with the Elizabethan dramatists, was to read
the Italian plays that called themselves ‘Senecan’, but were full of horrors
enacted on stage. The first true English tragedy Gorboduc written by Thomas
Norton and Thomas Sackville, and The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, show
Seneca’s influence. It could be summarized in the effect of speaking emotions
out loud, blank verse, the breaking of the line between different speakers
and the use of repetition to give the effect of echo.
The Difference between Greek and Shakespearean
Hero
With the heroes of Greek tragedy there
is no free will. The gods control man’s destiny and one cannot fight the
gods. On the other hand, the Shakespearean hero has the power of choice;
he has free will. It is his own faults of character that bring about his
downfall. Nothing, outside his heroes, prevents them from choosing the
right way as opposed to the wrong. It is because of the big difference
between the Greek view of life and the Christian view of life, the difference
between fate and free will, that the Greek tragedies have had so little
influence on English drama.
English Drama
If we go back to the last days of the
Roman Empire, we can see, in the plays, that condemned men were executed
as part of the action, copulation took place openly on stage, and so the
church condemned such kind of art. Roman theatres were closed. When drama
came back to Europe, it returned back to its place and came in the service
of the church itself. It would seem that the church is concerned with the
theme of Christ’s sacrifice and wanted to show it through drama. We can
also expect that drama was used to make people, who cannot read, understand
the teachings of the church. The language of all these early dramatic pieces
was Latin.
At that time, there were different kinds
of plays; one of them was the ‘Miracle’ play. These plays were about saints,
Christ and miracles. When they were performed in the church usually, a
priest took the role of Christ. After that, plays started to move outside
the church to the churchyard. Then, the word ‘secularization’ started to
appear. That is to say the participation of non-religious men. A priest
could act Christ’s resurrection in the church for that was part of the
church instructions, but on highways and greens, it was a different matter.
Another kind of plays was the ‘Mystery’
plays. These plays were chosen by the trade guilds of the towns of England
for the presentation of a cycle of plays based on incidents from the Bible.
These trade guilds were organizations of skilled men, men gathered together
for the protection of their crafts, and for social purposes. This presentation
of plays became one of the most important of their social activities. Each
guild would choose an episode from the Bible and the episode would usually
be suitable to the craft or trade practiced. Each guild had its own decorated
cart, called a ‘pageant’. It is a sort of portable stage to be dragged
through the town. The upper part of the pageant was a kind of stage. The
plays were presented in order; starting from the creation of the world
and ending with the day of judgement. All these plays are anonymous, but
they have a certain art in language and construction, and they also have
humor.
The secular subjects made their way into
drama through a new kind of religious or semi-religious play, the ‘Morality’
play. It did not take its story from the Bible, but, instead, it tried
to teach a moral lesson through allegory. This kind of play seems to be
telling us something that we did not know before. This is always a sign
of good art. Nevertheless, in the last days of the fifteenth century, we
find it hard to distinguish between the morality play and the ‘Interlude’.
The main difference seems to lie not in theme, but in place and occasion
of performance. An interlude was a short play performed in the middle of
something else, perhaps a feast. We now see two dramatic traditions, an
aristocratic one and a lower-class one. These plays are sheer entertainment,
and their humor is gentle and in excellent taste.
Elizabethan Drama
Introduction:
The story of Elizabethan drama began not
in the theatres but in the Inns of Court of London. The influence of Seneca
on the Elizabethan dramatists was very considerable. This influence was
clear in the use of blank verse, the breaking of the line between speakers,
speaking emotions out loud and reserving horror and violence to the language.
The first true English tragedy owes every thing, except the plot, to him.
Its name is Gorboduc, written by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. It
is about a quarrel over the division of a kingdom that is full of murders
and ends in a civil war. Moreover, the first tragedy to hold the Elizabethan
theatre, which is The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, owed a lot to Seneca.
University Wits:
During the Elizabethan age, there were
men of talent and learning but no money, they could not find a career in
the church and teaching was not an attractive profession. As a result,
writing plays for the new popular theatres was the most suitable field
for those who graduated from Oxford or Cambridge. Their groups were known
as University Wits. Some of the University Wits wrote comedies, such as
Nicholas Udall, John Lyly, George Peele, and Robert Green. On the other
hand, the most important writer of tragedy, who belongs to the same group,
is Christopher Marlowe.
Comedies:
One can start to deal with Elizabethan
comedies by mentioning Nicholas Udall who was a school head master. He
is one of the University Wits who was under the influence of Plautus and
wrote comedies arranged into five acts and several scenes and also modeled
his hero on Plautus’s ‘boastful soldier’. He wrote Ralph Roister Doister
and Gammer Gurton’s Needle, which is about an old village woman who loses
her needle and after upsetting the whole village about it, she finds it
stuck into the trousers of her farm servant. The first really polite dramatist
of the period is John Lyly. He had an elaborate prose style and he used
his skills in writing plays, such as Mother Bombie and Midas. The most
delightful of the pre-Shakespearean comedies is The Old Wives Tale, written
by George Peele. It is about kidnapping, magic, and the world of the supernatural.
Much of the charm of the play lies in its interludes of song and dance.
The last important pre-Shakespearean writer is Robert Greene. His most
remarkable work is Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. The title refers to the
magical power of two friars. It has a plot, a sub plot, and a clown. The
play has freshness, charm and humor.
Tragedies:
The greatest playwright of the public
theatre until Shakespeare is Christopher Marlowe. He was born only a few
weeks before Shakespeare and was murdered in the age of twenty-nine. His
reputation as a dramatist rests on five plays; Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus,
The Jew of Malta, Edward II and Dido Queen of Carthage. In these plays
appears the first true voice of the Renaissance, the period of new learning,
new freedom, new enterprises, the period of worship of man rather than
God. Marlowe sums up the new age. The old restrictions of the church and
the limitation on knowledge have been destroyed. Marlowe is a great poet
and dramatist who might well have become greater even than Shakespeare
is.
Shakespeare
Introduction:
Shakespeare was born in Stradford, made
an unwise marriage there, migrated to London and came back as a wealthy
person. He wanted property, land, and houses. He had no interest in the
reader; only in the audience in the playhouse. In his theatre, there was
no scenery, no period customs, no attempt at convincing the audience that
they were in Ancient Rome, Greece, or Britain. Words are all-important
to Shakespeare; not just the meaning but the sound of words. Shakespeare’s
verbal genius is a lyric one, a musical one.
Shakespeare is always aware of his audience.
This audience had to be given what it wanted, action and blood for the
unlettered, fine phrases and wit for the gallants, thought and debate and
learning for the more scholarly, subtle humor for the refined, clowning
for the unrefined, love interest for the ladies, song and dance for every
body. Shakespeare’s greatness may lie in the consistency of achievement.
He could do well in ‘tragedy’, and could match the ‘comic specialists,
moreover, was able to do strange and great things in fields hardly anyone
touched. Many men wrote plays in his lifetime, but no one achieved the
consistency of excellence in play after play.
Comedies:
The lyrical Shakespeare first manifests
himself in a series of romantic comedies. Love’s Labour’s Lost that was
written for an artistic audience. The Taming of The Shrew, As You Like
it and Twelfth Night which is a fine pastoral comedy. His other comedies
like All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure are not meant primarily
for laughs as in, for example, his Comedy of Errors.
Tragedies:
Shakespeare’s remarkable lyrical tragedy
is Romeo and Juliet. In another tragedy, Hamlet, he sums up the whole of
the dying Elizabethan age. Shakespeare’s tragedies could be clearly represented
through other masterpieces like Macbeth, Othello and King Lear.
Others:
Shakespeare also wrote history plays like
Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Richard II, and Henry IV. While, Cymbeline and
The Tempest could serve as a representation of Shakespeare’s romances.
Elizabethan Dramatists
Introduction + Comedy:
The age of Shakespeare was full of great
men of talent. Shakespeare’s greatest contemporary was Ben Jonson. Jonson’s
aims were different from those of Shakespeare, and we feel from his words
that he does not even like him. Shakespeare followed no rules and had no
dramatic theory, while Jonson was a classicist whose masters were the ancients.
Jonson’s plays obey the rules of unity that of action and time, and he
added to them the unity of place. The action takes less than a day and
the scene never moves from the initial setting. Jonson’s characters are
very simple and they were modeled on the idea of the four humors, sanguine,
choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic; which mixed in different proportions
and gave different human types. His play Every Man in His Humour seems
to be little more than a demonstration of the theory. In each character,
one quality predominates. He also wrote other remarkable comedies like
Volpone and The Alchemist. He is concerned with making his comedy out of
the situations of his own time; he is always contemporary in his themes
and settings. Jonson’s gift, like Shakespeare, is a verbal one, but it
is coupled with sharp observation, a keen sense of satire, and a strong
sense of humour.
Introduction + Tragedy:
The greatest tragic dramatist after Shakespeare
is John Webster. Webster, like Jonson and Shakespeare, has a strong verbal
gift, he is a remarkable poet able to convey a situation or a state of
mind in the fewest possible words. But, he approaches Shakespeare in his
ability to create character, his tortured, haunted creatures in his tragedies,
once known, can never leave the memory. In his play The White Devil, Webster’s
psychology and language raise the plot to a level of high seriousness.
He also wrote The Duchess of Malfi, which is a tale of many murders. Its
climax comes when the Duchess of the title undergoes mental torture from
her brother and his hired villain, and is then strangled with her two children.
After that follow vengeful murders, madness, sublime and terrible poetry.
Webster, despite his small out-put, is very great. Both his tragedies are
visions of hell displaying a verbal power and an imagination that Shakespeare
only could touch.
Tudor Prose
Introduction+Details:
We have to know that the great glory of
the Tudor period is the drama. However, the other forms of literature were
flourishing as well. In the field of prose, translation seems to come first.
A prose literature can only grow by support. This support can, only, be
obtained from foreign sources. That is why translation from the Greek,
Latin, French and Italian make up much of the first Tudor prose.
Contemporary with the Great Tyndale was Sir Thomas Moore, one of the Renaissance
talented men with bold imagination and vision. Moore’s most imaginative
work was written in Latin, Utopia, which is a Greek word for ‘nowhere.
It is a book that depicts an imaginary island, were everything is nearly
perfect. We still use the word ‘Utopia’ to describe the paradise that every
politician promises, the ideal world that men can build on reason and proper
social organisation.
The Novel
To understand the Elizabethan prose we
have to know about spoken English. The Elizabethan people addressed themselves
to the ear rather than the eye. We can feel warmth and intimacy from their
writings. Because of this reason, we have the impression that the author
is talking directly to us. In the prose stories of the Elizabethan age
we see the beginnings of what is to be called ‘novel’. The first true novel
is Don Quixote written by Miguel de Cervantes, which is a very long work.
English novels are more like long short stories, but as stories, they are
good. Certain novels of the ancient world were translated during Shakespeare’s
lifetime. Other novels were more aristocratic and more refined. Nashe’s
The Unfortunate Traveler is a tale full of astonishing dialogue and description
and the strangest adventures. Moreover, Sir. Philip Sidney wrote Arcadia,
which is a long fantastic tale of aristocrats shipwrecked on an ideal island.
The Elizabethan age is full of brilliant books about all the subjects under
the sun.
Despite the interesting verse of the age, what still holds the general
reader is its prose. Defoe, Swift, and Fielding are the most famous of
the age. Daniel Defoe was a journalist, he did not see himself as a literary
artist; he had things to say to the public, and he said them as clearly
as he could. There are no stylistic tricks in his writings, but there is
the flavor of colloquial speech. He was like Swift, capable of irony. Robinson
Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Roxana, and others could best exemplify his achievements.
These works were shown as real events not fiction. Defoe avoids all art,
all fine writing, so the reader should concentrate only on the events and
regard them not as a story, but an autobiography.
The greatest novelist of the century is Henry Feilding. With him we have
to use the term ‘Picaresque’, it is applied when the leader character in
a novel is a rogue. It is also used when the low-life characters appear.
Tom Jones is Fielding’s masterpiece. It has its picaresque elements, the
theme of the journey occupies the greater part of the book, but it would
be more accurate to describe it as a mock epic. The novel introduces a
rich variety of characters and a moral observation. It is recognizing the
social conventions, but much more concerned with reform or law.
Picaresque novel:
In the picaresque novel, a lower-class
hero wanders from place to place, suffering hunger and humiliation before
learning to survive by his or her cleverness and adaptability. In
16th-century Spain, where the style became popular, this sort of roguish
hero was called a picaro. Picaresque adventures were usually humorous;
the tone of voice mock innocent and satirical, and the hero or heroine
was almost always the narrator. Many early picaresque works may in
fact have been masked autobiographies.
Epistolary novel:
The epistolary form was familiar among
the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. The
Greek philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus made notable use of it. Twenty-one
books of the New Testament are epistles written by the apostles to members
of the early church. Since the Renaissance the epistle, in verse and prose,
has held a prominent place in literature. Examples of the literary epistle
are Lettres provinciales (1656-57), by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal;
the Drapier's Letters (1724-25), by the English satirist Jonathan Swift;
and An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), in verse, by the English poet Alexander
Pope.
