HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION (AT, AN)

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1 ESZTERHÁZY KÁROLY COLLEGE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH STUDIES HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION (AT, AN) I. Poetry, Drama and Generic Theory 1. Christian and Heathen Elements in Early English Literature General Characteristics of Anglo-Latin Writings. Venerable Bede: De Ratione Temporum, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglo-Saxorum. Bishop Asser: Life of King Alfred. Runes, The Dream of the Rood. Popular Poetry: Death Song. Courtly Poetry: The Fight at Finn s Borough, Battle of Maldon. Caedmon and His School: Christ and Satan. Cynewulf and His School: Phoenix. Secular Poetry: The Ruin, Beowulf. Beowulf the Great National Epic. Character Delineation and Plot. The Presence of Christian and Heathen Elements in the Epic and their Function. 2. Famous English Sonnets. 16 th Century Sonnet: Origins and Importance Sir Philip Sidney, Innovations of the Petrarchan Sonnet: the English Sonnet. Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Long Love That in My Thought Doth Harbour ; Farewell, Love. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: Love, That Doth Reign and Live Within My Thought ; The Soote Season. Sonnets in Sidney s Arcadia and Astrophel and Stella: Sonnet 1. Edmund Spenser: Amoretti Sonnet 75. Shakespeare s Sonnet Cycle: Sonnet 18. The Romantic Sonnet: William Wordsworth: Nuns Fret Not. John Keats: On First Looking into Chapman s Homer. Shelley: Ozymandias. The Deformed Sonnet: Yeats: Leda and the Swan. 3. Drama at the Crossroads: Classical Modes of Expression and Innovation in Pre- Shakespearean drama Mysteries and Moralities. Mediaeval Drama Versus Renaissance Drama (Form and Concept) Main Features of Classical Tragedies: Sophocles Antigone. Classical Comedies. The University Wits. Thomas Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy. Pre-Shakespearean Drama: Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus. 4. Shakespeare s Comic Might and its Artistic, Social and Philosophical Implications Varieties of Comedy. Romanticism in Shakespearean Comedy. A Midsummer Night s Dream. The Unity of Comic Idea, Structure and the Technicalities Which Support the Unity of Matter and Control the Point of View. The Vital Temper of the Elizabethan Age. The Comic View of the Status of Art. The Pains and the Pleasures of Love as Romantic Ecstasy. England, the World of the Fairies and Pre-Homeric Athens. The Darker Comedies. Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing. Cynicism Expressed Through Dialogue, Plot and Character Delineation. 5. Shakespeare s Concept of the Tragic Aspects of Existence and its Artistic, Social and Philosophical Implications The Conflict Between the Mediaeval and the Renaissance Periods. The Dark Side of Humanism. Varieties of Tragedy. The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy. Construction in Shakespeare s Tragedies. The Role of Comic Elements in Shakespeare s Tragedies. Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet. 6. Power, History, Life and Responsibility in Shakespeare s Chronicle Plays Chronicle Play as a Type of Drama. The Question of Legitimacy in Shakespeare s Tragedies, Comedies and Chronicle Plays. Shakespeare s Concept of Legitimacy. The Centrality of the Problem of Legitimacy in Shakespeare s Tragedies (Macbeth), and Chronicle Plays (Richard III.).

2 7. Milton and His World. The Civil War Puritanism. Milton s Temperament. L Allegro, Il Penseroso. Milton s Masks: Comus. Lycidas Warning of the Political and Religious Strifes to Come. Paradise Lost a religious Epic. Plot, Structure, Technique and Vision. 8. Early 17 th Century Poetry. General Characteristics John Donne: The Flea ; The Canonisation ; Hymne to God my God in my Sicknesse ; A Hymne to God the Father. Ben Jonson: To Celia ; To John Donne ; An Ode: to Himselfe. Robert Herrick: To the Virgins to Make Much of Time ; To Daffodils. George Herbert: Easter Wings ; The Church-Floore. Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress ; A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body 9. The Poetic Diction of the 18 th Century Alexander Pope: Essay on Man, An Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, Moral Essays, Epistles and Satires, Imitations of Horace. The Translation of The Iliad. Dryden: An Essay on Dramatic Poesy, Annus Mirabilis. Absalom and Achitophel, London Reborn, A Song for St Cecilia s Day. Thomas Gray: Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Robert Burns: Tam O Shanter, A Red, Red Rose, Auld Lang Syne. William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. 10. Philosophy, Art and Re-Formulated Enthusiasm in William Blake s Works Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The Cultural, Social and Ideological Structures as Organizational Patterns. The Lamb, The Tyger, London, The Chimney Sweeper. 11. The First Wave of Romantic Poets General Characteristics. Development of the Romantic Thought and Mode of Expression. William Wordsworth: I Wandered Lonely, To the Cuckoo, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Tintern Abbey. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Kubla Khan, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Frost at Midnight. 12. The Second Generation of Romantic Poets General Characteristics. John Keats: When I Have Fears, La Belle Dame Sans Mercy, Ode on a Grecian Urn. Ode to a Nightingale, On First Looking Into Chapman s Homer, Last Sonnet, Percy Bysshe Shelley: To the Skylark, Ode to the West Wind, Mont Blanc, The Mask of Anarchy. George Gordon Byron. Hebrew Melodies: She Walks in Beauty, The Prisoner of Chillon, Prometheus, Darkness, The Vision of Judgement. 13. Art, Life and the Romantic Solution Regarding the Qualities, Status and Function of the Artist Romantic Poetry: Theories, Generations, Industrial Revolution, French Revolution, European Connections. Edmund Burke: Philosophical Inquiry. William Blake: All Religions Are One. William Wordsworth Advertisement and the Prefaces to the Second and the Third Editions of Lyrical Ballads. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria. Colerdige on Wordsworth. Shakespearean Criticism. Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Defence of Poetry. 14. Victorian Criticism and Poetry Matthew Arnold: Homer and the Grand Style, Essays in Criticism and Culture and Anarchy. General Characteristics of Victorian Poerty. Elizabeth Barret Browning: Sonnet 21 and Sonnet 43. Tennyson: Mariana, The Lotos Eaters, Ulysses. In Memoriam A. H. H Robert Browining: My Last Duchess, Parting in the Morning, Love Among the Ruins. 15. Dramatic Interpretations of the Nonsense Quality of Life: William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett The Nature of Life as Defined in Hamlet, King Lear and Timon of Athens. The Worth or Worthlessness of Morality and Knowledge in The Tempest. The Deconstruction of the Concept of Heroism, Loyalty and Responsibility in the Plays of George Bernard Shaw. Caesar and Cleopatra, Mrs. Warren s Profession. The Emergence of the Absurd in Literature. Samuel Beckett s Theory of the Absurd. The Characteristics of the Absurd Drama through Samuel Beckett s Waiting for Godot. 2

3 16. The Irish Renaissance: Humanism, Symbolism, and Romanticism Varieties of Drama. Symbolism, Realism and Romanticism as Modes of Expression in Drama and Poetry. The Definition of Renaissance in the Context of the Irish Revival. Re-definitions of Humanism in the Works of the Representatives of the Irish National Movement in Literature: Yeats, Synge, O Casey. The Coexistence of Realism, Romanticism and Symbolism in the Art of William Butler Yeats. 17. Eliot and Yeats: Theories of Poetry: Classicism, Romanticism, Symbolism and Imagism Yeats on Symbolism: The Symbolism of Poetry. Yeats s Indebtedness to Arthur Symons s The Symbolist Movement in Literature. T. S. Eliot on the Metaphysical Poets, Romantic Poets and Classicism. ( Tradition and the Individual Talent, Byron, The Metaphysical Poets. ) Eliot as Modernist, The Sacred Wood and the Dissociation of Sensibility. The Criterion. The Idea of a Christian Society. 18. The State of Poetry at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries William Butler Yeats: The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Coat, Easter 1916, Sailing to Byzantium, Byzantium, The Second Coming, Among School Children, Leda and the Swan, The Circus Animals Desertion. Thomas Stearns Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land; Four Quartets. 19. New Romanticism in Twentieth Century Poetry Dylan Thomas the Modern Welsh Bard. Romantic Solutions to the Problems of Human Existence: And Death Shall Have No Dominion, Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night. A Modern Romantic s Artistic Creed, Reshaping William Wordsworth s Metaphor, Romantic Irony and the Invisible Poetic Structure in Author s Prologue. Fern Hill, Poem in October, The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, After the funeral. 20. Post WW2 English Poetries: away from Modernism (proper) Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney Philip Larkin: Church Going, The Whitsun Weddings, The Importance of Elsewhere, High Windows, Sad Steps, To my Wife. Ted Hughes: Crow s First Lesson, February 17 th, Daffodils, An Otter. Seamus Heaney: Digging, Personal Helicon, Bogland, The Tollund Man, Casualty, From the Frontier of Writing. 3

4 II. Fiction and Its Theory 1. Heroes, Heroines and Protagonists (Concepts regarding the status of art, fictional characters and their social, historical, aesthetic and philosophical backgrounds) Anglo-Saxon Heroic Poetry. Beowulf: a Typical Hero of Early English Literature. Arthur the Legendary Hero. Chaucer s Noble and Less Noble Heroes. Abandonment of the Lofty Dimension of the Heroes in Elizabethan Literature: the Complex Status of Marlowe s, Kyd s and Shakespeare s Heroes. The Appearance of the Middle Class Hero in Defoe s and Swift s Fiction. Charlotte and Emily Brontë s Handling of their Heroines. Thackeray s Novel Without a Hero. 2. The Adventures of Revival and its Philosophical Implications Humanism in Mediaeval, Victorian and Twentieth Century Literature. Chaucer s Early Humanism in The Canterbury Tales. European Connections. Shakespeare s Interpretation of Humanism in Hamlet. The Crisis of Humanism as Formulated in Charles Dickens Great Expectations. The Dilemmas of Early Twentieth Century Humanism in Joseph Conrad s The Secret Sharer. John Fowles s Interpretation of Humanism in his Fiction and Non-Fiction. 3. Vanitas Vanitorum: From Bunyan to William Makepeace Thackeray Art as the Critique of the Establishment and its Ideological, Ethical, Social Parallels. Bunyan s Interpretation of Life in the Context of Christian Moral Principles. The Centrality of Christian s Visit to Vanity Fair in The Pilgrim s Progress. The Critique of the Social and Moral Developments in Victorian Britain in Charles Dickens s A Christmas Carol and Charlotte Brontë s Jane Eyre. The Loss of Faith and Morality in the Nineteenth Century and its Artistic Implications in William Makepeace Thackeray s Vanity Fair. 4. Optimistic and Pessimistic Interpretations of Utopia The Definition of Utopia in Literature. Humanism and Utopia. Thomas More: Utopia. Posterity Misreading Utopia. Negative Utopia and Dystopia in the Modern World. George Orwell: 1984, Aldous Huxley: Brave New World. 5. The Adventures of the Myth of Englishness in the English Novel Journalism and Essay Writing: Addison and Steele. (The Spectator and The Tattler. Mr. G.) The Rise of the Modern Novel. The Englishman Creator of Christianity- Based Civilisation. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe. Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim. The Dilemmas of the Englishman s Superiority. Rudyard Kipling: the White Man s Burden. William Golding: Lord of the Flies. John Fowles: The Magus, and On Being English, Not British. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day. 6. Reshaping the Ways of the World The Satirical Mode of Jonathan Swift (Gulliver s Travels). New Age New Responsibilities: Robert Louis Stevenson. (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). Imagining the Scientific Imagination Herbert George Wells (The Time Machine, The Invisible Man). Varieties of Reality. 7. The Growing Emphasis of the Aesthetic Categories in the Art of John Keats, Oscar Wilde and Lawrence Durrell Art and Life. The Function of Art. John Keats Aesthetic Creed as Formulated in Ode on a Grecian Urn. Oscar Wilde s Decadent Aestheticism in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lawrence Durrell: Alexandria Quartet. The Aesthetics of Bad Taste in Post-War British Fiction. 8. General Characteristics of the Victorian Novel and Individual Solutions New Function- New Form - The Dickensian Novel. Charlotte Bronte s Happy-Ending. The Adequate Narrative Frame for Emily Bronte s Wuthering Passions. Manipulation of Temporality. 9. Belated Dreams of the British Empire: The Optimistic Adventure Robert L. Stevenson: Treasure Island. The Relevance of the Plot. Joseph Conrad on Books Like Treasure Island. De-Constructing the Empire. Forster: A Passage to India. 4

5 10. Aestheticism and Decadence in the Later Nineteenth Century Oscar Wilde s Definition of Beauty in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Short Fiction. Walter Pater: Preface and Conclusions to The Renaissance. The Greek Spirit, the Oxford Hegelians, Imaginary Portraits. 11. The Intellectual Journey of Ulysses: Homer, Byron, Joyce The Odyssey and the Illiad Two Essentially Different Heroic Epics. The Open-Endedness of the Odyssey. Classic Art Prey to Romantic Irony: Byron s Handling of the Odyssey in Don Juan. The Twentieth Century Variant of The Odyssey: James Joyce s Ulysses. 12. Sharing the Craft of the Creator : Fictional Theoretical Elements in the Works of Henry Fielding, William Makepeace Thackeray and John Fowles Narrator and Point of View. The Novelist as the Reader s Guide. Henry Fielding: Tom Jones. The Novelist as Puppeteer. William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair. The Novelist as Impressario. John Fowles: The French Lieutenant s Woman. 13. The English Historical Novel: Realism and Romance Walter Scott Walter Scott s Handling of History and Romance. Realism of Details and Minimal realism in Ivanhoe and Rob Roy. Walter Scott s Influence on the Development of the English and Continental Historical Novel. 14. Early Feminism : Richardson, Austen, Charlotte Brontë Virtue Rewarded or the Proper Way of Defying Male Dominance in Richardson s Pamela. Models of Gender Conflicts and Reconciliation in Jane Austen s Novels. Charlotte Brontë s Interpretation of the Natural Man- Woman Relationship. 15. Seeing the Blindness and its Technical Implications: Emily Bronte, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf and John Fowles The Social and the Supernatural as Sources of Blindness in Wuthering Heights and their Technical Implications. Joseph Conrad s Heart of Darkness as the Critique of the Official Version of Reality and its Discourse, The Secret Sharer, as the Discourse of the Doppelgänger. Virginia Woolf s Variant of Heart of Darkness as a Source of Blindness in Mrs. Dalloway. The Late Twentieth Century Forms of Blindness in John Fowles s Poor Koko 16. The Odd Ways of Realism: from Charles Dickens to the Angry Young Men The Characteristics of Charles Dickens s Realism. Realism and Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century Novel. Realism Reformulated in the Age of Modernism. Not so Angry Young Men : the Odd Careers of Post War Novelists and their Fictional Characters. Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim, The Old Devils. Allan Sillitoe: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 17. The Edwardians: Wells, Bennet, Galsworthy Materialists Versus Modernists. General Characteristics of Edwardian Literature. Main Features of Herbert George Wells s Realism and Science Fiction in The Time Machine and The Invisible Man. John Galsworthy s Nostalgic Interpretation of the Social and Intellectual Changes of the Period. The Forsyte Saga. Arnold Bennet s Suffocating Realism and His Conflict with the Modernist Artists. Virginia Woolf: Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown. 18. Shameful Secrets of the World: The Aesthetics of Passion Versus Art, Community, Race, Imperialism and History Walter Pater s Interpretation of the Aesthetic Impression in Marius the Epicurean. Oscar Wilde s Aesthetic Creed. James Joyce s Narrative, Technical Solutions and Employment of a Great Variety of Styles when Interpreting the Relationship of Art, Community, Race, Imperialism and History in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Salman Rushdie s Interpretation of History in Shame and Midnight s Children. 19. Feminism Revisited: From Virginia Woolf to John Fowles The Multiple Sources of Virginia Woolf s Feminism: Classic Feminism, Feminism as Mode of Expression and Existential Strategy. (Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, The Waves.) John Fowles s Interpretation of Creativity and Imagination as the Basic Dilemma of Man-Woman Relationship. (Mantissa.) 5

6 20. Thomas Hardy: Modernist Poetry Explaining Victorian Fiction The Last Victorian Novelist and the First Modernist Poet. Thomas Hardy s Interpretation of the Dark Side of Human Existence in the Nineteenth Century. Tess of the d Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure. Thomas Hardy s Determinism, Fatalism and His Search for New Interpretations of the Dilemmas of the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Hardy s Re-Interpretation of Man s Possibilities. The Modernist Characteristics of His Poetry: Hap, Neutral Tones, The Convergence of the Twains, The Self-Unseeing, The Darkling Thrush, In Time of The Breaking of Nations, Afterwards. 21. The Novel of Transition The Situation of Literature at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. The State of the Novel at the Turn of the Century. The Technical and Narrative Solutions Devised by Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Henry James s Centers of Consciousness in What Maisie Knew and The Ambassadors. Henry James The Art of Fiction. Joseph Conrad s Definition of One of Us in His Preface to Lord Jim and the Need for Solidarity of All Human beings in His Introduction to The Nigger of the Narcissus. Conrad s Narrative Strategies and Manipulation of Time, Setting and Point of View in Lord Jim. 22. Innovations of the Narrative Technique The New Experience in the Novel: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrencwe. Technicalities: Stream of Consciousness, Epiphany, Fictional Psychology. Narrative Strategies in the Novel: Objectivity and the Portrayal of the Social and Intellectual Scape. Henry James and the Trans-Atlantic Dilemma (The Portrait of a Lady). Joseph Conrad s Narrators (Marlow). James Joyce and the Twentieth Century Revision of the Concept of Life. (Dubliners, Ulysses) Virginia Woolf s Feminine Fiction. (The Waves) Aldous Huxley s Interpretation of the Individual s Possible Choices. (Point Counterpoint). George Orwell s Bitter Irony Concerning History (Animal Farm) 23. The Experiments of Metafiction with Classicism, Realism, Romanticism and Modernism Definitions of the Above Modes of Expression. The Relationship of Metafiction with Postmodernism. Metafictional Strategies in Doris Lessing s The Golden Notebook and John Fowles s The Magus. (Chinese Box, Authorial Intrusions, Play with different Genres et al.) Eger, 22 April 2004 Dr. Éva Antal Department of British Studies Head 6

PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. Daniel Schulze

PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. Daniel Schulze PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Daniel Schulze Repetition What is a text? What is an isotopy/isotopic field? What, according to de Saussure, is a linguistic sign? Name two differences between literary and