English Literature Until 1800

English Literature Until 1800

- Literature:
Words: meaning, arbitrary rounds (not in a poem), with a communicative purpose
Imagination: inventing; explain, express feelings (“how it is said”)
Purpose: aesthetics, beauty, convincing element
Character: heroes, antiheroes, people, lyrical I/biographical I, individual person
StructureART
[pic]
LANGUAGE REALITY
Extra-ordinary use of language (rethorical figures: used to convince)

OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH

OLD ENGLISH (VI-XI):
Religious literature:
- Caedmon’s Hymn
- Historia Ecclesiastica (Bede) (731): history of English people.
Secular literature:
- Heroic poetry: epic poem, with classical and barbarian examples.+ Beowulf: it is divided in two parts: a) he kills Grendel and his mother. He is not a king; b) he has to kill a dragon but he is wounded, so at the end, he dies.
It is a long poem. Its author is anonymous (it might be a Christian monk). It originated as a pagan saga transmitted orally from one generation to the next.
The hero has to sacrifice his life for his people: this is theChristian idea.
Grendel is considered to be a descendant of Cain or Satan, so he represented the devil.
There are a lot of references to the Old Testament. It is a mixture of history and mythical tradition (reality vs. fiction).
It is written in Old English and we have only four manuscripts in which Old English poetry is preserved:
Cotton Vitellius (where Beowulf appears)
JuniusExeter
Vercelli
Beowulf is written in lines which have a “caesura”, divided in two parts. Each part has two stresses. The first stress of the second part is going to be repited.
Style: Hyperbatons: syntactical disorder
Enjambment: (double pattern: syntax and metre) the sentence finishes at the
next line.
Kenning: a type of a primitivemetaphor which substitutes a word with two
words.
+ Battle of Maldon: epic poem
+ The Seafarer: lyrical poem
+ The Wanderer: lyrical poem
IX (prose)
Alfred: (871-899)
King of the west Saxons. He worried about culture and he translated the most important Latin texts. He also encouraged writing in the vernacular.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (a collection of annals of theAnglo-Saxons) was supported economically by Alfred and it was about informative prose. So it can be called “the first newspaper”.
William:
He introduced some European elements in England. He simplified the structure, vocabulary and spelling of English language. He also created London as a political, geographical and economical centre.
William imported the aristocratic taste (modern approach toliterature) from France and Europe.
He created differences between the King and his courts and the rest of the country (internal division).

MIDDLE ENGLISH (XII-XV)
French cultural dominance, moreover, was general in Europe at this time. French language and culture replaced English in polite court society and had lasting effects on English culture. But the native tradition survived, althoughlittle 13th-century, and even less 12th-century, vernacular literature is extant, since most of it was transmitted orally. Anglo-Saxon fragmented into several dialects and gradually evolved into Middle English, which, despite an admixture of French, is unquestionably English. By the mid-14th cent., Middle English had become the literary as well as the spoken language of England.
XII-XIII
LatinHistory of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth (1136): It was a historical work, considered a fiction work because it speaks about the legend of King Arthur or Brutus.
French
Conventions/bases of the French society (service, honour and obligation)
Epic myths but the English versions= Arthurian romances
English
-Religious:
Ormulum by Orm (a monk) (1200)
Ancrene Riwle (1300): about the...