A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 19

   

A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers

a. Legouis says “Wordsworth saw Nature and Man with new eyes”. William Wordsworth exalts familiar reality through the strength of a reflective sensibility. One can distinguish in Wordsworth’s poetry a marked transition from the realm of pathos to that of ethos.  Wordsworth’s Philosophy of Nature is nothing more than a case of pathetic fallacy because he cannot shake off his egocentricity even when he tends to be philosophic.

b. The 19th century Romantic Movement has been variously interpreted as ‘the convalescence of the feeling of beauty’, ‘renaissance of wonder’, ‘split religion’ and ‘erotic nostalgia’.

 c. ‘Art for God's sake ‘  phrase best characterizes the late-nineteenth century aesthetic movement which widened the breach between artists and the reading public, sowing the seeds of modernism.

d. ‘Pygmalion is described as ‘A Romantic in Five Acts’ by Shaw whereas it is anti-romantic in Spirit’. ‘Pygmalion’ was Satire on the rigid class system in England. It is said that, Shaw tears off veils, and lays bare the half-voluntary illusions of complacently blind souls.

e. Hobbes, the English Philosopher (1588 – 1679) believed that “Man was merely a Body, or better a Machine in motion. Thus, what is the Heart but a Spring, and the Nerves but many Strings and the Joints but so may Wheels”.

f. One of the best of the metrical romances “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”is commonly believed to be written by the same unknown author who wrote also” The Pearl” which is a beautiful old elegy, or poem of grief, which immortalizes a father’s love for his little girl. They were written not in the King’s English or speech of London (which became modern English) but in a different dialect.

g.Kennings, seen in Anglo-Saxon poetry, in modern terms are similar to euphemisms, or periphrases. Exp: whale-paths -the oceans, wave-rider- a boat or ship, ring-giver, folk-friend, or friend to the people -a king, and a word-hoard -a vocabulary.

h. The early-twentieth-century thinker Sigmund Freud is associated with enormously influential perspective or practice psychoanalysis. He had a major impact on early-twentieth-century writers, leading them to reimagine human identity in radically new ways.

i. The imagist movement is exemplified in the work of T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound.

j. British dominion, the southern counties of Ireland, achieved independence in 1921-22, following the Easter Rising of 1916.

k. Wycliffe, ''the first champion of the Reformation”, was neither a minstrel nor a monk but an Oxford teacher and preacher whose life was one long attack against the Church.

l. The novels of Hardy are of intensely dramatic and epic nature; his characters move progressively towards a crisis. Hardy’s characters are subservient to plot.  It is said by C. Rickett. “In his earlier writing, Sweetness and bitterness are contrasted but in his later novels of Hardy, the gloom is needlessly intensified”.

m. Robert Frost was a regional or a pastoral poet. Robert Frost ranged in tone from the lyric to narrative from dramatic to meditative from the terrifying to humourous. All the fun’s in how you say a thing. He had rejected the revolutionary Principles of his contemporaries, choosing instead ‘the old fashioned way to be new’. He employed the plain speech of rural New ENGLANDERS and preferred the Short; traditional forms of lyric and narrative.

n. The year 1453 A.D., when the Eastern Empire the last relic of the continuous spirit of Rome fell before the Turks, used to be given as the date, and perhaps the word " Renaissance " itself " a new birth "is as much as can be accomplished shortly by way of definition.

o. Chaucer's personal appearance is well known from the portrait of him by Occleve.

p. The plan of the "Canterbury Tales," a series of stories prefixed by a prologue and linked together by a framework, was probably derived by Chaucer from Boccaccio's “Decamerone,". Again Pilgrimages to Canterbury seem to have been joyous affairs, in which merriment and not devotion held the foremost place in the minds of those who took part in them.

q. Chaucer in "Canterbury Tales" was fully aware of the abuses of the prevailing ecclesiastical system is conclusively proved by his pictures of the Monk, the Friar, the Pardoner, and others. On the other hand, his fine portrait of the " Poor Parson” shows the opposite picture.

r. Dickens’ novels reflect the contemporary Victorian urban society with all its conflicts and disharmonies, both physical and intellectual.  The stories of Dickens also reflect the social evils of the Victorian Age.

s. The early-twentieth-century thinker Sigmund Freud is associated with enormously influential perspective or practice psychoanalysis. He had a major impact on early-twentieth-century writers, leading them to reimagine human identity in radically new ways.

t. Characteristics of seventeenth-century Metaphysical poetry sparked the enthusiasm of modernist poets and critics: i)its intellectual complexity ii)its union of thought and passion.

u. Ruskin expressed his ideas in a magnified poetic and decorative prose.

  

v. The literal meaning of postmodernism is “after modernism,” and in many ways postmodernism constitutes an attack on modernist claims about the existence of truth and value—claims that stem from the European Enlightenment of the 18th century.

w. A metaphor from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Life is but a walking shadow.”

x. In The Triumph of Life Shelly describes the crowd that is accompanying the car of life.

y. Johnson’s style is similar to Milton’s in Paradise Lost.

z. The White Mountains by John Christopher and its sequels, a small band of free people struggles against a race of alien invaders called Masters. 

Ardhendu De

 

Ref: Wikipedia, Literary Timelines, History of English Literature- Albert