Clear summary of the novels, drama, poetry and short stories on the reading list, including important information about the authors, themes and interpretations on just 22 pages!
Leseliste
1. British Literary and Cultural Studies
Renaissance:
Drama:
William Shakespeare, King Lear (1606)
→ King Lear was slightly mad; tragedy of fate vs. Character;
focus on change: hero is changing throughout the play; mixture of tragic & comic elements
topic: King gives heritage to daughters, they need to tell him how much they love him,
Cordelia is sassy and says “Nothing” → a whole play about “Nothing!”, testing limits of
language → denial (family bonds, hope, love etc.)
→ no happy ending, devastating, no hope left (Cordelia dies, Lear dies hoping she lives)
→ family dysfunction, senile old man who makes a series of bad political decissions
family drama is universal and timeless; died of a broken heart? Pitted his daughters against
each other, disowned one of them, and banished his right-hand man Kent for no good reason
- transformation of his head and heart
Ealrly Modern:
Poerty:
William Shakespeare, Sonnets 66, 116 (1609)
66 → a world-weary, desperate list of grievances of the state of the poet's society. The
speaker criticizes three things: general unfairness of life, societal immorality, and oppressive
government. Lines 2 and 3 illustrate the economic unfairness caused by one's station or
nobility
mood of Sonnet 66 does not change until the last line, when the speaker declares that the
only thing keeping him alive is his lover
116 → love in ideal form, measure love but don't fully understand it; if he is mistaken, all
his writings should be taken away
wedding poem
love might change, but defense of love (love is not times fool → transense time)
all addressed to a man
John Donne, „The Sun Rising“ (1633)
→ The speaker of the poem questions the sun's motives and yearns for the sun to go away so
that he and his lover can stay in bed. Donne is tapping into human emotion in personifying
the sun, and he is exhibiting how beings behave when they are in love with one another. The
speaker in the poem believes that, for him and his lover, time is the enemy
His lover is his whole world, and since the sun is shining on the bed composed of these two,
then it is also shining on the entire world.
→ Johne Donne: wrote about heterosexual desires in a explicit, erotic way no restriction: sex
combined with religion → desire for sex and for god → prime example of metaphysical
poetry
17th and 18th Centuries:
Novel:
Daniel Defoes, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
→ first narrative novel in English
→ castaways life on island
→ commercial blockbuster; based on the true story of a real-life castaway named Alexander
, Selkrik; Deals with big issues on the minds of people in 18th century England
Themes: Self-reliance, civilization, progress, Christianity, nature
1) religion: spiritual awakening, atonement, conversion to Christianity. Starts as prodigal son
2) Philosophy: relationship to society, does a man exist in a state of nature
3) Middle-class: emerging class in 18th century England → middle-class values and beliefs
4) Commerce and Imperial Expansion: trade networks of England;
Themes: Religion, Wealth, Society and Class, Man and the Natural World, Rules and Order,
Family, Foreignness, Slavery
→ no time for feelings, arrogance + European attitude
→ Friday represent all people repressed by European colonists
Drama:
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal (1777)
→ London 1776; high society where gossip runs rampant
→ comedy of manners → focuses on lives and flaws of upper-class people
Lady Sneerwell: in love with Charles Surface;
plots with Joseph to ruin relationship between Maria and Charles
Charles Suface: young + rebellious, in love with Maria
Joseph Surface: Charles' brother, in love with Maria
Maria: in love with Charles
Sir Peter Teazle: married to Lady Teazle → argue about money
Lady Teazle: affair with Joseph
Sir Oliver Surface: Charles + Joseph uncle; tricks them by disguising himself to find out if
rumors about spending to much money are true
→ Gossip: rumors spread by unofficial and official channels
rumor: Charles + Lady Teazle are having an affair
→ Marriage: troubled marriage (Teazles)
→ Gender: women play two main roles (not objects); daughters and love interests; Lady
Téazle = power woman
→ Family: morality judged on the way you treat your family
→ politics: no laws that protect from false rumors
→ physical appearance: great importance
→ money; who is more moral: Charles or Joseph?
Enlightenment/Romanticism:
The Romantic period isn't just about love stories – it was a political and social movement as well as
a literary one. The Romantics were reacting to an 18th century obsession with order, rationality, and
scientific precision. Romantic writers felt that these Enlightenment-era thinkers missed the point
about what it meant to be human. After all, they argued, you can't write an equation to define human
nature. So the Romantic movement was partly a backlash against the rationalism of the 18th
century Enlightenment.
, Peotry:
Thomas Gray, „Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard“ (1751)
→ Gray’s thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742; an elegy in name
but not in form; it employs a style similar to that of contemporary odes, but it embodies a
meditation on death, and remembrance after death. The poem argues that the remembrance
can be good and bad, and the narrator finds comfort in pondering the lives of the obscure
rustics buried in the churchyard
Gray's life was surrounded by loss and death, Gray felt that the poem was unimportant
William Blake, „The Tyger“ (1794)
→ The poem is often interpreted to deal with issues of inspiration, poetry, mystical
knowledge, God, and the sublime (big, mysterious, powerful, and sometimes scary)
no narrative movement in "The Tyger": nobody really does anything other than the
speaker questioning "the Tyger."
→ God = artist who made the tiger (Blake saw it in forests)
Tyger: dark and fearsome thing, what does it stand for?
William Wordsworth, „I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud“ (1807)
→ inspiration for the poem came from a walk Wordsworth took with his sister Dorothy
around Glencoyn Bay, revisits the familiar subjects of nature and memory
looking back at moment,
shift in mind to present → vision of daffodils; inward eye, image brings him joy
plot is extremely simple, speaker is metaphorically compared to a natural object, a cloud
daffodils are continually personified as human beings
→ rich in visual imagery
John Keats, „La Belle Dame Sans Merci“ (1820)
→ is a ballad, a medieval genre revived by the romantic poets.
→ ballad = narrative poem → tells story
the poem isn't explicit about why the knight is dying. It's left partly to our imagination. this
poem is about the dangers of obsession, in general: drug addiction, romantic or erotic
obsession
La belle dame sans Merci, the beautiful lady without pity, is a femme fatale, a circle-like
figure who attracts lovers only to destroy them by her supernatural powers → spell?
→ not first person to suffer; knight saw men of power who fell under this mysterious spell
→ cyclical structures
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, „The Rime of the Ancient Mariner“ (1798)
→ A lyrical ballad is a poem that combines two different genres: story-telling (a ballad) and
intense expressions of subjective and emotional experience (a lyric)
→Three guys are on the way to a wedding celebration when an old sailor (the Mariner)
stops one of them at the door
Shooting down a albatross; crew dying; bird just a bird? Albatross a symbol for Jesus
albatross around his neck like cross; religious backstory?
Symbols: Weather, Moon, Starts, sun, Albatross, Colors, The religious and the
Supernatural, 2 Settings,
George Gordon, Lord Byron, „Don Juan“ (Canto I) (1819-1824)
Plot: grows up a spoiled child, dad dies, mum hires many tutors to make him the greatest
child ever; puberty hits him, doesn't understand what his body wants, because mum
sheltered him from sexual education. Don Juan, grows up with two spoiling and flawed
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