HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (part 1)
READING LIST
Old English Literature
“The Wanderer”, “The Seafarer”, “Deor’s Lament”
“Charm for Unfruitful Land”, “For a Swarm of Bees”
Beowulf
The Dream of the Rood
Supplementary list:
“The Wife’s Lament”
“The Husband’s Message”
“The Lover’s Message”
“The Battle of Maldon”
Riddles: Cuckoo, Horn.
Middle English Literature
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
English Medieval Drama: Everyman or Mankind
Supplementary list:
Layamon: Brut (fragments)
Marie de France: Lais
John Gower: Confessio Amantis
Thomas Malory: Morte d’Arthur (fragments)
Julian of Norwich: Showings of Divine Love
(fragments)
Margery Kempe: The Book of Margery Kempe
(fragments)
York Mystery cycle
Mundus et Infans
Henry Medwall: Fulgens et Lucrece.
Renaissance Literature
Thomas Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy
Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
Thomas Wyatt: selected sonnets
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: selected sonnets
William Shakespeare: Sonnets (2, 18, 20, 55, 73, 106, 116, 130, 136, 141, 144, 147)
William Shakespeare: As You Like It, A Mid Summer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, The Tempest
Ben Jonson: Volpone
Philip Sidney: Apology for Poetry
Metaphysical Poetry
John Donne: “Valediction: Forbidden Mourning”, “The Flea”, “Elegy XIX”, “The Anniversary”
George Herbert: “The Collar”, “The Pearl”
Cavalier Poetry
Robert Herrick: “The Hock-cart, or Harvest Home”, “The Argument of His Book”
Richard Crashaw: “The Weeper”, “The Flaming Heart”
Andrew Marvell: “To His Coy Mistress”, “The Definition of Love”
Supplementary list:
Christopher Marlowe: Hero and Leander (fragments)
Edmund Spencer: The Fairie Queen (Canto I from “The First
Book”)
John Milton: Paradise Lost (Books I and II)
Thomas Heywood: The Four P’s
John Lyly: Endimion, Eupheus (fragments)
William Shakespeare: Henry IV, Measure for Measure
Ben Jonson: Bartholomew Fair
Thomas Dekker: Shoemaker’s Holiday
John Webster: The Duchess of Malfi
Thomas More: Utopia (fragments)
John Donne: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
(“Meditation XVII”)
Augustan Classicism
Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock
The beginning of the novel
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
Samuel Richardson: Pamela (fragments)
Henry Fielding: Tom Jones (fragments)
Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy (fragments)
One selected gothic novel: Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (or Anne Radcliffe: The Mysteries
of Udolpho; Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, M.G. Lewis: The Monk)
Supplementary list:
John Bunyan: Pilgrim’s Progress
Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year
Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey
Tobias Smollett: The Expedition of Peregrine Pickle.
Romanticism
Robert Burns: “To a Mouse”, “Auld Lang Syne”, “Tam O’Shanter”
William Blake: “The Lamb”, “The Tyger”, “The Little Vagabond”, “Holy Thursday”, “The Chimney
Sweeper” (both from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience)
Romanticism
Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice
William Wordsworth: “The Preface to Lyrical Ballads”, “We Are Seven”, “Tintern Abbey”, “Lines
Written in Early Spring”, “The Prelude” - part I
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “Kubla Khan”, Biografia Literaria chapter XIV
George Gordon Byron: Don Juan (cantos I, II, X, XI), “When We Two Parted”
Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Ode to the West Wind”, “The Cloud”
John Keats: “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode to a Grecian Urn”
Supplementary list:
Maria Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent
Fanny Burney: Evelina
Matthew Lewis: The Monk
William Beckford: Vathek
Walter Scott: Waverley
James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner.
HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (part 1)
CLASSES
1. Old English poetry: “The Wanderer”, “The Seafarer”, “Deor’s Lament”, “Charm for Unfruitful
Land”.
a) secular literature: courtly literature, elegies, laments, lyrical poems
b) pagan and Christian elements, characteristic features of charms
c) the reality of life in Anglo-Saxon England, the bond between the lord and his warriors, the
motifs of exile, ruin, solitude, transitory nature of human splendour, Ubi sunt motif, the
hardships of sea-life, the Anglo-Saxon values, loss and consolation, contrast between the past
and present condition, etc.
2. Beowulf (fragments), “The Dream of the Rood”
a) Germanic and Scandinavian sources, myth and folklore.
b) Beowulf as an example of courtly literature. Germanic court and customs.
c) Beowulf as a heroic and an epic poem (definition of an epic, the role of the genre in literature;
protagonists and their actions, heroic society, historical reality vs. the supernatural realm,
Anglo-Saxon values, style and language: description, literary figures etc.)
d) Christian and pagan elements. Pre-Christian mores infiltrated through Christian awareness.
e) characteristics of OE religious poetry, parallels and differences between Dream of the Rood
and heroic poetry
f) definitions: dream vision technique, personification and prosopopoeia.
3. Middle English literature: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
a) a romance hero and his code of behaviour (moral vs. physical strength, chivalric code).
b) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as an example of courtly literature.
c) symbols in Sir Gawain (number three, the pentangle, the girdle, the green colour). Structure of
the poem.
d) pagan vs. Christian elements in Sir Gawain.
4. Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (The General Prologue, “The Miller’s Tale” and “The
Knight’s Tale”)
a) the form of The Canterbury Tales: the motif of a pilgrimage, frame story, links, iambic
pentameter, heroic couplet.
b) The Canterbury Tales as an encyclopaedia of literary genres: romances, saints’ lives or pious
tales, exempla, fabliaux, folk tales, etc.
c) ways of character drawing: characters representing all ranks of English society – panorama of
medieval society; detailed descriptions of characters; irony, satire, realism.
d) low culture and high culture.
5. TEST: Medieval Literature.
Christopher Marlowe: Dr Faustus.
a) Renaissance and medieval elements;
b) medieval legend of the pact with the devil;
c) central character (Faustus as a new man, an epitome of Renaissance aspirations and their
deterioration);
d) language, structure and technical devices (blank verse).
6. William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Thomas Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy.
a) tragedy (definition of a tragedy, influence of Seneca, revenge tragedies; dramatic irony,
hamartia, catharsis, comic relief).
b) Thomas Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy
- The Spanish Tragedy as a Renaissance play
-
medieval elements
revenge tragedy: the definition, characteristic features.
language, structure and technical devices (sub-plot, play-within-the-play, monologues and
soliloquies)
7. William Shakespeare: King Lear (Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet)
a) characteristic features of Shakespearean tragedy (the role of the Fool in King Lear, the
metaphors of madness and blindness, the significance of love contest, the vision of family and
its universal implications, the supernatural elements – the three weird sisters in Macbeth, the
Ghost in Hamlet, the inner conflict, hesitation, exploration of human passions, questions of
morality, etc.)
b) technical devices in Shakespearean theatre (subplots, play-within-the-play, theatrical rhetoric,
soliloquies, monologues, asides, on-stage and off-stage audiences, functioning of prologues
and epilogues, comic relief, etc.
8. Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest:
the concept of comedy (the definition, romantic comedy, idyll, pastoral, comedy vs. tragedy).
sources of Elizabethan comedy (folklore, pagan traditions, medieval interludes, antique comedy
etc.).
sources of comic effects in Shakespeare’s comedies (tragic elements in Shakespearean comedy).
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- the title of the play
- attitudes to love
- the three worlds (the fairies, the young lovers, the mechanicals)
- folk elements
- the real and the illusory, law vs. magic, reality vs. theatre
- ‘the concord of discords’ – language, characters, love.
Shakespeare: The Tempest
- a tragicomedy (the definition of a tragicomedy, tragic and comic elements, the ending of
the play).
- theatre and theatricality (theatre within a theatre, a masque, the world as a stage, theatrical
illusion, Prospero as a director).
- illusions vs. reality.
- the function of magic, white magic of Prospero vs. black magic of Sycorax.
- nature vs. culture.
- the concept of ‘the other’ (Caliban – the native inhabitant); the problem of colonisation.
- the role of the epilogue, Shakespeare’s farewell to the theatre.
- definitions: a masque, Shakespearean romance utopia.
9. Thomas Wyatt: selected sonnets; Henry Howard: selected sonnets; Shakespeare: selected sonnets.
Philip Sydney: Apology for Poetry.
a) definition of a sonnet
b) three basic sonnet forms: Petrarchan, Spenserian, Shakespearean
c) Shakespeare’s sonnets:
- the sonnet cycle; the order of sonnets
- the characters in the sonnets
- recurrent themes (love, time, death, begetting children, creating poetry, etc.)
- anti-Petrarchan tradition
- Platonic and sexual love
10. Metaphysical poetry: John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell.
a) the origin of the term
b) characteristic features of metaphysical poetry (metaphysical conceits and the source of
conceit, discordia concors, balance between reason and emotion, dramatic nature of
metaphysical verse, the tone of persuasion).
c) recurrent motifs (angelic vs. beastly nature of man, images of sensual love, death, love, God).
11. TEST: Renaissance Literature
Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock.
a) the theory and practice of Neoclassicism in the poetry of Alexander Pope.
b) Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism
- Pope’s concept of art
- Pope’s understanding of Nature (Nature methodised)
- rules for writing poetry, influence of the poets of classical Antiquity.
- decorum, property, poetic diction
- causes of bad criticism
c) Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock.
- mock-heroic poem (characteristic features)
- supernatural machinery, theme and language
- satire
12. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (fragments)
a) early definitions of the novel – counter-distinction with romance
b) formal realism (the novel's assimilation of the forms of factual literature).
c) Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
- Robinson Crusoe as a novel (autobiography, diary)
- individualism, the rise of the middle class
- Robinson as homo economicus (personal relations viewed in terms of commodity value,
ethos of work, every stage of economic development is described etc.)
- colonialism and the attitude to ‘the other’ (Friday as ‘the other’, Robinson’s attitude to
him; the island as a land to cultivate and civilise etc.)
- religion (puritan doctrine, Bibliolatry, individual contact with God, etc.)
d) Gulliver’s Travels
- travel accounts, geographical discoveries
- Gulliver’s Travels as a political and philosophical satire (relativity of truth, corruption of
court life, critique of reason, irony).
13. Romantic literature: William Wordsworth: “The Preface to Lyrical Ballads”, “We Are Seven”,
“Tintern Abbey”, “Lines Written in Early Spring”, “The Prelude” (part 1).
a) Romantic idea of poetry and its role – “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (language and subject of
poetry, the role of feeling and sympathy, etc.)
b) the role of the poet – “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (“a man speaking to men”, the poet as a
teacher and “translator” of feelings, etc.)
c) Romantic attitude to Nature: contemplation of Nature, Nature as the source of morality, Man
and his place in Nature, etc. (“Lines Written in Early Spring”, “Tintern Abbey”, The Prelude).
d) Folk elements in Wordsworth poetry - “We Are Seven” (the language of his poetry, the
ballad, the supernatural etc.).
e) Children and their perception of the world – “We Are Seven”, The Prelude.
14. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “Kubla Khan”, Biografia Literaria
– chapter XIV
a) Biographia Literaria (roles of a poet and poetry, definition of poetry, form and subjects of
poetry, approaches to nature, the supernatural)
b) “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (the supernatural, the romantic hero, symbols, dreams,
Nature, etc.)
c) “Kubla Khan” (dream-vision, the source of poetry, symbols, etc.).
15. Percy Byssie Shelley: “Ode to the West Wind”, “The Cloud”; John Keats: “Ode to a Nightingale”,
“Ode to a Grecian Urn”
a) Percy Bysshe Shelley:
- ode – a definition.
the force of chaos in Shelley’s poems, the properties and symbolism of wind and autumn
(‘Ode to the West Wind’)
- the idea of revolution (as reinvigoration)
- the role of the poet and his powers (“Ode to the West Wind”, “The Cloud”)
- poetic inspiration
b) John Keats
- the relation between art and life
- the function of fancy/art and Death
- the significance of images on the urn
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HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (part 1)
LECTURES
1. Old English literature: historical background (Anglo-Saxon conquest, Germanic legends, social
life in Anglo-Saxon England, the advent of Christianity and its effects); early forms of OE writing:
runic alphabet, the advent of Latin alphabet, manuscripts, charms, inscriptions, gnomes, memory
jingles.
2. Old English literature (cont.): formal features of OE literature: formulaic language, alliteration and
alliterative line, anonymity, oral literature, kennings.
3. Middle English literature: historical background – the Norman Conquest, the influence of Norman
language, culture and literature; social origins of romantic love (social position of women in the
feudal aristocracy; marriage as a political act; courtly love); the medieval romance (sources of
medieval romance, subject matter, the Arthurian cycle, legends; characteristic features of romance;
most frequent motifs, style); chanson de gestes, lays.
4. Medieval theatre: origins of the medieval drama (tropes, liturgical dramas); different types of
medieval drama (mystery, miracle and morality plays, interludes) and their characteristic features;
the most frequent motifs: death, dance macabre, ars moriendi, memento mori, struggle between
good and evil, psychomachia, character drawing etc.; the morality play as an allegory; examples of
morality plays.
5. Renaissance: historical background (the Tudors, the Reformation, humanism, geographical
discoveries etc.)
6. Renaissance theatre and theatre conventions; University Wits; Shakespeare’s contemporaries
(Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Webster etc.); dramatic genres.
7. The Puritan Age, the Restoration, the Augustan Age: historical background (the Civil War,
influence of Puritanism etc.); literature of the period; Restoration theatre.
8. Alexander Pope: Augustan ideas about art and literature, imitation of ancient models, satire, mock
epic etc.
9. The beginning of the novel; formal realism; Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Daniel Defoe’s fiction.
10. The beginning of the novel (cont.): a self-conscious novel, an epistolary novel; novelistic
conventions, a novel as an artefact, an anti-novel Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.
11. The second half of the 18th c., preromanticism; criticism of neoclassical rules; sentimentalism,
gothic novel and gothic romance: characteristic features (counterpoint to Neoclassical decorum,
character drawing, supernatural elements, setting, the role of nature etc.)
12. Romanticism: a historical background; romantic ideas of poetry.
13. William Blake (romantic elements in Blake’s poetry, innocence and experience, the visionary
quality of Blake’ poetry, Blake’s philosophy, mysticism, idea of the universe, Swedenborg,
rational and mystical elements, children and their reality) and Robert Burns (the source of
language of Burns’ poetry, folk tradition, Burns’ attitude to nature, humanistic views).
14. The novel of the romantic period (different genres, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, fascination with
history etc.)
15. George Gordon Byron (‘Byronic hero’, passionate love, Nature, etc.; Don Juan – an epic poem,
influence of 18th century literature; criticism of Romantic idea of imagination, love, nature, etc.
elements of crude realism, the role of the reader, form and structure of the poem, individualism,
indignation).