Literature in Context
Lecture 10
Period Study
Literary History
Cultural Memory
Postcolonial Studies
Literatures in English
Literature in Context
Period Study, Literary History, Cultural Memory,
Literatures in English, Postcolonial Studies, Literary
Translation are interrelated notions or approaches to
the study of literature.
They are attempts at a scientific approach to literature,
they propose related ways of a systematic study of
literature and its phenomena.
Literature in Context
University curricula:
based on literary kinds
based on literary periods
based on individual authors
based on literary theories
based on social context
Literary Periods
Dominant Qualities
Defining literary periods: based on dominant qualities.
Dominant qualities colour most elements of
intellectual life in a given culture at a certain time
– also influence art, music, architecture,
landscape gardening, philosophy, politics, etc.
• a few broad tendencies in common at a high level of
abstraction
• with individual, temporal, local variations
• subordinate currents exist as well as dominant ones
• declining and emergent energies
e.g. New Historicism takes this line of study
How to examine a literary period:
how it is framed by a set of significant events
The Renaissance in England, for example:
•
•
•
•
the first visit of Erasmus (1499),
Caxton's printing press at Westminster (1476),
the discovery of America (1492),
the court of the young Henry VIII
(on the throne: 1491-1547),
• the Protestant Reformation,
• Copernicus's new astronomy (1543),
• the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603)
How to examine a literary period:
priorities in its views
• features certain priorities in its views concerning the
world and art
• e.g., in Classicism: balance, form, proportion,
propriety (good taste, good manners correctness,
otherwise known as decorum), dignity, simplicity,
objectivity, rationality, restraint, responsibility
(rather than self-expression), unity (rather than
diversity)
How to examine a literary period:
views of humans, favourite genres
• promotes a certain view of humankind
e.g., in Romanticism: the celebration of the
individual
• uses specific genres (rather than others)
e.g., in 19th c. Realism: the novel with its details, its
particularisation of the lives of ordinary people
How to examine a literary period:
favourite subjects, favourite forms
• favours certain subjects for art
e.g., in Modernism: inner individual perception
(impressionistic presentation, stream of
consciousness technique, such as in Virginia
Woolf's Mrs Dalloway)
• shows characteristic formal elements (including the
• example above)
e.g., in Postmodernism: Narcissistic narrative:
intruding into one's own fiction to ponder upon
its powers
A literary trend may not correspond exactly to a cultural
period, e.g., Postmodernism and the Post-Modern Period.
Literary period:
horizontal or vertical study
• The study of High Modernism
• 1928 in literature in England
in the historical context of the UK
in the artistic or social or political context of
continental Europe
in the life of Virginia Woolf
• The history of literature
The history of literature
history of literature: a series of literary periods
connections may be established among texts
(see “Leda and the Swan”)
allusion,
intertextuality: interdependence of texts through
genre, conventions
vs traditional notions of influence: study of direct
sources
How is literature read, or judged?
Yet another way of looking at literature: how it was
read, by whom, how it was judged
• readership, horizon(s) of expectations
(Hans Robert Jauss)
• How do you judge a piece of literature? Do you have
to? Should you? Can you avoid doing so? How do
you select a work or period to be studied? Can
evaluation change reading? Can evaluation prevent
reading?
• How are literary canons formed?
• Literary canon – selection, exclusion, promotion
Period Study. Literary History.
"Dates and periods are necessary to the study and
discussion of history, for historical phenomena are
conditioned by time and are produced by the sequence
of events. […] But, unlike dates, ‘periods’ are not facts.
They are retrospective conceptions that we form about
past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often
leading historical thought astray.”
G. M. Trevelyan: English Social History.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1942) 1970, 107
Literary Histories
A few examples
Michael Alexander:
A History of English Literature.
Third Edition. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
Saintsbury, George: A Short History of English
Literature. London: Macmillan, (1898) 1953
The Preliminaries of English Literature
•
The Earliest Anglo-Saxon Poetry
•
Caedmon, Cynewulf, and Those about Them
•
Angol-Saxon Prose
•
The Decadense of Anglo-Saxon
The Making of English Literature
•
The Transition
•
First Middle English Period (1200-1250)
•
Second Middle English Period (1300-1360)
•
Early Romances – Metrical
5.
Early Romances – Alliterative
Saintsbury, cont.
Chaucer and His Contemporaries
1.
Chaucer’s Life and Poems
2.
Langland and Gower
3.
Chaucer’s Prose – Wyclif, Trevisa, Mandeville
The Fifteenth Century
1.
The English Chaucerians – Lydgate to Skelton
2.
The Scottish Poets – Historical, Political, and Minor
3.
The Four Great Scottish Poets (The King’s Quair, Henryson,
Dunbar, Douglas)
4.
Later Romances in Prose and Verse
5.
Minor Poetry and Ballads
6.
Miscellaneous Prose
Saintsbury, cont.
Elizabethan Literature to the Death of Spenser
1.
Preliminaries – Drama
2.
Preliminaries – Prose
3.
Prelminaries – Verse
4.
Spenser and His Contemporaries
5.
The University Wits (Peele, Green, Marlowe, Kyd, Lodge,
Nash)
6.
Lyly and Hooker – The Translators, Pamphleteers and Critics
Later Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature
1.
Shakespeare
2.
Shakespeare’s Contemporaries in Drama
3.
The Schools of Jacobean Poetry
4.
Jacobean Prose – Secular
5.
The Golden Age of English Pulpit - I
Saintsbury, cont.
Caroline Literature
1.
Blank Verse and the New Couplet
2.
The Metaphysicals – The Lyric Poets – The Miscellansts, etc.
3.
The Drama till the Closing of the THeatres
4.
The Golden Age of the English Pulpit – II
5.
Miscellanous Prose
6.
Scots Poetry and Prose
The Augustan Ages
1.
The Age of Dryden – Poetry
2.
The Age of Dryden – Drama
3.
The Age of Dryden - Prose
Saintsbury, cont.
4.
5.
Queen Anne Prose (Swift, Steele, Addison, etc.)
Pope and His Elder Contemporaries in Verse
Middle and Later Eighteenth-Century Literature
1.
The Poets from Thomson to Crabbe
2.
The Eighteenth-Century Novel
3.
Johnson, Goldsmith, and the Later Essayists
4.
The Graver Prose
5.
Eighteenth-Century Drama
6.
Miscellaneous Writers
The Triumph of Romance
1. The Poets from Coleridge to Keats
Saintsbury, cont.
2.
3.
4.
5.
The Novel – Scott and Miss Austen
The New Essay (Lamb, Hunt, Hazlitt, De Quincey, etc.)
The Last Georgian Prose
The Minor Poets of 1800-1830
Victorian Literature
1.
Tennyson and Browning
2.
The Victorian Novel (Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë,
George Eliot, etc.)
3.
History and Criticism (Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, etc.)
4.
Poetry since the Middle of the Century
5.
Miscellaneous (J. S. Mill, Darwin, etc.)
Baugh, Albert C.: A Literary History of England.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948
Book I. The Middle Ages
1.
The old English Period (to 1100)
2.
The Middle English Period (1100-1500)
Book II. The Renaissance
1.
The Early Tudors (1485-1558)
2.
The Reign of Elizabeth (1558-1603)
3.
The Early Stuarts and The Commonwealth (1603-1660)
Book III. The Restauration and Eighteenth Century (1660-1789)
1.
The Rise of Classicism
2.
Classicism and Journalism
3.
The Disintegration of Classicism
Book IV. The Nineteenth Century and After
Dodsworth, Martin, ed.: The Penguin History of
Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, (1970)
1994
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
[8.
9.
The Middle Ages
English Poetry and Prose 1540-1674
English Drama to 1710
Dryden to Johnson
The Romantic Period
The Victorians
The Twentieth Century
American Literature to 1900
American Literature since 1900]
Ford, Boris, ed.: The New Pelican Guide to English
Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, (1983)
1990
1.
Medieval Literature
Part One: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition
Part Two: The European Inheritance
2. The Age of Shakespeare
3. From Donne to Marvell
4. From Dryden to Johnson
5. From Blake to Byron
6. From Dickens to Hardy
7. From James to Eliot
8. The Present
[9. American Literature]
Penguin
Pelican
Daiches, David: A Critical History of English Literature.
4 vols. London: Secker and Warburg, (1960) 1969
1.
2.
From the Beginnings to the Sixteenth Century
Shakespeare to Milton
[Shakespeare
Drama from Jonson to the Closing of the Theatres
Milton
Prose in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Scottish Literature to 1700]
4.
The Restoration to 1800
The Romantics to the Present Day
+
The Present Age in British Literature
3.
(Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, (1958) 1969
David Daiches
Perkins, David: A History of Modern Poetry. From the
1890s to the High Modernist Mode. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1976
1. Poetry around the Turn of the Century
2. Poetry in Rapport with a Public
3. Popular Modernism
[The New Poetry of America
Imagism
Poetry for Democracy
Conservative and Regional Poets of America
Black Poets of America: The First Phase
British Poetry after the War, 1918-1928]
4. The Beginnings of the High Modernist Mode
Perkins, David: A History of Modern Poetry. Modernism
and After. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1987
1.
The Age of High Modernism
[The Ascendancy of T. S. Eliot, 1925-1950
Eliot’s Later Career
Modes of Modern Style in the United States
Hart Crane
The Poetry of Critical Intelligence
The Period Style of the 1930s in England
W. H. Auden
The English Romantic Revival]
1.
2.
The Resurgence of Pound, Williams, and Stevens
Postmodernism
Period Studies
Innes, Christopher: Modern British Drama 1890-1990.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992
Proceeds by a mixture of chronological, generic,
cultural and theoretical features
Bradbury, Malcolm: The Modern British Novel 1878
2001. London: Penguin Books, 2001
Proceeds by chronology, each decade a
characteristic quality is attributed to
Period Studies
Childs, Peter: The Twentieth
Century in Poetry. A Critical
Survey. London and New York:
Routledge, 1999
Proceeds by a mixture of
chronological, generic, cultural
and theoretical features.
Period Studies
Bradbury, Malcolm; McFarlane, James, eds.:
Modernism. A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930.
London: Penguin Books (1976) 1991
1. The Name and nature of Modernism
2. The Cultural and Intellectual Climate of Modernism
3. A Geography of Modernism
4. Literary Movements
5. The Lyric Poetry of Modernism
6. The Modernist Novel
7. Modernist Drama
Histories of Genres
Allen, Walter: The English Novel. Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books (1954) 1958
Grierson, Herbert J. C.; Smith, J. C.: A Critical History
of English Poetry. New Jersey: Humanities Press,
London: Athlone Press (1944) 1983
Cultural Memory
How we create an image of the past,
How we make sense of our past from our present,
How we understand ourselves and our past,
What stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves,
What we choose to remember or forget,
How we explain the reasons why we remember or
forget something,
How we make sure that we hand over the memories
that matter to us
Cultural Memory as a Concept
• Introduced to the archaeological disciplines by Jan
Assmann
Assman’s definition: the "outer dimension of human
memory"
• "memory culture“ (Erinnerungskultur)
• "reference to the past“ (Vergangenheitsbezug)
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/2.0.html
Cultural Memory
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory
As a term, cultural memory was first introduced by the
German Egyptologists Jan Assmann in his book Das
kulturelle Gedächtnis (1992). Assmann and fellow
scholars have identified a general interest in memory
and mnemonics since the early 1980s, illustrated by
phenomena as diverse as memorials and retro-culture.
Some might see cultural memory as becoming more
democratic, due to liberalization and the rise of new
media. Others see cultural memory as remaining
concentrated in the hands of corporations and states.
Cultural Memory
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory
Because memory is not just an individual, private
experience but is also part of the collective domain,
cultural memory has become a topic in both
historiography and cultural studies.
These emphasize cultural memory’s process
(historiography) and its implications and objects
(cultural studies), respectively.
Memory is a phenomenon that is directly related to the
present; our perception of the past is always
influenced by the present, which means that it is
always changing.
Cultural Memory
Historiographical approach
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory
Crucial in understanding cultural memory as a
phenomenon is the distinction between memory and
history. This distinction was put forward by Pierre
Nora, who pinpointed a niche in-between history and
memory. Simply put, memories are the events that
actually happened, while histories are subjective
representations of what historians believe is crucial to
remember. This dichotomy, it should be noted,
emerged at a particular moment in history: it implies
that there used to be a time when memories could exist
as such — without being representational.
Cultural Memory
Historiographical approach
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory
Scholars disagree as to when to locate the moment
representation 'took over'. Nora points to the formation
of European nation states. For Richard Terdiman, the
French revolution is the breaking point: the change of
a political system, together with the emergence of
industrialization and urbanization, made life more
complex than ever before. This not only resulted in an
increasing difficulty for people to understand the new
society in which they were living, but also, as this
break was so radical, people had trouble relating to the
past before the revolution. In this situation, people no
longer had an implicit understanding of their past.
Cultural Memory
Historiographical approach
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory
In order to understand the past, it had to be
represented through history. As people realized that
history was only one version of the past, they became
more and more concerned with their own cultural
heritage (in French called patrimoine) which helped
them shape a collective and national identity.
Cultural Memory
Historiographical approach
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory
In search for an identity to bind a country or people
together, governments have constructed collective
memories in the form of commemorations which
should bring and keep together minority groups and
individuals with conflicting agendas.
The obsession with memory coincides with the fear of
forgetting and the aim for authenticity.
Cultural Memory
Historiographical approach
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory
However, more recently questions have arisen whether
there ever was a time in which 'pure', nonrepresentational memory existed. Representation is a
crucial precondition for human perception in general:
pure, organic and objective memories can never be
witnessed as such.
Cultural Memory
In an oral tradition, all cultural representations are
easily remembered ones; hard-to-remember
representations are forgotten, or transformed into
more easily remembered ones, before reaching a
cultural level of distribution.
Sperber, Dan: Explaining Culture. A Naturalistic
Approach. Malden, MSA: Blackwell, 1996, 74
Cultural Memory
Cultural Studies approach
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory
Recently, interest has developed in the area of
'embodied memory'. The body can be seen as a
container, or carrier of memory.
Memory can be contained in objects. Souvenirs and
photographs inhabit an important place in the cultural
memory discourse.
Cultural Memory
Cultural Studies approach
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory
Another practice that has a specific relationship with
memory is photography. The act of taking a picture can
underline the importance of remembering, both
individually and collectively.
Pictures cannot only stimulate or help memory, but can
rather eclipse the actual memory – when we remember
in terms of the photograph – or they can serve as a
reminder of our propensity to forget.
Cultural Memory
Between Culture and Memory: Experience
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory
The rise of gender and postcolonial studies
underscored the importance of the individual and
particular memories of those unheard in most
collective accounts: women, minorities, homosexuals,
etc.
Experience, whether it be lived or imagined, relates
mutually to culture and memory. It is influenced by
both factors, but determines these at the same time.
Cultural Memory
Between Culture and Memory: Experience
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory
Culture influences experience by offering mediated
perceptions that affect it. In turn, experience affects
culture, since individual experience becomes
communicable and therefore collective.
A memorial, for example, can represent a shared sense
of loss.
Experience is substantial to the interpretation of
culture as well as memory, and vice versa.
Dublin
General Post Office
The Death of Cuchulain
(1911) by Oliver Sheppard
Cultural Memory
Assmann, Jan: Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift,
Erinnerung und Politische Identität in frühen
Hochkulturen. Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1992
Nora, Pierre: 'Between Memory and History: Les Lieux
de Mémoire'. Representations, 26, 1989, 7–25.
“Memory Culture”
The way a society ensures cultural continuity
by preserving, with the help of cultural mnemonics, its
collective knowledge from one generation to the next,
rendering it possible for later generations to
reconstruct their cultural identity.
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/2.0.html
“Reference to the Past”
• Reassure the members of a society of their
collective identity and supply them with an
awareness of their unity and singularity in time and
space—i.e., an historical consciousness—
by creating a shared past
• It can involve rituals and ceremonies at special
occasions such as commemoration days, and at
special places such as ancient monuments, which
function as timemarks and sites of memory
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/2.0.html
Forms of Cultural Memory
Formal – institutional – private – personal
• History
• Schools, subjects, syllabi, exams
• Religion
• Holidays (public, national, religious, private rituals)
• Anecdotes
• Memories
• Controversial, minority views, counter-narratives
Cultural Memory and Literature
Literary works – popular, canonical
History of literature
- of a language
- of a nation
Representation of a literature or culture in another
literature or culture:
stereotypes
popular images
history of their literature
Cultural memory at DES, SEAS
British Literature in the Hungarian Cultural Memory
project at the Department of English Studies, dir. Prof.
Ágnes Péter
Cultural Memory and Literature
An international conference (24–25 Sept, 2010)
http://kulturalisemlekezet.blogspot.com/
Cultural memory resources
Cultural Memory, Collective Memory sites
Brief introduction to names and concepts:
http://www.collectivememory.net/2009/12/culturalmemory-and-communicative.html
Up to date academic info on projects and conferences:
http://www.collectivememory.net/
Definition with interpretation and sources before 2000:
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/2.0.html
Cultural Memory Texts
Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural
Identity”
Collective Memory and Cultural Identity - JStor
www.jstor.org/stable/488538
Recent publications:
Cultural Memory Studies: An International and
Interdisciplinary Handbook. Astrid Erll, Ansgar
Nunning eds. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008
Series: Cultural Memory in the Present ed. Mieke Bal
and Hent de Vries, Stanford UP
http://www.sup.org/browse.cgi?x=series&y=Cultural%2
0Memory%20in%20the%20Present
Studying Cultural Memory
Center for the Study of Cultural Memory at the
University of London
http://www.igrs.sas.ac.uk/centre-study-culturalmemory
University of Brighton
http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/study/postgrad/culturalhistory-memory-identity-ma
The Centre for Bible and Cultural Memory, Faculty of
Theology, Copenhagen:
http://www.teol.ku.dk/english/dept/bicum/
Literatures in English
Postcolonial Studies
• explores the various facets—textual, figural, spatial,
historical, political and economic—of the colonial
encounter, and the ways in which this encounter
shaped the West and non-West alike
• investigations from many disciplines, as well as a
theoretical perspective from which to view a variety
of concerns
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13688790.asp
Literatures in English
English literary texts representing other cultures
– the living conscience and public depository of the
cultural memories of the world,
telling the story,
incorporating the way of thinking,
and mirroring the language of other cultures.
Some examples
V. S. Naipaul: A Bend in the River (1979), narrated by
an Indian Muslim in an unnamed African country
after independence, observing the rapid changes in
his homeland with an outsider's distance.
Salman Rushdie: Midnight's Children (1981), key
events in the history of India.
Kazuo Ishiguro: A Pale View Hills (1982), narrated by a
Japanese widow living in England.
Tibor Fischer: Under the Frog (1992), the 1950s and
1956 in Hungary.
Some more examples
R. K. Narayan: The Guide (1958), a novel based in
Malgudi, the fictional town in South India. The novel
describes the transformation of the protagonist, Raju
from a tour guide to a spiritual guide and become
one of the greatest holy man of India.
Derek Walcott: Omeros (1990), an epic poem set on the
Caribbean island of St. Lucia, drawing on Homer,
Virgil, and Dante, presenting themes such as
colonialism, historiography, homecoming, paternity.
Derek Walcott
(1930)
Salman Rushdie
(1947)
Kazuo Ishiguro
(1954)
Postcolonial Studies
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism
Post-colonialism (postcolonial theory, post-colonial
theory) is an intellectual discourse that consists of
reactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy of
colonialis.
Postcolonialism comprises a set of theories found
amongst anthropology, architecture, philosophy,
film, political science, human geography, sociology,
feminism, religious and theological studies, and
literature.
Postcolonial Studies
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism
The ultimate goal of post-colonialism is accounting for
and combating the residual effects of colonialism on
cultures.
It is not simply concerned with salvaging past
worlds, but learning how the world can move beyond
this period together, towards a place of mutual respect.
Postcolonial Studies
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism
Post-colonialist theorists recognize that many of the
assumptions which underlie the "logic" of colonialism
are still active forces today.
Exposing and deconstructing the racist, imperialist
nature of these assumptions will remove their power of
persuasion and coercion.
Postcolonial Studies
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism
A key goal of post-colonial theorists is clearing
space for multiple voices. This is especially true of
those voices that have been previously silenced by
dominant ideologies – subalterns.
Edward Said, in his book Orientalism, provides a clear
picture of the ways social scientists, specifically
Orientalists, can disregard the views of those they
actually study – preferring instead to rely on the
intellectual superiority of themselves and their peers.
Postcolonial Studies
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism
Postcolonialism as a literary theory (with a critical
approach), deals with literature produced in countries
that once were colonies of other countries.
Colonized people, especially of the British Empire,
attended British universities and with their access to
education, created this new criticism. Following the
breakup of the Soviet Union during the late 20th
century, its former republics became the subject of this
study as well.
Postcolonial Studies
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism
Postcolonial theory provides a framework that
destabilizes dominant discourses in the West,
challenges inherent assumptions, and critiques
the legacies of colonialism.
Postcolonial Studies
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism
Postcolonialism deals with cultural identity in
colonized societies: the dilemmas of developing a
national identity after colonial rule;
•
the ways in which writers articulate and
celebrate that identity;
•
the ways in which the knowledge of the
colonized (subordinated) people has been generated
and used to serve the colonizer's interests;
•
the ways in which the colonizer's literature has
justified colonialism via images of the colonised as a
perpetually inferior people, society and culture.
Postcolonial Studies
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism
Founding works on postcolonialism
• Edward Said: Orientalism (1978)
• Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern
Speak? (1988)
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: The Postcolonial Critic
(1990)
• Homi Bhabha: The Location of Culture (1994)
• Declan Kiberd: Inventing Ireland (1995)
Charles Tennyson Turner
(1808-1879)
LETTY’S GLOBE
When Letty had scarce pass'd her third glad year,
And her young artless words began to flow,
One day we gave the child a colour'd sphere
Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know,
By tint and outline, all its sea and land.
She patted all the world; old empires peep'd
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leap'd,
And laugh'd and prattled in her world-wide bliss;
But when we turn'd her sweet unlearned eye
On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry-'Oh! yes, I see it, Letty's home is there!'
And while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.
Charles Tennyson Turner
(1808-1879)
Letty’s Globe
When Letty had scarce pass'd her third glad year,
And her young artless words began to flow,
One day we gave the child a colour'd sphere
Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know,
By tint and outline, all its sea and land.
She patted all the world; old empires peep'd
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leap'd,
And laugh'd and prattled in her world-wide bliss;
But when we turn'd her sweet unlearned eye
On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry 'Oh! yes, I see it, Letty's home is there!'
And while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.
Victorian Terrestrial Globes
Victorian Terrestrial Globe
Map of the British Empire, 1886
Map of the British Empire, 1922
RUDYARD KIPLING
(1865-1936)
George Orwell called Kipling a "prophet of British
imperialism".
He had the reputation as the ‘Poet of the Empire’.
The poem concerns the signing of the Ulster
Covenant in 1912.
The Ulster Covenant was signed by just under half
a million men and women from Ulster, on and
before 28 September 1912, in protest against the
Third Home Rule Bill, introduced by the British
Government in that same year. The signatories
were all against the establishment of a Home Rule
parliament in Dublin.
ULSTER
1912
The dark eleventh hour
Draws on and sees us sold
To every evil power
We fought against of old.
Rebellion, rapine hate
Oppression, wrong and greed
Are loosed to rule our fate,
By England's act and deed.
The blood our fathers spilt,
Our love, our toils, our pains,
Are counted us for guilt,
And only bind our chains.
Before an Empire's eyes
The traitor claims his price.
What need of further lies?
We are the sacrifice.
ULSTER
1912
We asked no more than leave
To reap where we had sown,
Through good and ill to cleave
To our own flag and throne.
Now England's shot and steel
Beneath that flag must show
How loyal hearts should kneel
To England's oldest foe.
Ulster
1912
The residents of Ulster, the northernmost province
of Ireland, desired to keep their province part of
the United Kingdom. By the late 19th century
"Home Rule" was the idea de rigueur – it would
give the Irish a devolved Parliament in Dublin to
devise legislation for their own affairs, but they
would be part of the British Empire. There were
critics of this plan who felt that Home Rule was too
close to an independent Ireland. Furthermore, as
mostly Protestant, they feared the dominance of
the rural, catholic South of Ireland over the
northern part.
Thomas Osborne Davis
(1814–1845)
was a revolutionary Irish
writer who was the chief
organiser and poet of
the Young Ireland
movement.
A NATION ONCE AGAIN
When boyhood's fire was in my blood
I read of ancient freemen,
For Greece and Rome who bravely stood,
Three hundred men and three men;
And then I prayed I yet might see
Our fetters rent in twain,
And Ireland, long a province, be.
A Nation once again!
A Nation once again,
A Nation once again,
And lreland, long a province, be
A Nation once again!