MAJORSHIP

Focus: English and American Literatures

LET Competencies:
1. Trace the major literary works produced in English and American literatures.
2. Explain the tenets of specific literary movements in English and American literature.
3. Define literary terms and concepts exemplified in selected literary texts.

A. OLD ENGLISH PERIOD

1. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Written by The Venerable
Bede (673-735) who is considered as the Father of English History and
regarded as the greatest Anglo-Saxon scholar.
2. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Different monks trace the annals that
chronicle Anglo- Saxon history, life and culture after the Roman
invasion
Alfred the Great (8487-899) who was King of the southern Anglo-Saxon
kingdom of Wessex from 871-899 championed Anglo-Saxon culture by
writing in his native tongue and by encouraging scholarly translations
from Latin into Old English (Anglo-Saxon). It is believed that the Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle was begun during his reign.
3. Cædmon's Hymn. (7th century). An unlearned cowherd who was
inspired by a vision and miraculously acquired the gift of poetic song
produced this nine-line alliterative vernacular praise poem in honor of
God.
4. Fates of the Apostles, Juliana, Elene, and Christ II or The Ascension.
These Old English Christian poems were popularized by Cynewulf in the
8th century.
5. Beowulf. The National epic of England which appears in the Nowell
Codex manuscript from the 8th to 11th century. It is the most notable
example of the earliest English poetry, which blends Christianity and
paganism.
 Epic is a long narrative poem written about the exploits of a
supernatural hero.
6. Dream of the Rood. One of the earliest Christian poems preserved in
the 10 century Vercelli book. The poem makes use of dream vision to
narrate the death and resurrection of Christ from the perspective of the
Cross or Rood itself.
7. The Battle of Brunanburg. This is a heroic old English poem that
records, in nationalistic tone, the triumph of the English against the
combined forces of the Scots, Vikings and Britons in AD 937.
8. The Battle of Maldon. Another heroic poem that recounts the fall of
the English army led by Birhtnoth in the hands of the Viking invaders in
AD 991.
9. The Wanderer. The lyric poem is composed of 115 lines of alliterative
verse that reminisces a wanderer's (eardstapa) past glory in the
company of his lord and comrades and his solitary exile upon the loss of
his kinsmen in battles.
10. The Seafarer. An Old English lyric recorded in the Exeter Book that
begins by recounting in elegiac tone the perils of seafaring and ends with
a praise of God.

B. MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD

1. Everyman is regarded as the best of the morality plays. It talks about

Everyman facing Death. He summons the help of all his friends but only
Good Deeds is able to help him. Characters in this morality play are
personifications of abstractions like Everyman, Death, Fellowships,
Cousins, Kindred, Goods, Good Deeds, etc. which makes the play
allegorical in nature.
 Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons,
and actions in a narrative, have meanings that lie outside the
narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social,
religious, or political significance, and characters are often
personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
2. English and Scottish ballads preserved the local events, beliefs, and
characters in an easily remembered form. One familiar ballad is Sir
Patrick Spens, which concerns Sir Patrick's death by drowning.
 Ballad. A narrative poem meant to be sung. It is characterized by
repetition and often by a repeated refrain (a recurrent phrase or
series of phrases). The earliest ballads were anonymous works
transmitted orally from person to person through generations.
3. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The best example of the romance of
the Middle Ages attributed to the Pearl Poet (14th century).
 Medieval Romance is a long narrative poem idealizing knight
errantry. As such, it pictures chivalrous knights engaged in a
number of adventures to protect their King, to pay homage to their
lady love and to prove their honor.
4. The Canterbury Tales. Geoffrey Chaucer's frame narrative (story
within a story) which showcases the stories told by 29 pilgrims on their
way to the shrine of the martyr Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury the
seat of religious activities during the Middle English period. The
collection of tales presents a microcosm of the Middle English society
composed of the nobility, the religious, the merchant class and the
commoners.
5. Le Morte d'Arthur. Originally written in eight books, Sir Thomas
Mallory's collection of stories revolves around the life and adventures of
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
 C. THE RENAISSANCE (16th Century)

1. Doctor Faustus. Christopher Marlowe (Father of English Tragedy)

powerfully exemplifies the sum total of the intellectual aspirations of
the Renaissance through his play Dr. Faustus. In the play, Faustus sells
his soul to the devil in exchange of power and knowledge.
2. The Faerie Queene. Edmund Spenser composed this elaborate allegory
in honor of the Queen of Fairyland (Queen Elizabeth I).
 Each verse in the Spenserian stanza contains nine lines: eight lines
of lambic pentameter, with five feet, followed by a single line of
iambic hexameter, an "alexandrine." with six. The rhyme scheme
of these lines is ababbcbc-cdcdee.
 Spenserian sonnet consists of three quatrains and a concluding
couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme pattern abab-bcbd-
cdcd-ee
3. Song to Celia. A love poem written by Ben Jonson a poet, dramatist,
and actor best known for his lyrics and satirical plays.
 Drink to me, only with thine eyes/And i will pledge with mine; Or
leave a kiss but in the cup. And I's not look for wine The thirst, that
from the soul doth rise/Doth ask a drink divine: But might I of Jove's
noctar sup.// would not change for thine.
4. The King James Bible. One of the supreme achievements of the English
Renaissance. This translation was ordered by James I and made by 47
scholars working in cooperation. It was published in 1611 and is known
as the Authorized Version. It is rightly regarded as the most influential
book in the history of English civilization,
5. Shakespearean Sonnets. Also known as the Elizabethan or English
sonnets, Shakespearean sonnets are composed of three quatrains and
one heroic couplet with the rhyme scheme-abab-cdcd-efef-gg.
6. Elizabethan Tragedies, Comedies and Historical Plays William
Shakespeare is the great genius of the Elizabethan Age (1564- 1616). He
wrote more than 35 plays as well as 154 sonnets and 2 narrative poems-
Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

Examples of Shakespearean Plays

Tragedies Comedies Historical Plays
a. Antony and Cleopatra a. All's Well That Ends Well a. Henry IV, part 1
b. Coriolanus b. As You Like It b. Honry IV, part 2
c. Hamiet c. The Merchant of Venice C. Henry V
d. Julius Caesar d. A Midsummer Night's Dream d. Henry VI, part 1
e. King Lear e. Much Ado About Nothing e. Henry VI, part 2
f. Macbeth f. Taming of the Shrew f. Henry VI, part 3
g. Othello g. The Tempest g. Henry VIII
h. Romeo and Juliet h. Twelfth Night h. King John
1. Timon of Athens i. Two Gentlemen of Verona i. Richard II
j. Titus Andronicus J. Winter's Tale J. Richard II

SOME QUOTABLE FROM SHAKESPEARE

A. The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king-
Hamlet
B. All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time
plays many parts"-As You Like It
C. Good Night, Good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall
say good night til it be morrow. Romeo and Juliet
D. What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name
would smell as sweet. - Romeo and Jullet
E. If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? If
you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge?-The Merchant of Venice
F. Cowards die many times before their deaths: The valiant never
taste of death but once.- Julius Caesar
G. How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child! -
(King Lear, Act L Scene IV).
H. Out, out, brief candlel Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no
more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing. - Macbeth
I. But love is blind, and lovers cannot see/ The petty follies that
themselves commit- Merchant of Venice
J. The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to
be a fool. - As You Like

D. THE AGE OF REASON (17TH Century)

1. The Essays (Francis Bacon). The greatest literary contribution of the

17th century is the essay. Francis Bacon is hailed as the Father of
Inductive Reasoning and the Father of the English Essay.

SOME QUOTABLE QUOTES FROM BACON

a. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to
be chewed and digested, that is, some books are to be read only in parts;
others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and
with diligence and attention. Of Studies
b. He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they
are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Of
Marriage and Single Life
c. Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old
men's nurses Of Marriage and Single Life
d. Children sweeten labors, but they make misfortunes more bitter. They
increase the cares of life, but they mitigate the remembrance of death.
The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, menit,
and noble works, are proper to men Of Parents and Children e. If a man
will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be
content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.- Advancement
of Learning

2. The Pilgrim's Progress (John Bunyan). An allegory that shows

Christian tormented by spiritual anguish. Evangelist, a spiritual guide
visits him and urges him to leave the City of Destruction. Evangelist
claims that salvation can only be found in the Celestial City, known as
Mount Zion. Christian embarks on a journey and meets a number of
other characters before he reaches the Celestial City.
 Allegory is a story illustrating an idea or a moral principle in which
objects and characters take on symbolic meanings external to the
narrative.
3. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (John Milton)
Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse that tells of the fall of the
angels and of the creation of Adam and Eve and their temptation by
Satan in the Garden of Eden ("Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit/
Of that forbidden tree....
Paradise Regained centers on the temptation of Christ and the thirst for
the word of God.
4. Holy Sonnets (John Donne)
• Metaphysical Poetry makes use of conceits or farfetched similes and
metaphors intended to startle the reader into an awareness of the
relationships among things ordinarily not associated.

Holy Sonnets XIV

John Donne
Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, bum, and make me now.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end,
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy,
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

5. Easter Wings and the Altar (George Herbert). Concrete poems that
deal with man's thirst for God and with God's abounding love.
 The Altar
A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant reares,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame,
No workmans took hath touch 'd the same.
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame.
To praise thy Name:
That If chance to hold my peace.
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
Olet thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine
And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.

6. Cavalier Poems. Popularized by Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, Sir

John Suckling and Robert Herrick, cavalier poems are known for their
elegant, refined and courtly culture. The poems are often erotic and
espouse carpe diem, "seize the day."

From To the Virgins to Make Much of Time Robert Herrick

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.

E. THE RESTORATION (18th Century)

1. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

 A Modest Proposal is a bitter pamphlet that ironically suggests that
the Irish babies be specially fattened for profitable sale as meat,
 since the English were eating the Irish people anyhow-by heavy
taxation.
 Gulliver's Travels is a satire on human folly and stupidity. Swift
said that he wrote it to vex the world rather than to divert it. Most
people, however, are so delightfully entertained by the tiny
Lilliputians and by the huge Brobdingnagians that they do not
bother much with Swift's bitter satire on human pettiness or
crudity.
2. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) published an exposition of the rules of the
classical school in the form of a poem An Essay on Criticism.
 The Rape of the Lock mockingly describes a furious fight between
two families when a young man snips off a lock of the beautiful
Belinda's hair. Pope wrote in heroic couplets, a technique in which
he has been unsurpassed. In thought and form he carried 18th-
century reason and order to its highest peak.
3. Thomas Gray (1716-71) wrote Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,
which is a collection of 18th-century commonplaces expressing concem
for lowly folk.
4. Henry Fielding (1707-54) is known for his Tom Jones, which tells the
story of a young foundling who is driven from his adopted home,
wanders to London, and eventually, for all his suffering, wins his lady.
5. Laurence Sterne (1713-68) wrote Tristram Shandy, a novel in nine
volumes showcasing a series of loosely organized funny episodes in the
life of Shandy.
6. Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74)
 She Stoops to Conquer is a comedy of manners that satirizes the 18
Century aristocracy who is overly class conscious.

F. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

1. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth and Samuel

Taylor Coleridge declared that "poetry should express, in genuine
language, experience as filtered through personal emotion and
imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature."
2. The most important tenets of Romanticism include:
 Belief in the importance of the individual, imagination, and
intuition
 Shift from faith in reason to faith in the senses, feelings, and
imagination; from interest in urban society and its sophistication to
an interest in the rural and natural, from public, impersonal poetry
to subjective poetry, and from concern with the scientific and
mundane to interest in the mysterious and infinite.

3. Because of this concem for nature and the simple folk, authors began
to take an interest in old legends, folk ballads, antiquities, ruins, "noble
savages," and rustic characters.
  Many writers started to give more play to their senses and to their
imagination.
 They loved to describe rural scenes, graveyards, majestic
mountains, and roaring waterfalls.
 They also liked to write poems and stories of such eerie or
supernatural things as ghosts, haunted castles, fairies, and mad
folk.
Romantic Writers

1. Robert Burns (1759-96) is also known as the national poet of Scotland

because he wrote not only in Standard English, but also in the light Scot's
dialect.
2. Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto), Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries
of Udolpho) and Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk) are Gothic writers
who crafted stories of terror and imagination.
 Gothic Literature is a literary style popular during the end of the
18th century and the beginning of the 19th. This style usually
portrayed fantastic tales dealing with horror, despair, the
grotesque and other "dark" subjects.
3. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) followed Gothic tradition in
her Frankenstein.
4. William Blake (1757-1827) was both poet and artist. He not only wrote
books, but he also illustrated and printed them. He devoted his life to
freedom and universal love. He was interested in children and animals
the most innocent of God's creatures.

from The Lamb from The Tyger The Sick Rose

William Blake William Blake William Blake
Little Lamb, who made thee? Tyger! Tyger! burning bright O ROSE, thou art sick!
Dost thou know who made thee? In the forests of the night, The invisible worm,
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed What immortal hand or eye
That flies in the night,
By the stream and o'er the mead Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In the howling storm,
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Has found out thy bed
Softest clothing, woolly, bright; When the stars threw down their
spears, Of crimson joy:
Gave thee such a tender voice,
And watered heaven with their And his dark secret
Making all the vales rejcice? tears,
love
Little Lamb, who made thee? Did he smile his work to see?
Does thy life destroy.
Dost thou know who made thee? Did he who made the Lamb make
thee?

5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) wrote a long narrative poem

about sinning and redemption in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
6. William Wordsworth (1770-1850), together with Coleridge, brought out
a volume of verse, Lyrical Ballads, which signaled the beginning of
English Romanticism. Wordsworth found beauty in the realities of
nature, which he vividly reflects in the poems: The World is Too Much
with Us, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. She Dwelt Among the Untrodden
Ways, and She was a Phantom of Delight.
7. Charles Lamb (1775-1834) wrote the playful essay Dissertation on
Roast Pig. He also rewrote many of Shakespeare's plays into stories for
children in Tales from Shakespeare.
8. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) wrote poems and novels. The Lay of the
Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake are representative of Scott's
poems. Between 1814 and 1832 Scott wrote 32 novels which include Guy
Mannering and Ivanhoe
9. Jane Austen (1775-1817) a writer of realistic novels about English
middle-class people. Pride and Prejudice is her best-known work. Her
other novels include: Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Mansfield Park,
Emma, and Sense and Sensibility.
10. George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was an outspoken critic of the evils
of his time. He hoped for human perfection, but his recognition of man's
faults led him frequently to despair and disillusionment. He is much
remembered for his poems: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, She Walks in
Beauty, and The Prisoner of Chillon
11. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), together with John Keats,
established the romantic verse as a poetic tradition.
 Many of his works are meditative like Prometheus Unbound; others
are exquisitely like The Cloud, To a Skylark, and Ode to the West
Wind. Adonais, an elegy he wrote for his best friend John Keats,
ranks among the greatest elegies.
 In Ode to the West Wind, Shelley shows an evocation of nature
wilder and more spectacular than Wordsworth described it.

12. John Keats (1795-1821) believed that true happiness was to be found
in art and natural beauty.
 His Ode to a Nightingale spoke of what Keats called "negative
capability," describing it as the moment of artistic inspiration when
the poet achieved a kind of self-annihilation-arrived at that
trembling, delicate perception of beauty.

From A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever John Keats

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever. Its loveliness increases, it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

G. THE VICTORIAN AGE

Major Victorian Poets shifted from the extremely personal expression
(or subjectivism) of the Romantic writers to an objective surveying of
the problems of human life.

1. Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) wrote seriously with a high moral purpose.

 Idylls of the King is a disguised study of ethical and social
conditions. Locksley Hall, In Memoriam, and Maud deal with
conflicting scientific and social ideas.
2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) wrote the most exquisite love
poems of her time in Sonnets from the Portuguese. These lyrics were
written secretly while Robert Browning was courting her.

Sonnet 43
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right
I love thee purely, as they tum from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

3. Robert Browning (1812-89) is best remembered for his dramatic

monologues. My Last Duchess, Fra Lippo Lippi, and Andrea del Sarto are
excellent examples.
 Dramatic monologue is a long speech by an imaginary character
used to expose pretense and reveal a character's inner self.
4. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is a group of painters and poets who
rebelled against the sentimental and the commonplace. They wished to
revive the artistic standards of the time before the Italian painter
Raphael. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and Christina Georgina
Rossetti (1830-1894) wrote in this tradition.

Victorian Novelists
1. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) became a master of local color in The
Pickwick Papers. He is considered as England's best-loved novelist. His
works include: Great Expectations, Hard Times, Oliver Twist, A
Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities. 2. William Makepeace Thackeray
(1811-1863) disliked sham, hypocrisy, stupidity, false optimism, and self-
seeking. The result was satire on manners like Vanity Fair with its
heroine, Becky Sharp.

3. Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Emily Bronte (1818-1848) and Anne

Bronte (1820- 1849) wrote novels romantic novels.
 Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights, especially,
are powerful and intensely personal stories of the private lives of
characters isolated from the rest of the world.
4. George Eliot (1819-80) was one of England's greatest women novelists.
She is famous for Silas Marner and Middlemarch.
5. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is a naturalist writer who brought to fiction
a philosophical attitude that resulted from the new science.
 Hardy's Wessex novels from The Return of the Native, Tess of
d'Urbervilles, Mayor of Casterbridge to Jude the Obscure sought to
show the futility and senselessness of human's struggle against the
forces of natural environment, social convention, and biological
heritage.
6. Samuel Butler (1835-1902) believed that evolution is the result of the
creative will rather than of chance selection. His novel The Way of All
Flesh explores the relationships between parents and children where he
reveals that the family restrains the free development of the child.

Romance and Adventure

1. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) wrote stories in a light mood. His

novels of adventure are exciting and delightful: Treasure Island,
Kidnapped, and The Master of Ballantrae. Stevenson also wrote David
Balfour and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
 Hyde which endear him to adult readers as well. 2. Rudyard Kipling
(1865-1936) satirized the English military and administrative classes
in India. He stirred the emotions of the empire lovers through his
delightful children's tales. He is known for Barrack Room Ballads,
Soldiers Three, The Jungle Books, and Captains Courageous.
3. Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832-98) combines fantasy
and satire in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through a Looking
Glass.

19th-Century Drama
1. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is a poet and novelist who became famous for
his Importance of Being Earnest.
2. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) wrote plays known for their attacks
on Victorian prejudices and attitudes. Shaw began to write drama as a
protest against existing conditions slums, sex hypocrisy, censorship, and
war. Because his plays were not well received, Shaw wrote their now-
famous prefaces.

H. MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE Early 20th-Century Prose

1. John Galsworthy (1867-1933) depicted the social life of an upper-class

English family in The Forsyte Saga, a series of novels which records the
changing values of such a family.).
2. H.G. Wells (1866-1946) wrote science fiction like The Time Machine,
The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The War of the Worlds. He also wrote
social and political satires criticizing the middle-class life of England. A
good example is Tono-Bungay which attacks commercial advertising.
3. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) wrote remarkable novels as The Nigger of
the Narcissus and Lord Jim where he depicts characters beset by
obsessions of cowardice, egoism, or vanity.
4. E.M. Forster (1879-1970) is a master of traditional plot. His characters
are ordinary persons out of middle-class life. They are moved by
accident because they do not know how to choose a course of action. He
is famous for A Passage to India, a novel that shows the lives of
Englishmen in India.

Early 20th-Century Poetry

1. A.E. Housman (1859-1936) was an anti-Victorian who echoed the

pessimism found in Thomas Hardy. In his Shropshire Lad, nature is
unkind; people struggle without hope or purpose; boys and girls laugh,
love, and are untrue.
2. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), John Millington Synge (1871-1909),
and Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) worked vigorously for the Irish cause. All
were dramatists and all helped found the famous Abbey Theatre.

Writers after the World Wars

World War I brought discontent and disillusionment. Men were plunged

into gloom at the knowledge that "progress" had not saved the world
from war. In fiction there was a shift from novels of the human comedy
to novels of characters. Fiction ceased to be concerned with a plot or a
forward-moving narrative. Instead it followed the twisted, contorted
development of a single character or a group of related characters
1. William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) focused on the alienation and
despair of drifters. His Of Human Bondage portrays Philip Carey
struggling against self-consciousness and embarrassment because of his
cub-foot.
2. D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) explored highly psychological themes as
human desire, sexuality, and instinct alongside the dehumanizing effects
of modernity and industrialization in such great novels as Sons and
Lovers, Women in Love, The Plumed Serpent, and Lady Chatterley's
Lover.
3. James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish expatriate noted for his
experimental use of the interior monologue and the stream of
consciousness technique in landmark novels as Ulysses, Finnegans
Wake, and in his semi-autobiographical novel The Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man'.
 Stream of consciousness is a technique pioneered by Dorothy
Richardson, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. It presents the
thoughts and feelings of a character as they occur.
 Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of the most
notable bildungs-roman in English literature. A bildungsroman is a
novel of formation or development in which the protagonist
transforms from ignorance to knowledge, innocence to maturity.

4. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) also believed that reality, or consciousness,

is a stream. Life, for bath reader and characters, is immersion in the
flow of that stream. Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse are among her
best works.
5. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) wrote Point Counter Point, Brave New
World, and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan where he showed his
cynicism of the contemporary world.
6. William Golding (born 1911) was awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1983. His first novel, Lord of the Flies tells of a group of
schoolboys who revert to savagery when isolated on an island. In the
novel, Golding explores naturalist and religious themes of original sin.
7. George Orwell (1903-50) is world-renown, for the powerful anti-
Communist satire Animal Farm. This was followed in 1949 with an anti-
totalitarian novel entitled Nineteen Eighty-Four.
8. Graham Greene (1904-91) is known for novels of highly Catholic
themes like Brighton Rock. The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair
and The Power and the Glory. Among his better-known later novels are
The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, A Burnt-Out Case, The Human
Factor, and Monsignor Quixote.
9. Kingsley Amis is considered by many to be the best of the writers to
emerge from the 1950s. The social discontent he expressed made Lucky
Jim famous in England. Lucky Jim is the story of Jim Dixon, who rises
from a lower-class background only to find all the positions at the top of
the social ladder filled.
10. Anthony Burgess (bom 1917) was a novelist whose fictional
exploration of modern dilemmas combines wit, moral earnestness, and
touches of the bizarre. He is known for A Clockwork Orange. His other
novels include Enderby Outside, Earthly Powers, The End of the World
News, and The Kingdom of the Wicked.
11. Doris Lessing (bom 1919) is a Zimbabwean-British writer, famous for
novels The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook. She won the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 2007.
12. Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian novelist and essayist noted for his
Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses which prompted Iran's
Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa against him, because Muslims
considered the book blasphemous. In July 2008 Midnight's Children won
a public vote to be named the Best of the Booker, the best novel to win
the Booker Prize in the award's 40-year history.

AMERICAN LITERATURE

A. THE LITERATURE OF EXPLORATION

1. Christopher Columbus the famous Italian explorer, funded by the

Spanish rulers Ferdinand and isabella, wrote the "Epistola," printed in
1493 which recounts his voyages.
2. Captain John Smith led the Jamestown colony and wrote the famous
story of the Indian maiden, Pocahontas.

B. COLONIAL PERIOD IN NEW ENGLAND

1. William Bradford (1590-1657) wrote Of Plymouth Plantation and the

first document of colonial self-governance in the English New World, the
Mayflower Compact.
2. Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672) wrote the first published book of poems
by an American which was also the first American book to be published
by a woman.
 She wrote long, religious poems on conventional subjects, but she is
well loved for her witty poems on subjects from daily life and her
warm and loving poems to her husband and children.
 She was inspired by English metaphysical poetry, and her book The
Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) shows the influence
of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and other English poets as well.
3. Edward Taylor (c. 1644-1729) was an intense, brilliant poet, teacher
and minister who sailed to New England in 1668 rather than take an oath
of loyalty to the Church of England.
 He wrote a variety of verses: funeral elegies, lyrics, a medieval
"debate," and a 500-page Metrical History of Christianity (mainly a
history of martyrs). His best works, according to modern critics, are
the series of short Preparatory Meditations.
4. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) a Puritan minister best known for his
frightening. powerful sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

 Puritans refer to two distinct groups: "separating" Puritans, such as

the Plymouth colonists, who believed that the Church of England
was corrupt and that true Christians must separate themselves
from it, and non-separating Puritans, such as those in
Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed in reform but not
separation.
 Puritans believed in God's ultimate sovereignty in granting grace
and salvation: therefore, their lives center on three important
covenants-covenants of Works, Grace, and Redemption.
C. THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT

Enlightenment thinkers and writers were devoted to the ideals of justice,

liberty, and equality as the natural rights of man. Thus, the 18th-century
American Enlightenment was a movement marked by-
 an emphasis on rationality rather than tradition,
 scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious dogma, and
 Representative government in place of monarchy.

1. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was America's "first great man of

letters," who embodied the Enlightenment ideal of humane rationality.
 He used the pseudonym Poor Richard or Richard Saunders in Poor
Richard's Almanack a yearly almanac he released from 1732-1758.
The almanac was a repository of Franklin's proverbs and
aphorisms.
2. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) is America's greatest pamphleteer
 His pamphlet Common Sense sold over 100.000 copies in the first
three months of its publication.
 He wrote the famous line, "The cause of America is in a great
measure the cause of all mankind."
3. Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was the Poet of the American Revolution
who incorporated the new stirrings of European Romanticism in his lyric
The Wild Honeysuckle.

4. Washington Irving (1789-1859) published his Sketch Book (1819-1820)

simultaneously in England and America, obtaining copyrights and
payment in both countries.
 The Sketch Book of Geoffrye Crayon (Irving's pseudonym) contains
his two best- remembered stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow.
5. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
  Leather Stocking tales in which he introduced his renowned
character Natty Bumppo, who embodies his vision of the
frontiersman as a gentleman, a Jeffersonian "natural aristocrat."
 Natty Bumppo is the first famous frontiersman in American
literature and the literary forerunner of countless cowboy and
backwoods heroes.
6. Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784) is the first African-American author
who wrote of religious themes.
 To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works and On Being
Brought from Africa to America. These poems boldly confront
white racism and assert spiritual equality.
D. THE ROMANTIC PERIOD, 1820-1860 Transcendentalists

 The Transcendentalist movement was a reaction against 18th

century rationalism and a manifestation of the general
humanitarian trend of 19th century thought.
 The movement was based on the belief in the unity of the world and
God.
 The doctrine of self-reliance and individualism developed through
the belief in the identification of the individual soul with God.

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was a leading exponent of the

transcendentalist movement who called for the birth of American
individualism inspired by nature.
 In his essay Self-Reliance, Emerson remarks: "A foolish consistency
is the hobgoblin of little minds."
 Most of his major ideas the need for a new national vision, the use
of personal experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the
doctrine of compensation-are suggested in his first publication,
Nature.

2. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) wrote Walden, or Life in the Woods,

which was the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845
to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on property
owned by Emerson.
 In Walden, Thoreau not only tests the theories of
transcendentalism, but he also re-enacts the collective American
experience of the 19th century by living on the frontier.
 He also wrote Civil Disobedience, with its theory of passive
resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to
disobey unjust laws. This was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi's
Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King's struggle
for black Americans' civil rights in the 20th century.
3. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) incorporated both transcendentalist and
realist ideas in his works. He championed the individual and the
country's democratic spirit in his Leaves of Grass.
  Leaves of Grass, which he rewrote and revised throughout his life,
contains Song of Myself, the strongest evocation of the transcend
list ideals.

From Song of Myself Walt Whitman

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume.
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
4. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was a radical individualist who found
deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of
the New England countryside.
She wrote 1,775 poems but only one was published in her lifetime.
She shows a terrifying existential awareness. Like Poe, she explores the
dark and hidden part of the mind, dramatizing death and the grave.

The Brahmin Poets

Boston Brahmin poets refer to the patrician, Harvard-educated literati

who sought to fuse American and European traditions in their writings.

1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was responsible for the

misty, ahistorical, legendary sense of the past that merged American and
European traditions.
 He wrote three long narrative poems popularizing native legends in
European meters Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, and The
Courtship of Miles Standish.
 He also wrote short lyrics like The Jewish Cemetery at Newport, My
Lost Youth, and The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls.
2. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) was a physician and professor of
anatomy and physiology at Harvard. Of the Brahmin poets, he is the
most versatile. His works include collections of humorous essays (The
Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table), novels (Elsie Venner), biographies
(Ralph Waldo Emerson), and verses (The Deacon's Masterpiece, or The
Wonderful One-Hoss Shay).

The Romantic Period, 1820-1860: Fiction

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) set his stories in Puritan New

England. His greatest novels, The Scarlet Letter and The House of the
Seven Gables, and his best-known shorter stories The Minister's Black
Veil, Young Goodman Brown, and My Kinsman, Major Molineux, all
highlight the Calvinistic obsession with morality, sexual repression, guilt
and confession, and spiritual salvation.
2. Herman Melville (1819-1891) went to sea when he was just 19 years old.
His interest in saillors' lives grew naturally out of his own experiences,
and most of his early novels grew out of his voyages.
 Moby-Dick is Melville's masterpiece. It is the epic story of the
whaling ship Pequod and its "ungodly, god-like man," Captain Ahab,
whose obsessive quest for the white whale Moby-Dick leads the ship
and its men to destruction
3. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) refined the short story genre and invented
detective fiction. Many of his stories prefigure the genres of science
fiction, horror, and fantasy so popular today.
 His famous works The Cask of Amontillado, Masque of the Red
Death, The Fall of the House of Usher, Purloined Letter, and the Pit
and the Pendulum, all center on the mysterious and the macabre.
 He also wrote poetry like Anabel Lee, The Raven, and The Bell.
4. Sojourner Truth (c.1797-1883) epitomized the endurance of the women
reformers.
 Born a slave in New York, she escaped from slavery in 1827, settling
with a son and daughter in the supportive Dutch-American Van
Wagener family, for whom she worked as a servant.
 She worked with a preacher to convert prostitutes to Christianity
and lived in a progressive communal home. She was christened
"Sojoumer Truth" for the mystical voices and visions she began to
experience. To spread the truth of these visionary teachings, she
sojourned alone, lecturing, singing gospel songs, and preaching
abolitionism through many states over three decades

5. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life
Among the Lowly which became the most popular American book of the
19th Century. Its passionate appeal for an end to slavery in the United
States inflamed the debate that, within a decade, led to the U.S. Civil War
(1861-1865). Uncle Tom, the slave and contral character, is a true
Christian martyr who labors to convert his kind master, St. Clare, prays
for St. Clare's soul as he dies, and is killed defending slave women,
 Slavery is depicted as evil not for political or philosophical reasons
but mainly because it divides families, destroys normal parental
love, and is inherently un- Christian.

E. REALIST WRITERS

1. Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew
up in the Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri.
 Emest Hemingway's famous statement that all of American
literature comes from one great book, Twain's Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, indicates this author's towering place in the
tradition.
  Twain's style is vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech,
gave American writers a new appreciation of their national voice.
 Huckleberry Finn has inspired countless literary interpretations.
Clearly, the novel is a story of death, rebirth, and initiation. The
escaped slave, Jim, becomes a father figure for Huck; in deciding to
save Jim, Huck grows morally beyond the bounds of his slave-
owning society. It is Jim's adventures that initiate Huck into the
complexities of human nature and give him moral courage.
2. Bret Harte (1836-1902) is remembered as a local colorist and author of
adventurous stories such as The Luck of Roaring Camp and The Outcasts
of Poker Flat set along the western mining frontier.
3. Henry James (1843-1916) wrote that art, especially literary art, "makes
life, makes interest, makes importance."
 With Twain, James is generally ranked as the greatest American
novelist of the second half of the 19th century.
 James is noted for his "international theme that is, the complex
relationships between naive Americans and cosmopolitan
Europeans, which he explored in the novels The American, Daisy
Miller, and a masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady.
4. Edith Wharton (1862-1937) descended from a wealthy family in New
York society and saw firsthand the decline of this cultivated group and,
in her view, the rise of boorish, nouveau-riche business families. This
social transformation is the background of many of her novels.
 Wharton's best novels include The House of Mirth, The Custom of
the Country, Summer, The Age of Innocence, and the novella Ethan
Frome.
5. Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was a journalist who also wrote fiction,
essays, poetry, and plays.
 Crane saw life at its rawest, in slums and on battlefields. His short
stories like The Open Boat. The Blue Hotel, and The Bride Comes to
Yellow Sky exemplify such realism.
 He wrote a haunting Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage which explores
the psychological turmoil of a self-confessed coward.
 Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is one of the best naturalistic
American novels. It is the harrowing story of a poor, sensitive
young girl whose alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In love and
eager to escape her violent home life, she allows herself to be
seduced into living with a young man, who soon deserts her. When
her self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute
to survive, but soon commits suicide out of despair.
6. Jack London (1876-1916) is a naturalist who set his collection of stories,
The Son of the Wolf in the Klondike region of Alaska and the Canadian
Yukon. His best- sellers The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf made him
the highest paid writer in the United States of his time.
7. Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) explores the dangers of the American
dream in his 1925 work An American Tragedy. The novel relates, in great
detail, the life of Clyde
 Griffiths, who grows up in great poverty in a family of wandering
evangelists, but dreams of wealth and the love of beautiful women.
  An American Tragedy is a reflection of the dissatisfaction, envy,
and despair that afflicted many poor and working people in
America's competitive, success-driven society. As American
industrial power soared, the glittering lives of the wealthy in
newspapers and photographs sharply contrasted with the drab
lives of ordinary farmers and city workers.
 Muckraking novels used eye-catching joumalistic techniques to
depict harsh working conditions and oppression. Populist Frank
Norris's The Octopus exposed big railroad companies, while
socialist Upton Sinclair's The Jungle painted the squalor of the
Chicago meat-packing houses. Jack London's dystopia The Iron Heel
anticipates George Orwell's 1984 in predicting a class war and the
takeover of the government.
8. Willa Cather (1873-1947) grew up on the Nebraska prairie among
pioneering immigrants-later immortalized in O Pioneers!, My Antonia,
and her well-known story Neighbour Rosicky.
 During her lifetime she became increasingly alienated from the
materialism of modem life and wrote of alternative visions in the
American Southwest and in the past
 Death Comes for the Archbishop evokes the idealism of two 16th-
century priests establishing the Catholic Church in the New
Mexican desert.
9. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) was a poet, historian, biographer, novelist,
musician, essayist, but a journalist by profession. To many, Sandburg
was a latter-day Walt Whitman, writing expansive, evocative urban and
patriotic poems and simple, childlike rhymes and ballads.
Fog
Carl Sandburg
The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
ever harbor and city
on silent hounches
and then moves on

10. Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) is the best U.S. poet of the late
19th century. Unlike Masters, Robinson uses traditional metrics. Some of
the best known of Robinson's dramatic monologues are Luke Havergal,
about a forsaken lover, Miniver Cheevy, a portrait of a romantic
dreamer, and Richard Cory, a somber portrait of a wealthy man who
commits suicide.

F. MODERNISM AND EXPERIMENTATION

1. Gertrude Stein termed this age as the "Period of the Lost Generation."
Many young Americans lost their sense of identity because of the
instability of traditional structure of values brought about by the wars
and the growing industrialization of cities.
2. The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of
the United States. Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down;
businesses and banks failed; farmers, unable to harvest, transport, or
sell their crops, could not pay their debts and lost their farms.
3. Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier
Darwinian theory of evolution) became popular.
4. Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other American writers
experimented with fictional points of view. James often restricted the
information in the novel to what a single character would have known.
Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury (1929) breaks up the narrative
into four sections, each giving the viewpoint of a different character
(including a mentally retarded boy).
5. To analyze such modernist novels and poetry, New Criticism arose in
the United States.

MODERNIST POETS

1. Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was one of the most influential American poets
of this century. His poetry is best known for its clear, visual images,
fresh rhythms, and muscular, intelligent, unusual lines, such as the ones
inspired by Japanese haiku -

"In a Station of the Metro" (1916):

The apparition of these faces in the crowd,
Petals on a wet, black bough

3. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) wrote influential essays and dramas, and

championed the importance of literary and social traditions for the
modem poet. As a critic, Eliot is best remembered for his formulation of
the "objective correlative," as a means of expressing emotion through "a
set of objects, a situation, a chain of events" that would be the "formula"
of that particular emotion.
 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock embodies this approach, when
the ineffectual, elderly Prufrock thinks to himself that he has
"measured out his life in coffee spoons," using coffee spoons to
reflect a humdrum existence and a wasted lifetime.
4. Robert Frost (1874-1963) combines sound and sense in his frequent use
of rhyme and images. Frost's poems are often deceptively simple but
suggest a deeper meaning. 5. Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) lived a double
life, one as an insurance business executive, another as a renowned
poet.
  Some of his best known poems are "Sunday Morning." "Peter
Quince at the Clavier," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and "The idea of Order at Key
West."
 Stevens's poetry dwells upon themes of the imagination, the
necessity for aesthetic form, and the belief that the order of art
corresponds with an order in nature. His vocabulary is rich and
various: He paints lush tropical scenes but also manages dry,
humorous, and ironic vignettes.
6. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) championed the use of colloquial
speech.
 His sympathy for ordinary working people, children, and every day
events in modern urban settings make his poetry attractive and
accessible. The Red Wheelbarrow, like a Dutch still life, finds
interest and beauty in everyday objects.

The Red Wheelbarrow William Carlos Williams

so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens.

 He termed his work "objectivist" to suggest the importance of

concrete, visual objects. His work influenced the "Beat" writing of
the early 1950s.
 Beat Generation refers to a group of American writers who became
popular in the 1950s and who popularized the "Beatniks" culture.
The "Beatniks" rejected mainstream American values,
experimented with drugs and alternate forms of sexuality, and
focused on Eastern spirituality.
 The major works of Beat writing are Allen Ginsberg's Howl. William
S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch and Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
6. Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962), commonly known as e.e.
cummings, wrote innovative verse distinguished for its humor, grace,
celebration of love and eroticism, and experimentation with
punctuation and visual format on the page.
7. Langston Hughes (1902-1967) embraced African-American jazz
rhythms in his works. He was one of the leaders of the Harlem
Renaissance responsible for the flowering of African-American culture
and writings.

MODERNIST WRITERS

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is known for novels whose protagonists

are disillusioned by the great American dream. The Great Gatsby focuses
on the story of Jay Gatsby who discovers the devastating cost of success
in terms of personal fulfillment and love.
 Tender Is the Night talks of a young psychiatrist whose life is
doomed by his marriage to an unstable woman.
 The Beautiful and the Damned explores the self-destructive
extravagance of his times
2. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) received the Nobel Prize in 1954 for his
The Old Man and the Sea - a short poetic novel about a poor, old
fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks. This
also won for him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953
 Hemingway wrote of war, death, and the "lost generation" of cynical survivors.
 His characters are not dreamers but tough bullfighters, soldiers,
and athletes. If intellectual, they are deeply scarred and
disillusioned.
3. William Faulkner (1897-1962) experimented with narrative
chronology, different points of view and voices (including those of
outcasts, children, and illiterates), and a rich and demanding baroque
style built of extremely long sentences full of complicated subordinate
parts.
 Created an imaginative landscape, Yoknapatawpha County,
mentioned in numerous novels, along with several families with
interconnections extending back for generations.
 His best works include The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying,
two modernist works experimenting with viewpoint and voice to
probe southern families under the stress of losing a family
member;
 Faulkner's themes are southern tradition, family, community, the
land, history and race, and the passions of ambition and love.
4. Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) is the first American to win the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1930.
 Lewis's Main Street satirized the monotonous, hypocritical small-
town life in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. His incisive presentation of
American life and his criticism of American materialism,
narrowness, and hypocrisy brought him national and international
recognition.
 In 1926, he was offered and declined a Pulitzer Prize for
Arrowsmith, a novel tracing a doctor's efforts to maintain his
medical ethics amid greed and corruption.
5. John Steinbeck (1902-1968) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1963 for his realist novel The Grapes of Wrath, the story of a poor
Oklahoma family that loses its farm during the Depression and travels to
California to seek work.
6. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was an American poet, novelist, short story
and children's author. She became famous for her semi-
autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, which pictures a woman trapped
between the dictates of marriage, mother, and wifehood and the
demands of a creative spirit that. Confessional poetry was popularized
by Robert Lowell, Richard Snodgrass, Confessional poetry was
popularized by Robert Lowell, Richard Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, and
Sylvia Plath. It is a kind of poetry which reveals the poet's personal life
in poems about illnesses, sexuality, and despondence.
7. Richard Wright (1908-1960) was the first African-American novelist to
reach a general audience, despite his little education. He depicted his
harsh childhood as a colored American in one of his best books, his
autobiography, Black Boy. He later said that his sense of deprivation,
due to racism, was so great that only reading kept him alive.
8. Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960) is known as one of the lights of the
Harlem Renaissance. She first came to New York City at the age of
16having arrived as part of a traveling theatrical troupe.
 Her most important work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a
moving, fresh depiction of a beautiful mulatto woman's maturation
and renewed happiness as she moves through three marriages.

9. Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) is the first American playwright to be

honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.
 O'Neill's earliest dramas concern the working class and poor, but
his later works explore subjective realms, such as obsessions, sex
and other Freudian themes.
 His play Desire Under the Elms recreates the passions hidden
within one family: The Great God Brown uncovers the
unconsciousness of a wealthy businessman; and his Strange
Interlude, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, traces the tangled loves of
one woman.
 O'Neill continued to explore the Freudian pressures of love and
dominance within families in a trilogy of plays collectively entitled
Mourning Becomes Electra, based on the classical Oedipus trilogy
by Sophocles.

10. Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) is known for his plays Our Town and The
Skin of Our Teeth, and for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Our
Town has all the elements of sentimentality and nostalgia-the archetypal
traditional small country town, the kindly parents and mischievous
children, the young lovers.
 It shows Wilder's innovative elements such as ghosts, voices from
the audience, and daring time shifts.

11. Arthur Miller (1915-) is New York-born dramatist-novelist-essayist-

biographer.
 He reached his personal pinnacle in 1949 with Death of a Salesman,
a study of man's search for merit and worth in his life and the
realization that failure invariably looms.
 Miller also wrote All My Sons and The Crucible-both political
satires. 12. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) focused on disturbed
emotions and unresolved sexuality within families most of them
southern.
 As one of the first American writers to live openly as a homosexual,
Williams explained that the sexuality of his tormented characters
expressed their loneliness. He was known for incantatory
repetitions, a poetic southern diction, weird Gothic settings, and
 Freudian exploration of sexual desire. He became famous for his
The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.

THE 1950s
 The 1950s saw the delayed impact of modernization and technology
in everyday life left over from the 1920s before the Great
Depression.
 World War II brought the United States out of the Depression, and
the 1950s provided most Americans with time to enjoy long-awaited
material prosperity.
 Loneliness at the top was a dominant theme. The 1950s actually was
a decade of subtle and pervasive stress. Novels by John O'Hara,
John Cheever, and John Updike explore the stress lurking in the
shadows of seeming satisfaction.
 Some of the best works portray men who fail in the struggle to
succeed, as in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Saul
Bellow's novella Seize the Day.
 Some writers went further by following those who dropped out, as
did J.D. Salinger in The Catcher in the Rye, Ralph Ellison in Invisible
Man, and Jack Kerouac in On the Road.
 Philip Roth published a series of short stories reflecting his own
alienation from his Jewish heritage Goodbye, Columbus.
 The fiction of American Jewish writers Bellow Bemard Malamud
and Isaac
 The fiction of American Jewish writers Bellow, Bernard Malamud,
and Isaac Bashevis Singer- are most noted for their humor, ethical
concern, and portraits of Jewish communities in the Old and New
Worlds.

1. Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-1994) is known for his one highly-acclaimed

book the Invisible Man (1952) which is a story of a black man who lives a
subterranean existence in a hole brightly illuminated by electricity
stolen from a utility company. The book recounts his grotesque,
disenchanting experiences.
2. Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) created fiction organized around a
single narrator telling the story from a consistent point of view. Her first
success, the story Flowering Judas, was set in Mexico during the
revolution.
3. Eudora Welty (1909-2001) modeled after Katherine Ann Porter, but she
is more interested in the comic and grotesque characters like the
stubborn daughter in her short story Why I Work at the P.O., who moves
out of her house to live in a tiny post office.
4. Saul Bellow (1915-2005) received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.
 Bellow's Seize the Day is a brilliant novella noted for its brevity. It
centers on a failed businessman, Tommy Wilhelm, who tries to hide
his feelings of inadequacy by presenting a good front. Seize the Day
sums up the fear of failure that plagues many Americans.
5. J.D. Salinger (1919-) achieved huge literary success with the
publication of his novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951).
 The novel centers on a sensitive 16-year-old, Holden Caulfield, who
flees his elite boarding school for the outside world of adulthood,
only to become disillusioned by its materialism and phoniness.
When asked what he would like to be, Caulfield answers "the
catcher in the rye," In his vision, he is a modern version of a white
knight, the sole preserver of innocence.
 His other works include Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise
High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters, a collection of stories from The
New Yorker.

6. Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was the son of an impoverished French-

Canadian family; Jack Kerouac questioned the values of middle-class life.
 Kerouac's best-known novel, On the Road, describes "beatniks"
wandering through America seeking an idealistic dream of
communal life and beauty.
 The Dharma Bums focuses on counterculture intellectuals and their
infatuation with Zen Buddhism.
 Kerouac also penned a book of poetry, Mexico City Blues, and
volumes about his life with such beatniks as experimental novelist
William Burroughs and poet Allen Ginsberg.

7. John Barth (1930-) is more interested in how a story is told than in the
story itself. Barth entices his audience into a camival fun-house full of
distorting mirrors that exaggerate some features while minimizing
others. Many of his earlier works were in fact existential.
 In Lost in the Funhouse, he collects14 stories that constantly refer
to the processes of writing and reading. Barth's intent is to alert the
reader to the artificial nature of reading and writing, and to
prevent him or her from being drawn into the story as if it were
real.
8. Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was a novelist, essayist, poet, playwright,
screenwriter, and film director. He is considered as an innovator of
narrative nonfiction called New Journalism in Miami and the Siege of
Chicago. He is also famous for The Executioner's Song, Ancient Evenings,
and Harlot's Ghost.
9. Toni Morrison (1931-) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for
her skillful rendition of complex identities of black people in a universal
manner. Some of her novels include: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of
Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved.
10. Alice Walker (1944-) is an African-American who uses lyrical realism
in her epistolary dialect novel The Color Purple where she exposes social
problems and racial issues.
11. Maya Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) which
celebrates mother-daughter connection.