Hans-Peter Wagner-A History of British Irish and American Literature (2010)

Preface
This book attempts to render more accessible those parts of the vast jungle called literature
which we normally refer to as British, Irish and American. In order to achieve this task it
has been arranged by periods and genres in a way that might seem radically simple to some
readers. But every literary history must select and establish an order of some kind in the
face of diversity.
British and Irish literature are presented here together in the first part of the book because
notwithstanding national differences and the existence of separate histories of Irish lit-
erature1 the European literature in English is never simply national. To take just two ex-
amples: while most British readers will be aware of the fact that James Joyce was an (ex-
patriate) Irishman, they will consider his writings as part of the heritage in English-language
literature; and whereas Roddy Doyle is one of contemporary Ireland's literary stars, his
books are again appreciated by readers in Wales, Scotland and England alike. Yet unlike
Scotland or Wales (which also have their own heritages and histories2) Ireland deserves spe-
cial attention because of cultural, historical and political events (mostly related to Britain)
that have had a deep and lasting influence on literature. One might, for instance, refer to the
fact that to this very day the British government has stationed troops in Northern Ireland to
maintain the enforced political order. Into the 1980s, people died in Ireland and England be-
cause of this fact; as late as November 2005 the Belfast dramatist Gary Mitchell had to go
into hiding with his family in order to avoid being killed by the Ulster Defence Organization
(UDA) who resented his critical views of the brutality of this para-military organization.
Meanwhile, the Celtic Irish culture, including Gaelic, although boosted by educational poli-
cies in Dublin, is being overpowered by English much like Breton in France, where a sim-
ilar phenomenon has occurred. To a certain extent, Irish literature can claim the status of
postcolonial writing (the New Literatures in English3), but even some Irish critics and
writers question that status, claiming a role apart. It is because of this in-between status that
Irish literature has not been accorded separate chapters here even while its special role
from James Joyce down to Brian Friel has been taken into account.
If the terms British and Irish pose a problem in the title of this book, so does American, as
the word could be taken to refer to North America. The focus of this book is, however,
1 See Christina Hunt Mahoney, Contemporary Irish Literature (London and New York: St
Martin's Press, 1998); Margaret Kelleher and Philip O'Leary, eds. The Cambridge History of
Irish Literature. 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and especially Declan
Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996).
2 See, for instance, the literary histories concerned with Scotland, by Roderick Watson, The
Literature of Scotland (London: Macmillan, 1984); and by Brown and Riach (listed in the
bibliographical section); and on Wales, by Meic Stephens, ed. The New Companion to the
Literature of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998).
3 On these literatures only discussed in this book as far as the writers live in Britain, see Christa
Jansohn, ed. Companion to the New Literatures in English (Berlin: Schmidt, 2002).
VIII PREFACE
exclusively on the literature of the United States and excludes Canadian literature4, with the
notable exception of a classic novel by Margaret Atwood reacting to the socio-political
climate in the USA.
Major Irish Writers as seen by David Levine This literary history focuses mainly on
the modern period and provides analyses
of fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction; the latter includes literary criticism, theory, travel
writing, and outstanding works in historiography and the social sciences. The book contains
illustrations for several reasons. Firstly, because from medieval illuminated manuscripts
down to recent hypertexts, art has been an essential part of literature, its mute sister as it
were. Thus many nineteenth-century novels first appeared in illustrated versions and some
contemporary authors (e.g., Alasdair Gray) insist on illustrating their own works. Secondly,
the never ending symbiosis between art and writing in any given period is sufficiently im-
portant to warrant the inclusion of some pictorial examples that inspired writers to a degree
of which they might not even have been aware. Thirdly, the visual material as well as the
brief discussions of movements in art at the beginning of each chapter are supposed to en-
courage the reader to consider the ways the arts feed on or respond to each other often in
most surprising ways that are far from any correspondence.
Those readers especially interested in this fascinating relation between art and writing at any
given period covered here will find, in addition to the pictures accompanying the text of the
book, visual material galore (more than 450 illustrations) as well as the full text of the book
on the CD in the back of the book. This CD also facilitates the search for both names and
pictures and thus serves as another index.
If the book has a particular focus, it is on contemporary literature. This means that the read-
er will find discussions here of some genres and developments that have been neglected by
other literary histories; important examples are children's literature and the various subdivi-
sions of the popular market performance art (integrating drama and poetry), television
drama, crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy and horror, the Western, comics, and hyper-
text. Discussing both the great works of highbrow literature and representative writings of
4 See Konrad Gro et al., eds. Kanadische Literaturgeschichte (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005), and
Carol Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Krller, eds. The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
PREFACE IX
the popular canon, the book takes cognizance of what readers (including students) are told
to read by the popes defending the literary canon and of what the post-capitalist market of-
fers by way of entertainment in an alternative canon. Both areas are extremely important,
and none should be neglected, since they contribute to the creation of postmodern mentali-
ties. To illustrate this as it were with an American example the novels of Thomas Pynchon
and the Superman comics series are both worth studying, not because of any inherent value
they might possess but because they contribute to, and reflect to some extent, the establish-
ment of the American mind in our time.
Finally, it is a great pleasure to acknowledge the help of several people in the preparation of
this book. Santina Rupp dealt most professionally with parts of the index. Ulrike Lackner
has shown great patience with my exasperating wishes for alterations in preparing the elec-
tronic version of the manuscript; Birgit Pretzsch and Jan Hollm were my first and most
critical readers who gave me their time and literary judgments when they had more im-
portant things to do; Dirk Vanderbeke enlightened me on some popular genres. Odile made
it possible for me to write this book and I hope that I shall have enough time left in my life
to thank her for this; and Dr Otto proved a daring and understanding publisher by granting
me my particular wishes concerning the make-up of this book.
Preface to the second edition

In this second edition, errors and typos have been corrected. The major new features, in
addition to several new illustrations, are the updapting of the chapters and appendices on the
twentieth century and the complementation of the various bibliographies. In fact, the
sections on contemporary culture and literature and the chronological tables now extend into
the twenty-first century, with a cut-off date at 2010. I wish to express my gratitude to Dr
Otto, WVT Trier, for his support all along the way. I wish to thank my most constructive
critic over the years, Professor Dr Anja Mller, whose review of the book proved im-
mensely helpful as did her additional suggestions. Without the constant support of Odile
over the years, the second edition could not have appeared.
Saarbrcken, January 2010 Peter Wagner

Picture credits
The author has made every effort to contact all holders of copyright works. All copyright holders
who could not be reached are invited to write to the publishers so that a full acknowledgment
may be made in subsequent editions. The numbers quoted here refer to the list of illustrations.
The Paul G. Allen Collection 410

American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA 278
Archives of the author 2, 5-9, 11, 13, 15-20, 23-26, 30-34, 36-65, 68-84, 86-87, 89-108, 110-
114, 116-117, 120, 122-125, 131, 133-135, 137, 142, 143, 146-149, 153-168, 169-174, 178-
179, 181, 183-188, 190, 194-197, 199, 201-207, 209, 211-215, 217, 219-220, 223, 227, 229,
231-234, 238, 242-245, 248-250, 253-258, 260, 263-265, 267-269, 271-277, 279-283, 285,
287-288, 290, 293, 295, 297-299, 301, 303, 306-310, 314, 317-318, 322-329, 331-333, 339,
348, 354, 356-365, 368, 370-374, 376, 378, 380-381, 384-385, 392, 397, 400, 405-406, 408,
411, 413-416, 420, 426-427, 430-438, 447, 449-451, 453, 454-455, 458
The Art Institute of Chicago 315, 396
The Arts Council of Great Britain 407
The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery 128
The Blount Collection, Montgomery, Alabama 383
The British Council 182
The British Library 3, 4
Carlisle Museum and Art Gallery 239
Cassell, London 145, 152
The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA 320, 321
Collection of Peter and Chrissy Blake 270
Collection The Earl of Shaftesbury 119
Collection of Mr and Mrs Gilbert H. Kinney 404
The Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D.C. 292
D.E. Bower Collection, Chiddingstone Castle, Kent 28
The Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington 140, 141
Desmoines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa 341
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit 115
The Estate of Keith Haring 444-446
The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco 313
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 121, 139, 177
The Frick Collection, New York 21, 67
Odette Gilbert Gallery, London 262
Richard Green Galleries 88
Haags Gemeente Museum, The Hague 417
The Harvill Press, London 412, 421
Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford 126
Hirmer Verlag, Munich 340, 394, 399
The Hirshhorn Museum, Smithonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 351
The Huntington Library, San Marino 66
The Imperial War Museum, London 180, 189, 191, 237
The International Center of Photography 337
Kunsthalle Tbingen 240
Kunsthaus Zrich, Graphische Sammlung 352
The Lefevre Gallery, London 200
The Leger Galleries, London 127
The Manoogian Collection, Taylor, Michigan 312
The Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, MA 305
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 294, 300, 311, 319, 345, 347
Muse Cond, Chantilly 10, 35
Muse du Louvre, Paris 22, 222, 259
Museum Ludwig, Cologne 398
The Museum of Modern Art, New York 375, 419
The National Gallery, London 224
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 144
The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 284
The National Museum of American Art, Smithonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 289
The National Portrait Gallery, London 14, 27, 29, 85, 109, 118
The New-York Historical Society, New York 291, 304
The New York Public Library 296
The New York Review of Books 1, 236, 252, 286, 333, 349-350, 355, 366-367, 369, 418,
423, 428-429, 448, 452, 456-457
The Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA 330
Oxford University Press 138, 151, 175, 176
The Philadelphia Museum of Art 338
The Plymouth City Art Gallery 130
Prestel Verlag, Munich 221, 266, 353, 439-441
The Saatchi Collection, London 208, 261
Schirmer/Mosel, Munich 335, 336, 342-344, 346, 377, 382, 386-391, 395, 402, 422, 425
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh 334
The Sheffield City Art Galleries 198
The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln 379
Southampton Art Gallery 251
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemldegalerie, Dresden 218
Thames and Hudson, London 228, 241, 246, 247
The Tate Gallery, London 136, 150, 192, 193, 210, 226, 230, 235
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano 302, 316
Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid 12
Victoria and Albert Museum 129, 132, 225
The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 401
The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 216
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York 409, 424, 442-443
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 393, 403
BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE
I. The Anglo-Saxon Period (449-1066)
1. General Background
Following the practice of linguistics, literary historians have divided early English literature
into the Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) and the Middle English periods. The Anglo-Saxon
period began around the year 450 with the invasion of England by Jutes, Angles, and
Saxons from Denmark and northern Germany.
Among the earliest inhabitants of Britain
were Celtic tribes. Subdued in the first
century by the Romans under Julius
Caesar and Claudius, they remained un-
der Roman rule until the early fifth cen-
tury, when the Roman legions were re-
quired at home to protect the capital.
Traces of the Roman occupation can be
found in English geographical names
ending in -caster or -chester (Lancaster,
Dorchester), which are derived from the
Latin "castra" (camp). With the Romans
gone, successive waves of Anglo-Sax-
ons gradually conquered the south of
England. The Celtic Britons were killed
or forced into slavery; many escaped to
Cornwall, to the mountains of Wales
and Scotland, or across the sea to Brit-
tany. It was during this period when the
Celts retreated that the legends of King A Map of the British Isles and Ireland
Arthur and his knights were invented. in the Anglo-Saxon Period
Celtic languages (Welsh in Wales, and
Gaelic in Scotland and Ireland) are still spoken today, but the number of native speakers is
steadily decreasing.
The Germanic tribes brought with them a common language called Anglo-Saxon or Old
English, although different dialects existed in the various kingdoms into which the country
was divided. The more important among these kingdoms were Kent, Northumbria, Mercia,
and Wessex. Under the Wessex King Alfred (871-99) the West Saxon dialect gained a
leading role. Alfred made his capital, Winchester, an intellectual centre in England and
forced the Vikings (Danes), who tried to invade the country, to retreat to the northeast.
Roman and Irish missionaries brought England into contact with the Christian-Latin culture.
Saint Augustine arrived in 597 and made Canterbury an important seat of Latin literature
and learning. In Northumbria, Irish monks founded monasteries that became famous
throughout Europe. The first religious poets, Caedmon and Cynewulf, lived in the northern
half of England. Anglo-Saxon culture and literature came to an end with the Battle of
Hastings (1066), when King Harold and his noblemen were defeated by William the
Conqueror, Duke of Normandy.
4 BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE
2. Poetry
Anglo-Saxon poetry includes short and often witty riddles and magic formulas and the
longer epic or elegiac poems telling of heroes and courageous deeds. Beowulf, a narrative
poem of more than 3,000 lines, is the best known Anglo-Saxon saga. It contains elements of
earlier sagas and blends the mythical and supernatural with the real.
Beowulf survives in a manuscript from the tenth century, but it was probably composed during
the eighth century. The poem relates the deeds of Beowulf, a Danish hero, who sails from
Sweden to Denmark to come to the help of his brother Hrothgar, king of the Danes. Hrothgar's
castle and land are ravaged by a monster of human shape called Grendel. Beowulf fights the
monster and tears away his arm. Grendel, although mortally wounded, escapes, leaving tracks
of blood that lead to a cave in the sea. Hrothgar's court is overjoyed at Beowulf's victory, but
Grendel's mother, determined to avenge her son, appears and carries off a Danish knight. Beo-
wulf follows Grendel's mother into the sea-cave, kills her and returns to the court with the head
of Grendel he has cut off. At Hrothgar's death, Beowulf is proclaimed king. Many years later,
another fight takes place, this time involving an aged Beowulf and a fire-breathing dragon. The
old hero slays the dragon but eventually dies of its fiery breath. Beowulf is then burned on a
pyre, and his people lament his death.
The poem provides a vivid picture of life and the way of thinking of the Anglo-Saxons.
Interwoven with the pagan story are also some Christian elements.
The alliterative power of Old English poetry, which used head-rhymes (end-rhymes were
introduced by the Normans after 1066), has had some influence on English and American
poets in the modern period (see, for instance, the poetry of John Donne and of Gerard
Manley Hopkins). Ezra Pound was considerably impressed by this kind of poetry and
employed its techniques in his own verse. Pound translated into modern English the first
half of an Old English elegy, The Seafarer, trying to preserve the poetic techniques of the
original. Here is an excerpt from the poem, together with Pound's translation, providing an
impression of Old English verse.
Bitre breostceare gebiden hbbe,
Gecunnad in ceole cearselda fela,
atol ya gewealc, mec oft bigeat
nearo nihtwaco t nacan stefnan
onne he be clifum cnossa. Calde gerungen
Wron mine fet, forste gebunden
caldum clommum, r a ceare seofedun
hat' ymb heortan; hungor innan slat
merewerges mod.
Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care's hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head
While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed.
Chill its chains are; chafing sighs
Hew my heart round and hunger begot
Mere-weary mood
THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD (449-1066) 5
The Seafarer is one of several elegiac poems in the Exeter Book, a collection of Old English
verse from the tenth century. The monks Caedmon (d. 680) and Cynewulf (late eighth cen-
tury) both wrote religious poetry in Old English. There are also many poems by churchmen
written in Latin.
3. Prose
The Anglo-Saxon monks were the major authors during this period. They wrote in Latin, the
official language of Medieval Europe. The outstanding writer among them has come to be
known as the Venerable Bede (673-735). He left about 45 works, in which all the know-
ledge of his time is accumulated: medicine, arithmetic, astronomy, meteorology, music,
rhetoric, philosophy, and theology. The work for which he is best remembered is the
Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People),
which was finished in 731.
Two centuries after Bede, English prose received a splendid impetus through the activity of
King Alfred (871-901). He defended his country against the Danes and then gathered round
him scholars and educators from England. Alfred founded an abbey at Winchester and
promoted the use of written English rather than Latin, initiating the first historical record of
English laws in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Alfred also arranged for a number of Latin
works, including Bede's Ecclesiastical History, to be translated.
Sermons in Old English prose have come down to us from the pens of Aelfric, a Bene-
dictine abbot, and Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, who lived in the late tenth and early
eleventh centuries.
A Page of Old English verse,

from the Junius manuscript in the Bodleian Library,
one of the four main surviving manuscripts
of Old English verse
II. The Middle English Period (1066-1500)
The Duke of Normandy's victory over King Harold in 1066 meant radical and painful
changes for Anglo-Saxon culture and customs. The new masters, the Normans, were
descendants of the Vikings but spoke Norman-French. They did not trouble to learn the
language of their subjects. Therefore, until the fourteenth century, three languages (and
many dialects) were spoken in England: French among the nobility and at court, Latin
among the learned clergy, and English among the ordinary people (nine tenths of the
population). The mixed character of the English language as spoken today, with its Latin
and Germanic bases, goes back to this period when the better sort of people called the meats
on their table "beef, veal, pork, and mutton" (from the French buf, veau, porc, mouton);
the meats came from farms where the respective animals were called ox, calf, swine/pig,
and sheep.
The Normans not only forced their French language upon the English but also introduced
the feudal system and martial rule. In literature, they brought new models and subjects from
France and changed the Anglo-Saxon system of versification (the end-rhyme became the
poetic standard). While the Old English language gradually discarded most of the flexional
endings, Norman-French added new lexical and grammatical elements to what became
Middle English, the language of the great poet Chaucer.
The kingdoms of England and Normandy, ruled by William and his successors, including
the Plantagenets (1154-1485)1, became a powerful force in Europe. In 1205 England lost
Normandy, and a new nation began to take shape in England. Toward 1400 a language had
developed that was neither Norman-French nor Anglo-Saxon. English, the language of the
people, had absorbed French vocabulary and grammatical rules. It became the official
language of the country, now spoken in schools and courts of law.
There were also a number of historical and political events with far-reaching consequences.
The crusades began in 1096 and exposed Christian Europe to Arab culture. The Magna
Carta2 of 1215 established that taxes had to be levied with the consent of the barons, not by
the King alone, and that nobody could be detained illegally. It was a first step towards
representative government. Under the Plantagenets, the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453)
saw the English monarchy fighting for, and eventually losing, its French possessions. The
Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) locked the House of York (the white rose) and the House of
1 The English kings of the Anjou Plantagenet family ruled, in a direct line, from 1154-1399
(Henry II, Richard I, John Lackland, Henry III, Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, Richard II),
and, in the Lancastrian and York lines, from 1399-1485. The Lancastrians included Henry IV,
Henry V, and Henry VI; and the House of York, Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III.
2 Under King John Lackland, the English barons were granted the liberties of England. The new
Magna Carta or Great Charter (1215) was revised several times. It introduced the idea of law as
something that is above the King's power, and it protected and guaranteed the freedom of the
English Church and the feudal rights of the barons. Although the mass of the people were not
very much concerned, this charter was a first step towards individual liberty.
THE MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD (1066-1500) 7
Lancaster (the red rose) in a fierce and bloody civil war. It was ended by the marriage of
Henry VII, which united the feuding families and founded the Tudor3 line.
For readers and writers, and for literature generally, the establishment in 1476 of Caxton's
printing press brought a revolution heralding the beginning of the modern period. A much
favoured form of literature was the romance, consisting of tales of heroic knights who
sought adventures and battles in order to prove their courage to, and love for, the ladies of
the courts. Many of these romances were translations from the French. It was Chaucer who
broke with this tradition, and his marvellous Canterbury Tales remains the outstanding
work in the literature of the Middle English period.
Several illuminated manuscripts of Chaucer's works and of other Middle English texts
reflect the close connection in this period not only between art and religion but also between
image and text. Artistic subjects are mostly inspired by biblical episodes. One of the
fascinating aspects of illuminated manuscripts is the fact that on every page the decoration,
the visual element, seems to be as important as the text. Even the text itself, since it is hand-
written, has an artistic dimension, as letters grow into plants and as the borders of the pages
contain elements that complement and contradict the message of the text. Similarly, many of
the first books printed after Caxton's invention contained illustrations (woodcuts and prints).
Writers of later periods such as William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelite poets returned to
this combination of text and image in what could be termed iconotexts.
2. Latin and French Literature in England

In his Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136) the monk Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1155)
recorded the legendary stories of the Celts, including those of the illustrious King Arthur and
the magician Merlin. The Anglo-Norman priest Wace (who is also the author of the Roman
de Rou, a chronicle history of the duke of Normandy) turned Geoffrey of Monmouth's history
into a French poem of 14,000 lines entitled Geste des Bretons or Brut d'Angleterre (1155),
representing King Arthur as a blameless and victorious sovereign sitting with his knights at a
round table. Wace also added to this semi-mythical life of Arthur the legend of the Holy
Grail. Around 1200 another priest, Layamon, translated Wace's Brut into English, employing
the Old English method of alliterative verse but also rhyme as in the French original. This
book became a major source for English poetry, prose and drama.
The French metrical romances (tales of chivalry4 mingled with love stories and magic) were
known throughout Europe. Thematically, they deal with the deeds of Charlemagne5, Arthur
3 The Tudor line ruled from 1485-1603 and included Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I,
and Elizabeth I. The term "Tudor" also signifies a style of architecture.
4 Chivalry refers to the qualities of courage and honour associated with medieval knights; also
the knightly system with its religious, moral, and social codes that demanded the defense of the
weak and of the (Catholic) faith.
5 Charlemagne (742-814) was King of the Franks of Germany (768-814), and Emperor of the
Holy Roman Empire (800-814). He introduced Frankish political institutions in Saxony, and
made Christianity compulsory. He improved the administrative institutions and promoted edu-
cation, the arts, and commerce. One of the great literary works dealing with his campaigns in
Spain is La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland), a medieval French epic describing the
annihilation of the rear guard of the Frankish forces at Saragossa.
and his knights, and the Roman and Greek heroes celebrated in the classical epics. The
poem with the strongest influence throughout the Middle Ages was the Roman de la Rose,
an allegorical romance written between 1256-1275 by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de
Meun. The almost 22,000 lines of this work abound with personified virtues and vices and
analyse love in its various aspects. With its didactic and satirical passages (including many
verses against women) and its presentation of the courtly and philosophical discussions of
love, the Roman de la Rose is the most eminent literary work before Chaucer, who trans-
lated a part of it into Middle English.
3. Literature in English
The first truly English literature emerged in the fourteenth century when an English lan-
guage, Middle English, had developed. Religious literature from this period is best repre-
sented by William Langland's (c. 1330-86) Piers Plowman, written and revised between
1370-1390. It is an allegorical poem which, like the Roman de la Rose, is told in the form of
a dream. Composed in alliterative and unrhymed verse, Piers Plowman records much of the
indignation the common people felt at the many abuses in Church and State. John Wyclif
(1324-84), a scholar and reformer, tried to abolish some of the bad conditions by training a
group of unselfish priests and by translating the Bible.
In addition to the popular adaptations of French romances, of which Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight is the finest example, literary genres that prospered were tales, such as those
of Gamelyn, the young knight cheated out of his property but regaining it with the help of
outlaws, and ballads, such as those about Robin Hood, the kind-hearted outlaw of Sherwood
Forest. There was also travel writing, one of the most curious examples being The Travels
of Sir John Mandeville. After its first appearance in French around 1356-57, English trans-
lations were made (one, from Lincolnshire, is dated c. 1375). Attributed to Sir John Mande-
ville (c. 1322-72), the book claims to be an account of the author's journeys in the East that
was to serve pilgrims to the Holy Land as a geographical and ethical guide. Laced with
many fictional passages and drawing on medieval monastic literature, the compilation also
takes the reader to Turkey, Tartary, Persia, Egypt, and India. The prototype of the fabulous
travel book, it had an important influence on later English writers from Chaucer to Shake-
speare. The best known example of another popular genre, didactic poetry, can be found in
the verses of John Gower (1325-1408), in Latin, French and English.
But no poet writing in the English tongue in the fourteenth century could surpass the work
of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400), the son of a London wine merchant. He had an inter-
esting career that included positions at court in the service of King Edward III. As a soldier
under this king he was taken prisoner in France. Later, Chaucer travelled abroad on many
occasions on diplomatic missions and may have met Boccaccio6 and Petrarch7 on a journey
6 Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), an Italian poet and humanist who is best known for his col-
lection of stories or "novellas" entitled Decamerone, first printed in 1470 and written between
1348-53. This work, which is concerned with the morality of love, exerted a great influence on
European literature.
7 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-74) was an Italian writer and humanist whose poetry, espe-
cially the sonnets, established the motifs and similes for many poets in several European coun-
to Italy in 1372-73. He also worked

as a customs official for the port of
London, and his last official position
was deputy forester in the King's
forest in Somerset. He was buried in
the Poet's Corner of Westminster
Abbey. Chaucer was initially very in-
terested in French poetry. He trans-
lated a third of the Roman de la Rose
(The Romaunt of the Rose) and
wrote The Book of the Duchesse (c.
1370), a dream poem on love in the
French tradition. Thereafter he was
for some time attracted to Italian lit-
erature, the most important of his
Italian-influenced works being Troilus
and Criseyde (c. 1385), a love story
set during the Trojan War and for
which Chaucer was inspired by
Boccaccio. Shakespeare also treated
the subject in a play bearing the
same title. During the last period of
his poetic career Chaucer turned to
English themes, and in 1386 he be-
gan The Canterbury Tales which he
left unfinished at his death. It is in
this work above all that he proves a
masterful poet, a shrewd observer, a Frontispiece to a copy of
kind-hearted satirist and an excellent Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
painter of characters and customs.
The following lines from the opening Prologue (in which the major characters are intro-
duced), given in Middle English and a modern translation by R. M. Lumiansky, refer to
April, a new season and the renewal of life. A number of modern writers have alluded satiri-
cally to this important section in their own works (see, for instance, T. S. Eliot's reference in
The Waste Land, 1922, and David Lodge's opening in his novel Small World, 1984).
Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
tries until the end of the seventeenth century. Petrarchism is a special kind of love poetry in
which comparisons are made between the beloved (woman) and beautiful things.
And smale fowles maken melodye,

That slepen al the night with open y,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

When April with its gentle showers has pierced the March drought to the root and bathed every
plant in the moisture which will hasten the flowering; when Zephyrus with his sweet breath has
stirred the new shoots in every wood and field, and the young sun has run its half-course in the
Ram, and small birds sing melodiously, so touched in their hearts by Nature that they sleep all
night with open eyes then folks long to go on pilgrimages
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories told by pilgrims who have met at a hostelry
in Southwark. In order to pass the time as they travel from this part of London to the shrine
of Saint Thomas Becket8 at Canterbury and back, the accompanying host convinces them
to tell four stories each, two on the way and two on the return trip. But the work is incom-
plete: instead of c. 120 tales (by the 29 pilgrims), there are only 24 stories told altogether.
In the "Prologue" Chaucer introduces the pilgrims in gentle humorous descriptions. Their tales
cover a wide field of subjects, from the Knight's romantic story of chivalry to the Monk's
complaint about the evils of the time, from satirical tales about marriage to downright erotic
adventures told by the Miller and the Reeve. The stories are linked by narrative exchanges be-
tween the pilgrims and by prologues and epilogues.
The major part of the work is written in rhyming couplets of various metres. It shows Chaucer
at his best as a gifted versifier and a humorous satirist who provides a vivid and sympathetic
picture of medieval clerical and lay society.
The fifteenth century did not produce a poet of Chaucer's stature. But it would be misleading
to label it a barren age for literature. Although poets such as Thomas Hoccleve (or Occleve,
c. 1369-1426), John Lydgate (c. 1370-1449) and John Skelton (c. 1460-1529) did not go
beyond the imitation of Chaucer, popular poetry (songs and short verse) flourished,
especially the Scottish ballad. Poems worth remembering are William Dunbar's (c. 1456-
1513) The Thistle and the Rose, a political allegory in rhyme royal, and John Barbour's
(1320-95) The Bruce, a verse chronicle of the deeds of Bruce, a Scottish king, and his fol-
lower James Douglas.
One of the first prose works William Caxton (1422-91) printed after establishing a printing
press at Westminster was Sir Thomas Malory's (d. 1471) Morte d'Arthur (1485), a long
cycle of Arthurian legends divided into 21 books. It is a free translation in prose from the
French and from other sources and records the major romances of chivalry of the Middle
Ages: those of King Arthur, the adventures of the Knights of the Round Table, and the
legend of the Holy Grail. The collection is one of the most important prose works in English
written and published before the sixteenth century.
8 Thomas Becket (1118-1170) was Chancellor of Henry II and later Archbishop of Canterbury.
In his clerical office, he was forced to oppose the king and tried to defend the rights of the
Church. Becket was exiled to France. When he returned to England, Henry had him assassin-
ated in the cathedral at Canterbury. Becket was canonized in 1173, and his shrine at Canterbury
became famous as a place where miracles were performed. The story of Saint Thomas Becket
has been the subject of plays by Tennyson and T. S. Eliot.
Some decisive developments also took

place in drama during this time. Between
1200-1400 the medieval church plays,
brief scenes based on the Bible and the
lives of the saints, were acted by the
clergy in the church buildings. Gradual-
ly, the plays were secularized, a process
that is mirrored in the removal of the
theatrical scenes from the church to the
streets. In the fourteenth century these
Miracle and Mystery Plays, as they were
called, also introduced comic characters.
They were rivalled by the very popular
Morality Plays, in which the characters
are allegorical figures representing vices
and virtues. Everyman (c. 1509-19),
which is still performed each year at
Salzburg, Austria, is the best-known ex-
ample in this genre of didactic drama.
The play shows how Everyman, called
by Death, is forsaken by all his former
companions and is left alone with his
Good Deeds that ensure his going to
heaven. In addition to the originally reli-
gious church plays (Miracles and Myste-
ries) and the Moralities, there were Inter-
ludes, i.e. short and humorous scenes or
Les Trs Riches Heures de Jean Duc de Berry: August.
dramatic dialogues often performed in Illuminated by the Limburg brothers
the houses of the better educated gentry.
The characters in these plays were most-
ly drawn from real life and enjoyed a
great popularity.
III. The Sixteenth Century
Politically and ideologically, this century saw alternating periods of stability and radical
changes. Henry VII (1485-1509), the first king in the Tudor line, ended the Wars of the
Roses and passed on to his son Henry VIII (1509-
47) a monarchy that had gained in power and re-
spectability. It was under the energetic Henry VIII
that a new age began and that England opened to
the influences of the Renaissance: Italian art and
culture (see the influential works of Petrarch and
Boccaccio in literature, and of Donatello, Leonardo
da Vinci, and Michelangelo in art, architecture, and
the sciences)1 provided the whole of Europe with
new forms, ideas and themes. Mankind reached out
to explore the worlds of science and philosophy,
and, beyond the horizon, in the voyages of discov-
ery.
But the rule of Henry VIII, which had begun in
splendour, ended in despotism and in a separation
from the Church of Rome, when the Pope refused to
grant the King of England a divorce from Catherine
of Aragon. Henry had her imprisoned and founded
the Anglican Church2 in 1534, with himself as the
Supreme Head. The story of Henry's wives, who
Hans Holbein, Henry VIII. Detail succeeded each other to the throne and the Tower of
London, has been told many times and once even in
an excellent TV series. With his new church, Henry, like his daughter Elizabeth I, pursued a
middle way between Catholicism and Protestanism.
1 Donatello (Donato di Niccol di Betto Bardi, 1382-1466), the most versatile Italian sculptor of
the early Renaissance who introduced secular themes into the art of sculpture and decoration.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Italian painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, and technician. He
was the outstanding genius of the Renaissance. He worked in Italy and France, leaving several
magnificent works of art and studies in the natural sciences and in mechanics that were far
ahead of his time.
Michelangelo (Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475-1564), Italian sculptor, painter, and architect. He
was the major artist of the high Renaissance and is famous for numerous paintings and build-
ings in Italy, such as the Palazzo Farnese and Saint Peter's in Rome.
2 The Anglican Church (also called The Church of England) was established by Henry VIII in
1534, by the Act of Supremacy, when the Pope refused to grant him a divorce from Catherine
of Aragon (divorced 1533). The archbishops, bishops, and deans of the Anglican Church are
appointed by the Sovereign (who must be a member of the Church) on the advice of the Prime
Minister. The clergy are required to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown and are not allowed
to sit in the House of Commons. The Church has two provinces: Canterbury and York, each
comprising several dioceses; and it can regulate its own worship.
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 13
After Henry's death England experienced several religious wars and much bloodshed. Ed-
ward VI (1537-53), Henry's son with Jane Seymour (d.1537), tried to make England a Prot-
estant country; his sister, Mary Tudor (Mary I, also
called Bloody Mary, 1516-58), Henry's daughter with
Catherine of Aragon (d.1536), intended to return it to
Catholicism. Elizabeth I (1533-1603), Henry's daugh-
ter with Anne Boleyn (executed in 1536), was a true
follower of her father, Henry VIII, whose politics she
continued. She persecuted Catholics not because of
their faith but as enemies of the state, a state that was
to have a unified Anglican Church.
The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 proved
beneficial for England. It established the country as a
major political power in Europe and ensured a period
of flourishing intellectual and cultural life. Social
changes during Elizabeth's rule included improve-
ments of the Poor Laws, but bear-baiting and cock-
fighting, those remnants of the Middle Ages, remained
remarkably popular. Elizabeth also helped to create
what has been called the Tudor myth historical and
literary or dramatic representations (including some of
Shakespeare's plays) in which the house of Tudor Portrait of Elizabeth I.
(beginning with Henry VII and ending with Elizabeth The Ditchley Portrait
I), and the Virgin Queen Elizabeth, are glorified. This
myth turns a blind eye to Elizabeth's weaknesses, such as her sexual relations with the mar-
ried Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester; and her successive love affairs with Sir Christopher
Hatton; Sir Walter Ralegh; and Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex. She used the mar-
riage issue as a tool of politics and foreign policy, flirting with several European rulers, in-
cluding Francis, duke of Anjou, heir to the throne of France in 1579, and Philip II of Spain
(the husband of her half-sister, Mary I). Like her father, Elizabeth did not hesitate, when
necessary, to have those killed who were close to her. Thus in 1587, Mary Stuart (Queen of
Scots), who had fled to England, was beheaded at Elizabeth's order, and in 1601, the queen
of England ordered the execution of her quondam lover, the rebellious earl of Essex.
The predominance of the Italian Renaissance is particularly obvious in the English literature
of the sixteenth century: the introduction of the Italian sonnet form and the Italian locations
and themes in drama are just two examples of the strong Mediterranean influence on Eng-
land.
Art in sixteenth-century England did not really flourish. Henry VIII took little interest in it.
When he was made head of the Church, the end of religious art had arrived. There was vir-
tually no mythological or landscape painting. Portraits remained fashionable; but it is per-
haps telling that in 1536 Henry VIII made the German-born Hans Holbein the Younger
(1497-1543) his court painter. Known especially for his mysterious The French Ambassa-
dors (1533), Holbein painted the king and his wives and other aristocrats. Holbein had a re-
markable influence on artists working in England, e.g., Hans Eworth (fl. 1540-74), who was
born in Antwerp and is also known for his portraits of English aristocrats, and the first Eng-
lish miniaturist, Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619), who worked under Elizabeth I. The Virgin
Queen's creation of the Tudor myth, mentioned above, can also be traced to her portraits
painted by George Gower (the Armada portrait) in 1588, and by Marcus Gheeraerts (the
Ditchley portrait) in 1590.
2. Poetry
Nowhere is the English fondness for Italian themes and forms more obvious than in the
poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (c. 1517-47),
the major poets in the reign of Henry VIII. Wyatt introduced the Italian sonnet form (two
quartets and a sestet or two tercets) into English literature, and it remained popular until
Shakespeare gave preference to the final couplet, the English form, first devised by Surrey.
Surrey's durable innovation was the use of blank verse, another poetic form Shakespeare
owes to his predecessor. Here is Wyatt's sonnet "I find no peace, and all my war is done",
which was written between 1527-35 and published in 1557:
I find no peace, and all my war is done;
I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice;
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
And nought I have, and all the world I seize on.
That looseth nor locketh, holdeth me in prison,
And holdeth me not, yet can I scape no wise,
Nor letteth me live, nor die at my device,
And yet of death it giveth me occasion.
Without eyes I see, and without tongue I plain;
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health;
I love another, and thus I hate myself;
I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain.
Likewise displeaseth me both death and life,
And my delight is causer of this strife.
In this case, Wyatt translated a sonnet by Francesco Petrarca while employing the typical
examples and comparisons used in the love poetry of Petrarchism the magic attraction of
the adored but cruel and distant lady, the sufferings of the male lover, and the expression of
passion and the wish to die. These motifs gradually became overused and thus turned into
stereotypes. Shakespeare was one of the first to turn against this tradition by mocking it in
his own sonnets.
Edmund Spenser (1552-99) and Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) were the dominant figures in
English poetry toward the end of the century. Both proved especially important in the
development of the sonnet form. Sidney was a glamorous personality at the court of Eliza-
beth I. His cycle of 108 sonnets was published in 1598 as Astrophel and Stella. This is es-
sentially the monologue of a lover discussing aspects of love, virtue, and beauty during his
own love affair. With his rhyme pattern (abab abab cdcdee; or abba abba etc.) Sidney leaned
more toward the French tradition, though he shared with Spenser the typical closing couplet
of the English sonnet. Spenser's sonnet collection, Amoretti (1595), consists of 88 sonnets in
the English manner. But this is not Spenser's best poetry. His major work with a lasting in-
fluence is The Faerie Queene, a giant fragment published between 1590-1608. It is a monu-
mental poem far too long for many modern readers. Modelled to some extent on the
Orlando Furioso of Ariosto3 (published in 1532 in complete form), it tells of human virtues,
such as love and faith, in the form of allegory, each virtue being personified as a special
knight or protector. The chief beauties of this epic lie in the particular episodes with which
the allegory is varied, and in the descriptions of fights, temptations, and battles. The "Faerie
Queene" represents the glory coming from the possession of virtue, though she also signifies
Queen Elizabeth. Spenser's epic is full of noble ideas, patriotism, profound learning, and
chivalry. What he bequeathed to later poets was a stanza form of his own invention, the
Spenserian Stanza. Thomson, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Tennyson were to use this form.
Here is the beginning of the The Faerie Queene.
The Patron of true Holinesse,
Foule Errour doth defeate:
Hypocisie him to entrape,
Doth to his home entreate.
A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine
Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,
The cruell markes of many a bloudy fielde;
Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield:
His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,
As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,
As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.
Some of the Elizabethan dramatists proved themselves great poets outside the drama.
Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), for instance, wrote the love poem Hero and Leander
(1598); Ben Jonson produced numerous lyrics inspired by Horace, Virgil, and Pindar4; and
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote outstanding narrative poems such as Venus and
3 Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533), Italian poet and dramatist who wrote the first regular Italian
comedies. He has gone down in literary history for his Orlando Furioso (1516-21, enlarged in
1532), an epic poem in 40 cantos that combines the Frankish saga of Roland with the tales
about the knights of King Arthur.
4 Horace (Quintilius Horatius Flaccus, 65 BC-8 BC), a Roman poet and writer best known for his
satires and odes, which were much read in the eighteenth century. He also wrote a book of
criticism which deals especially with poetry. Literature, according to Horace, must be "dulce et
utile", i. e. sweet and useful.
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70 BC-19 BC), the most famous of the Roman poets. His
Aeneid, an epic dealing with the fall of Troy, served as a model for all the Latin epics of the
medieval period and for the new classical epic of the Renaissance. Virgil influenced eighteenth-
century English poets as well as Wordsworth and Tennyson.
Pindar (c. 520 BC-445 BC), a Greek poet whose verse was inspired by myth, and characterized
by high pathos and formal logic. His poems were first printed in 1513; his odes impressed many
subsequent poets because they are distinguished by bold metaphors and an elaborate prosodic
structure. Dryden, Pope, and Gray were among those who tried to imitate Pindar.
Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) that appeared in countless editions and show
the influence of the love poetry of Ovid5.
3. Drama
Sixteenth-century English drama is indebted to the Miracle and Morality Plays and to the
late medieval Interludes. The influence can be studied in the comic characters of John Hey-
wood's The Play of the Wether (1553), an early example of a play drawing heavily on ele-
ments of the popular Interludes.
Equally important was the influence of Latin examples, both in comedy and tragedy. The
first true English comedy, for instance, Nicholas Udall's Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1553),
shows traces of classical Latin writers like Terence and Plautus. Elizabethan drama began
with tragedies written by lawyers who copied Seneca, the philosopher of Nero's time. The
first extant tragedy in English, Gorboduc (1562) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sack-
ville, owes everything to him. Five
of Seneca's plays were translated,
published and performed between
1559 and 1581, and his influence
was still noticeable in Shake-
speare's Titus Andronicus.
From 1580 to 1596 more than one
hundred different plays are known
to have been performed in London.
Of the immediate predecessors of
Shakespeare the most influential
writers were two masters of tragedy
Thomas Kyd and Christopher
Marlowe and the playwrights
better known for their comedies
Lyly, Peele, and Greene. Thomas
Kyd (1558-94), unlike the other
authors discussed here, did not be-
Titian, Venus and Adonis. c. 1550s long to the group known as the
"University wits". His fame rests
upon one play, The Spanish Tragedy (1592), which remained popular all through Shake-
speare's lifetime. Written in blank verse, this play accepted as much as was convenient of
the Senecan tragedy and became the model for later tragedies of revenge. Christopher
Marlowe (1564-93) was born two months before Shakespeare. A young Cambridge dramat-
ist, Marlowe had a tempestuous short life and found a tragic death when he was stabbed in a
tavern brawl. Had he lived longer, he might have become as important a dramatist as
5 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 BC-AD 18), a celebrated Roman poet who spent much of his
life in exile. His major works were widely read throughout the Middle Ages and were espe-
cially popular between 1600-1800. They include love elegies (Amores), mock didactic verse
(Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris), and verse narratives in a historical-mythical frame (Meta-
morphoses).
William Shakespeare. Marlowe's most important work is contained in four tragedies written
between 1587 and 1593: Tamburlaine the Great, Dr. Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Ed-
ward II. Although there are obvious faults of construction, youthful carelessness, and other
flaws in his works, Marlowe gave to tragedy a sound conception of character and the
magnificent instrument of his blank verse.
Comedy developed in the hands of John Lyly (1554-1606), George Peele (c. 1556-96), and
Robert Greene (1558-92). Lyly was a politician and courtier who is better known for his
prose work Euphues and mainly wrote what is essentially high comedy for an educated
audience. He combined the realistic farce, the Latin comedy, and the allegory of the Moral-
ity Plays into a new design, as in The Woman in the Moone (1597), which also has attractive
lyrics. George Peele was the most notorious of the rakish University wits and produced a
mythological play, The Arraignment of Paris (1584), which is written in verse and was per-
formed before Queen Elizabeth, and successful comedies like The Old Wives' Tale (1595), a
satire on the romantic dramas of the time. However, Peele was not as influential as Robert
Greene. Greene's best play is a comedy in verse and prose, The Honorable Historie of Friar
Bacon and Friar Bungay, which was acted in 1594. It has characters from high and low life
and shows an amazing freshness, charm, and humour.
In 1592 the London stages had to be closed because of a plague, and when theatrical per-
formances resumed about two years later, there was a new celebrity called William Shake-
speare (1564-1616) who began to make himself noticed as actor, playwright, and share-
holder in theatrical entertainment. Many of his plays were written before 1600, although
complete editions of his works did not appear before 1623.
4. Prose and Prose Fiction

The work of Thomas More (c. 1477-1535) embodies the classical scholarship of the cen-
tury. More was a friend of Erasmus6 and the author of Utopia, first written in Latin and pub-
lished in 1516. Translated into English in 1551 by Ralph Robinson, it is a speculative essay
on the best possible form of government. More's creation of the name "Utopia" in this work
passed into general usage and has been used to describe ideal projects and fantasies of the
future.
Some critics have seen the beginning of the novel in two late sixteenth-century romances
that remained popular until the eighteenth century. The first is The Arcadia, by Sir Philip
Sidney, begun in 1580 and first published in 1590. Written for an educated aristocratic audi-
ence, this is a complex romance, with generous intermixtures of verse and prose, which is
set in an ideal pastoral world (an island suggesting More's Utopia) where shipwrecked
princes and beautiful princesses engage in chivalric adventures. The other influential prose
romance was written by John Lyly (1554-1606). It was published in two parts, the first in
1578 as Euphues, or The Anatomy of Wit, and the second in 1580 as Euphues and His Eng-
land. The work reduces story and plot to a minimum and concentrates on the discussion of
love, manners, sentiment, and moral reflection. Euphues is famous, if not notorious, for its
6 Desiderius Erasmus (Erasmus of Rotterdam, c. 1466-1536), an important humanist, scholar, and

social critic. His satirical attacks on the Church and on theology paved the way for the Refor-
mation, but he never joined the Protestants and argued against Martin Luther on the issue of
free will.
peculiar style, "Euphuism", which is characterized by an excessive use of alliteration and

antitheses, allusions to historical and mythological personages, and a predilection for far-
fetched similes.
A second group of Elizabethan and Jacobean7 writers
lived much lower down the social scale. Unlike the
courtiers Lyly and Sidney, they depended on their
pens for a living. Their descriptions of the low life of
Elizabethan London bubble with life, and the realistic
elements of their tales helped to create a new literary
form the novel. Thus Robert Greene (c. 1560-92),
Thomas Lodge (1558-1625), and Thomas Deloney
(1560-1600) wrote occasionally bawdy narratives re-
plete with incident, crime, and love. The major char-
acters in these short pieces were not knights and noble
ladies but the London thieves and rogues, and their
victims. Deloney also gave us more homely stories in
Jack of Newbury (c. 1600), which shows the life of the
weavers, and The Gentle Craft (c. 1600), which deals
with shoemakers. Realistic though these tales were,
they had little artistic form. It was Thomas Nashe
(1567-1601), a pamphleteer, poet, satirist, and moral-
ist, who made some progress in this direction with his
picaresque The Unfortunate Traveller or The Life of
Arcadia Jack Wilton (1594). This is a tale of a rogue in the
army of Henry VIII, containing adventures galore and
gruesome descriptions of torture and death. The book is the nearest approach to the realistic
novel produced in the late sixteenth century.
7 The Jacobean age was that of James I, king of England from 1603 to 1625. He insisted on the
divine right of kings.
IV. The Seventeenth Century
With the death in 1603 of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) the reign of the Tudors came to an end.
Momentous political and religious changes had taken place during her rule. The reign of the
Stuarts1 under James I (1603-25)
ushered in the end of regal enlight-
ened despotism and foreshadowed
the revolutions. When the Scots
James VI succeeded to the throne
of England as James I, England and
Scotland were united. The year
1605 saw the "Gunpowder Plot", an
attempt to blow up the English Par-
liament, and thereafter the Stuarts
began their battle with the House of
Commons2 and the Puritans3. In
1629 Charles I (1625-49) dissolved
his third Parliament and, for the fol-
lowing eleven years, ruled accord-
ing to the "Divine Right of Kings".
In domestic and foreign politics,
Charles was as unsuccessful as his
predecessor. He became the arch- The Execution of Charles I
enemy of the Nonconformists4. In
1640 the "Long Parliament"5 was established, and two years later the Civil War broke out.
Charles surrendered to Parliament in 1647 and, after two years, was executed. The ensuing
period of the "Commonwealth" did not last long. In 1651 Charles II attempted an invasion
1 The Stuarts: the English kings James I (1603-25), Charles I (1625-49), Charles II (1660- 85),
and James II (1685-88).
2 The House of Commons is the "Lower House" of the legislative body of the United Kingdom.
The Parliamentary Act of 1911 established the dominant role of the Commons. The House now
has 635 members who are normally elected every five years.
3 The Puritans were an extremist Protestant group who believed in Calvin's doctrine of predestin-
ation and tried to abolish Catholic elements in the Church of England. They refused to accept
bishops and preferred presbyterian or congregational forms of church organizations. Many
emigrated to New England in the 17th century; those who remained in England joined the op-
position against the king under Oliver Cromwell. In 1689 they were given religious equality.
The Puritans were known, and often ridiculed, for their strict morals, their Bible reading, their
fundamentalist attitudes, and their objection to frivolous entertainment, such as the theatre or
dancing.
4 Protestant groups or Churches, such as the Puritans and Methodists, that do not recognize the
authority of the Church of England, are referred to as Nonconformists.
5 The English Parliament between 1640 and 1649 was called the Long Parliament.
of England. When it failed, he was forced to return to his exile in France. In 1653 Oliver
Cromwell dismissed the "Rump Parliament"6 to become Lord Protector of England. Four
years later, he declined the English crown. He died in 1658. His feeble son, Richard, was
unable to hold office for a full year. From then until the Restoration of the monarchy in
1660 England was governed by Parliament.
Charles II (1660-85) brought from France worldliness, wit, and a court circle of artists,
poets, and writers who infused new life into England's art and literature. But political up-
heaval continued. Under Charles II the Act of Uni-
formity7 was passed, depriving the Nonconformist
clergy of their positions. England and Holland
were at war between 1665-67 and again from
1672-74. There were catastrophes, too: hardly had
the Great Plague subsided (1665) in London, when
the city was struck in 1666 by the Great Fire.
James II (1685-88) attempted to re-establish Ca-
tholicism. But when the Protestants appealed to
William of Orange in Holland, he set sail for Eng-
land and forced James into exile in France (Glori-
ous Revolution)8. On James's abdication, William
and Mary were proclaimed King and Queen. In
1690, James made a last desperate attempt to re-
gain the throne by landing in Ireland and raising
forces. But William defeated him and ruled until
1702.
The social and political conflicts of these troubled
days have left their traces in philosophical and
moral writings, defending either body or mind,
reason or faith, worldliness or religiosity, rational-
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.
Frontispiece ism or empiricism. Ren Descartes (1596-1650),
the French mathematician, physicist, and philos-
opher, made man the centre of the universe with his famous phrase, "cogito, ergo sum". He
relied exclusively on reason and distinguished between spirit and matter. His influence on
the development of philosophy and science was immense. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1678)
published his Leviathan in 1651, defending materialism and explaining both ideas and
sensations as the result of matter in motion. Hobbes explained man as a selfish animal inter-
6 In 1648 Oliver Cromwell excluded the Presbyterian Protestants from Parliament. The "Rump
Parliament" continued until 1653 when Cromwell became Lord Protector of England.
7 The Act of Uniformity was passed in 1662. It abolished Cromwell's Presbyterian Church organ-
ization and strengthened the hierarchy of the Church of England.
8 The Glorious Revolution: In 1688 the Anglican Church and the supporters of Parliament united
against James II and, in a bloodless revolution, offered the English crown to the Dutch Prot-
estant Prince William of Orange. When William arrived, James fled to France and William and
his wife Mary (daughter of James II) were declared King and Queen. Before they became sove-
reigns, they agreed to the Bill of Rights which regulated and established constitutional mon-
archy. Catholics were now excluded from succession to the English monarchy.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 21
ested merely in self-preservation. Order, according to Hobbes, can only be established by

the granting of absolute power to a ruler or a body of rulers. It is obvious that both
Cromwell and James II interpreted such ideas as a justification for their claim for absolute
rule. The philosophy of John Locke (1632-1704), however, stressed the importance of the
contract in government. Unlike Hobbes, Locke believed that the ruler of a state was
responsible to the people. With his Two Treatises of Government (1690) Locke pointed to
the modern democratic way; and in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) he
formulated the "faith" of the Age of the Enlightenment.
The seventeenth century was an age of exploration in many areas. America was colonized:
Jamestown, Virginia, was founded in 1607, and the Pilgrims landed in New England in
1620, to be followed by the Puritans a decade
later. This was reflected in the literature of
discovery and travel writing discussed below
(see 5. Nonfiction).
In science, the establishment of the Royal
Society in 1662 proved important. By 1687
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) published his
Principia Mathematica. The seventeenth cen-
tury was thus marked by upheaval, revolu-
tions, and great changes. It was an age of con-
tradictions and contrast, seeing both the publi-
cation of the vastly influential Authorized
Version of the Bible in 1611 (commissioned
by James I in 1604), and the unabashedly
hedonistic works of the libertines and rakes at Peter Lely, Nell Gwyn. 1688
the court of Charles II.
Unlike Dutch art which saw a golden age in this century, English art stood in the shadow of
continental examples. The English kings still favoured portraits of themselves and their
mistresses, preferably by foreign artists. Thus Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641), who moved
to England in 1632, produced a series of paintings celebrating Charles I in various roles; and
Charles II brought with him several painters from France when he returned to the throne in
1660. During the Puritan Commonwealth (1640-60), any kind of art for art's sake was frowned
upon, with the exception of portraits. Painting in general was eclipsed by architecture. It was
in this area that England excelled with celebrated buildings by Inigo Jones (1573-1652),
England's most important Renaissance architect who imported the Palladian style; and, after
the Great Fire in London (1666), Christopher Wren (1632-1723), who rebuilt St. Paul's
Cathedral and 51 churches.
2. Poetry
One of the first major works to be published after 1600 was William Shakespeare's collection
of sonnets. It was published in a pirate edition by Thomas Thorpe in 1609. Shakespeare had
written poetry before 1600, but his new collection showed that he had broken with the tra-
dition of sonnet-writing. In his own sonnet no. CXXX he satirized it by mocking Petrarchan
comparisons.
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
As always, Shakespeare was different. The first 126 of his sonnets are addressed to "Mr.
W.H.". This person has been identified as (among others) Henry Wriothesley, earl of
Southampton. Held in terms of warmest affection, these poems express the love of a man
for another man. The first seventeen (the so-called "procreation sonnets") urge the friend to
marry in order to preserve his beauty in his children. The last twenty-eight poems of the
collection are addressed to an unidentified "dark lady". These sonnets express the joys and
pains that love can offer, for the lady is unfaithful to her husband and to her lover, the poet.
Shakespeare's sonnets outlived the Elizabethan period. They belong to the best poetry in the
English language and influenced generations of later poets.
John Donne (1572-1631) is beyond doubt the poet whose powerful verse set the tone in the
first decades of the seventeenth century. His life was adventurous: a Catholic in the early
part of his life, he was educated at Oxford and Cambridge and was notorious as a gallant
and courtier, running away and marrying his master's niece, Anne Moore. However, in 1615
he took Anglican orders and began to preach sermons, sometimes before Charles I, that rank
among the best of the century. From 1621 to his death he was the Dean of St. Paul's.
Donne's poetry combines the two sides of his character, that of the passionate soldier, lover,
and drinker, and that of the great preacher and devout person. Interweaving passion and rea-
soning, Donne was the first of the "metaphysical poets", a term invented by Dryden and
adopted by Dr. Johnson to describe Donne and his school (i.e. Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan,
Carew, and Marvell). Their work is characterized by witty conceits (striking metaphors) and
far-fetched and impressive imagery. A lover and a sensualist, Donne never abandoned intel-
lectual speculation when he saw beauty, he also saw the corpse and the skeleton. His pas-
sions were at the service of his thoughts. He avoided accepted verse forms, creating new
rhythms and images that startled readers. The first stanza of the "Canonization" shows him
as the analytic sensualist.
For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune, flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe His Honor, or His Grace,
Or the King's real, or his stampd face
Contmplate; what you will, approve,

So you will let me love.
In the elegy "To His Mistress Going to Bed" he compares his lover to a "new-found land".
License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
As only a few of Donne's poems were published during his lifetime, it is difficult to cate-
gorize his work. Some critics have divided it into three periods: the early years of the court
life, the later time of introspection, and the last years of his life. Most of his love poems are
collected in the 50 Songs and Sonnets (which contain no actual sonnets). His sonnets are
collected in the two series, La Corona and Holy Sonnets. No. XIV of his Holy Sonnets
shows the typical application of the terminology of love and erotic passion to God.
Batter my heart, three-personed 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, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit You, but O, to no end;
Reason, Your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love You, and would be lovd fain,
But am betrothed 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.
Until the Restoration, Donne's poetic style remained dominant in English literature. It can
be traced in the works of a number of his followers. Among these, Herbert, Crashaw, and
Vaughan were profoundly religious. George Herbert (1593-1633), one of the better known
Anglican metaphysical poets, poured forth his quiet and sincere verse in The Temple which
was published posthumously and contains 160 poems. Herbert is also known for his so-
called pattern poems. In the one reproduced here, "Easter Wings", the two stanzas mirror the
shapes of angels' wings while the text alludes to both shape and meaning of the poem itself.
Drawing on a long European tradition going back to classical Greek examples in this case a
poem by the Hellenistic poet Simias of Rhodes Herbert fuses visual and verbal levels in the
manner of emblem poetry. Pattern poetry was revived at several stages in literary history after
Herbert, e.g., in twentieth-century Surrealism and concrete poetry. Henry Vaughan (1622-95)
was also an Anglican poet. He was born in Wales and called himself "Silurise" after the an-
cient Silures. Influenced by Donne and Herbert's pronounced devoutness, Vaughan recorded
his mysticism in such poems as "The Retreat", contained in Silex Scintillans (1650). Richard
Crashaw (1612-49) started off as an Anglican and an admirer of Herbert's poems. He later be-
came a Catholic and worked in Rome, where he came under the influence of Italian poets like
Marino and Spanish mysticists. Like Donne, he employed erotic metaphors in the description
of religious ecstasy.
A few other poets remain to be mentioned, most of them followers of Donne or influenced
by his poetry. Closest to Donne was Andrew Marvell (1621-78). His poem "To His Coy
Mistress" celebrates the pleasures of erotic love in an exhortation (carpe diem) to his lover.
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Surprisingly, Marvell was a Puritan, an admirer of
Cromwell and tutor to Cromwell's ward. After the
Restoration Marvell's poetry assumed a satirical and
bitter element. Thomas Carew (c. 1595-1639) is
one of the more important poets of the so-called
Cavalier School. Carew was a disciple of both Jon-
son and Donne. A master of the heroic couplet, he
wrote fine elegies, numerous songs, and licentious
amatory poems like "The Rapture". Robert Herrick
(1591-1674) is more indebted to Ben Jonson and
stands a little apart from the Cavalier lyricists. He
spent his exile as a cleric in Devonshire, producing
secular and divine poems. To Jonson's art of brief
expression he added his own fanciful and melan-
cholic outlook in verse expressing the transience of
human life. Sir John Suckling (1609-42), John
Cleveland (1613-58), and Richard Lovelace
(1618-58), also Cavalier poets, wrote mainly licen-
tious love poems. Abraham Cowley (1618-67) was
the last of the metaphysicals and already very much
of a Restoration poet. As a precursor of Dryden, he
Herbert, Pattern Poem started off with poems in the manner of John Donne
and ended up as a poet of cool reason, an intellectual
who ignored the heart.
John Milton (1608-74) was the last great poet of the English Renaissance. He was a Puritan
who, both in verse and prose, dwarfed his contemporaries. Coming of a moderately well-to-
do London family, Milton never had to earn his own living and could afford the leisure
Shakespeare never had. He received a remarkable education at Christ's College, Cambridge,
and very early developed an interest in poetry while studying the ancient literatures. During
the six years he spent at his father's country-residence at Morton in Buckinghamshire,
Milton wrote his early poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso (i.e. "Mirth" and "Melancholy"),
which blended the artistic spirit of the Renaissance and the graver mood of Puritanism. They
show his descriptive gifts and a highly individualistic musicality. Il Penseroso, for instance,
celebrates the pleasures of solitude and contemplation while personifying and addressing
"melancholy".
But hail thou Goddess, sage and holy,
Hail, divinest Melancholy,
Whose saintly visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human sight;
And therefore to our weaker view,
O'erlaid with black, staid Wisdom's hue.
Black, but such as in esteem,
Prince Memnon's sister might beseem,
Or that starred Ethiope queen that strove
To set her beauty's praise above
The sea, nymphs, and their powers offended.
Yet thou art higher far descended.
Comus, a morality play, was also produced
during this period, as well as an elegy to a
friend, Edward King, which is entitled Lycidas
(1637). In 1638 Milton undertook a voyage to
France and Italy, visiting the Vatican and
Naples and writing a few poems in Latin. But
he was soon back in England and stepped into
the arena of political controversy, siding with Les Trs Riches Heures de Jean Duc
the enemies of the King. In 1643 he married a de Berry: The Garden of Eden.
girl of 17 who left him within a month. Milton Illuminated by the Limburg brothers
immediately wrote a treatise on divorce and
soon began publishing political pamphlets, such as Areopagitica (1643), which defended
the liberty of the press, and some works against the monarchy.
Milton's eyesight was by this time steadily declining, and about the middle of 1652 he be-
came completely blind, a fact which he recorded stoically in his most famous sonnet.
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."
With the Restoration of 1660 Milton retired from public life. He barely escaped imprison-
ment. Blind, half-fugitive, and disillusioned, he turned to compose some of the most power-
ful poetic works in the English language, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Paradise
Lost was completed in 1665, but held up by the Great Plague and the Great Fire in London,
it did not appear until 1667. The subject of this epic is the fall of man. Milton created a new
kind of English for this poem, a blank verse which is highly artificial and removed from
everyday speech. Yet the diction, however Latinized it may be, is appropriate for the subject
and contributes, together with the wealth and freshness of Milton's imagination, to the
magnificence of the poem. An excerpt from Book IV (Satan's address to the sun) follows
here.
Sometimes towards Eden which now in his view
Lay pleasant, his griev'd look he fixes sad,
Sometimes towards Heav'n and the full-blazing Sun,
Which now sat high in his Meridian Towr:
Then much revolving, thus in sighs began.
O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd,
Lookst from thy sole Dominion like the God
Of this new World; at whose sight all the Starrs
Hide their diminisht heads; to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy Sphear;
Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down,
Warring in Heav'n against Heav'ns matchless King:
Ah wherefore! he deserv'd no such return
From me, whom he created what I was
In that bright eminence, and with his good
Upbraided none; nor was his service hard.
What could be less than to afford him praise,
The easiest recompense, and pay him thanks,
How due! yet all his good prov'd ill in me,
And wrought but malice; lifted up so high
I sdained subjection, and thought one step higher
Would set me highest, and in a moment quit
The debt immense of endless gratitude,
So burthensome still paying, still to ow []
Like Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained (1671) is a religious epic. It is a shorter poem (there
are only four books while Paradise Lost has ten books) dealing exclusively with the temp-
tation of Christ in the wilderness. Milton's last work was Samson Agonistes (1671), a trag-
edy following classical Greek procedure.
After Milton came the new literature of the Restoration period. Poetry was now less passion-
ate. The Restoration poets mistrusted feeling and imagination. Reason, coupled with culture
and city manners, governed literary taste. The Puritans, now ousted from power, were ridi-
culed in a wave of satires, ranging from the burlesque to the obscene. Samuel Butler (1612-
80) wrote a mock-heroic poem, Hudibras (1663-78), denouncing all the hypocrisies of Puri-
tanism. Butler's tale of Sir Hudibras, the fat and quarrelsome knight, and his squire Ralph, is
reminiscent of Cervantes9, and, in its coarseness, of Rabelais10 and Scarron11, both vastly
influential French writers. With the help of burlesque, travesty, and parody, Butler ridiculed
the Puritan mentality, as in this description of Hudibras's religion.
For his religion, it was fit
To match his learning and his wit.
'Twas Presbyterian true blue;
For he was of that stubborn crew
Of errant saints, whom all men grant
To be the true church militant;
Such as do build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun;
Decide all controversy by Infallible artillery;
And prove their doctrine orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks;

Call fire, and sword, and desolation,
A godly thorough reformation,
Which always must be carried on,
And still be doing, never done;
As if religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.
The Restoration wits, many of them also notorious
rakes and libertines, left their traces in the poetry of
the closing decades of the century. Among them
were Charles Sackville, earl of Dorset (1638-1706),
Sir Charles Sedley (1639-1701), and John Wilmot,
Earl of Rochester (1647-80). Rochester, like his dis-
solute friends, was a brilliant satirist equally able to Engraving by W. Hogarth
write fine misanthropic pieces like "A Satyr on Man- for Butlers Hudibras
kind" as well as daring amatory poems which most
modern anthologies prefer to ignore. The shocking if not obscene verse produced by these
poets was a reaction against the severe and often false morals the Puritans demanded and
9 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), Spanish writer whose major work in fiction, Don
Quixote (1605-1615), became the prototype of the picaresque novel. This masterpiece has
proved influential for many European writers. Cervantes also wrote outstanding stories (Novelas
Ejemplares, 1613) and a number of comedies.
10 Franois Rabelais (c. 1494-c. 1553), French writer, humanist, and doctor. He published many
works on archeology and medicine but is mainly remembered for his satirical and fantastic
books about the popular giants Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-52). Rabelais's comic realism
ranges from obscenity to parody. His influence on English literature was widespread after the
first good translations had appeared in 1653. Samuel Butler, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne,
and James Joyce are among the writers who have drawn on Rabelais's humour and wit.
11 Paul Scarron (1610-1660), French writer who wrote satirical verse epics, comedies, and an out-
standing novel, Le Roman comique (1651 and 1657), with convincing realistic descriptions.
tried to enforce during their rule. The erotic and libertine poetry of the Restoration rakes
was naturally welcome in court circles, though the London middle class condemned both
the poets and their lyrics.
Donne and Milton were the outstanding figures in the first half of the century. John Dryden
(1631-1700) was the most prominent poet in the forty years following the Restoration.
Unlike Milton, Dryden identified himself with official opinion, even changing sides during
the first half of his life. Thus he wrote an elegy on Cromwell's death, but when Charles II
came back from exile he celebrated the King in "Astraea Redux". Dryden was the chronicler
of his age, recording catastrophes like plagues and fires as well as military victories in his
Annus Mirabilis (1667). He selected contemporary themes and fashioned them into poetry,
often of the satirical kind. Thus he mocked the politician Shaftesbury in his Absalom and
Achitophel (1681), in which Shaftesbury is Achitophel.
Of these the false Achitophel was first:
A Name to all succeeding ages cursed.
For close Designs and crooked Counsels fit;
Sagacious, Bold, and Turbulent of wit,
Restless, unfixed in Principles and Place,
In Power unpleased, impatient of Disgrace.
A fiery Soul, which working out its way,
Fretted the Pigmy Body to decay:
And o'er informed the Tenement of Clay.
A daring Pilot in extremity;
Pleased with the Danger, when the Waves went high
He sought the Storms; but for a Calm unfit,
Would Steer too near the Sands, to boast his Wit.
Great Wits are sure to Madness near allied;
And thin Partitions do their Bounds divide:
Else, why should he, with Wealth and Honour blessed,
Refuse his Age the needful Hours of Rest?
Punish a Body which he could not please;
Bankrupt of Life, yet Prodigal of Ease?
And all to leave, what with his Toll he won,
To that unfeathered, two-legged thing, a Son.
Like Swift and Pope, Dryden was a master of poetic irony. He made the heroic couplet the
classical form of poetic expression which would be used by his successors in the eighteenth
century. Yet he also wrote religious poetry, such as Religio Laici (1682) and, after em-
bracing Roman Catholicism in 1685 (at the accession of James II), The Hind and the
Panther (1687), a poem of 2,500 verses defending his new faith. Dryden is remembered for
his odes, too, such as "A Song For St. Cecilia's Day" (1687), and for his translations of
classical poetry and the adaptations of Chaucer and Boccaccio in heroic couplets, published
as Fables, Ancient and Modern (1699). Dryden depended on the money he got for trans-
lations, for the Revolution in 1688 deprived him of his pensions and of the office of Poet
Laureate. It must be said to his credit that he did not turn away from his adopted faith.
Thus the seventeenth century boasted a number of great poets. The development from
Donne to Dryden mirrored the momentous changes in taste, philosophy, and manners. It was a
movement from passion and religion to intellect and urban wit. And reason, wit, and good
manners were to dominate the poetry of the early eighteenth century.
3. Drama
The beginning of the century was dominated by William Shakespeare (1564-1616). The
works written about his life and work are legion. We know that he was born in Stratford-on-
Avon, made an unwise marriage there, went to London, amassed a fortune, came back to
Stratford a wealthy citizen, and died there.
He needed money and wanted property, and
he got both by writing his plays. Shakespeare
was not interested in leaving exact versions
of his works, nor did he think of his plays as
literature: he wrote for the audience in the
playhouse, not for the reader in the "closet".
The publication of his plays is a story by it-
self. In Shakespeare's time, regular and au-
thorized publication was the exception rather
than the rule and plagiarism was rampant.
Some of his works were published in his life-
time as Quartos (so called because they are
printed on a quarto size page); and they were
often faulty copies. After his death two of
Shakespeare's fellow players, John Heminges
and Henry Condell, brought out the first col-
lected edition of his plays, the so-called Folio
edition (1623).
As a young dramatist, Shakespeare wrote com-
edies and historical plays, some of them in col-
laboration with contemporary playwrights like
Beaumont and Fletcher. His early comedies
show him as a lyrical writer imbued with ex-
uberant mirth, buoyancy, and imagination. In
Love's Labour's Lost and The Comedy of Er-
rors Shakespeare resorted to the popular in- Portrait of Shakespeare.
gredients of comedy, such as mistaken iden- Engraving by Droeshout. 1623
tities, surprises, imbroglios, puns, and quib-
bles. But he was also capable of writing in different veins, producing romantic comedies like
The Two Gentlemen of Verona and boisterous plays bordering on farce, such as The Taming of
the Shrew.
Written around 1594, this comedy is presented as a play within a play. Christopher Sly, a
drunken tinker, is spirited to a castle, where he is assured he is a lord and attends a play per-
formed by strolling players.
This play deals with the taming of Katherina, a termagant and the elder daughter of a rich gent-
leman of Padua. Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, who has determined to marry Katherina,
cannot be deterred by her rude rebuffs, pretends to find her courteous and gentle, and manages
to tame the "shrew" by several rude actions, such as keeping her waiting on the wedding-day,
appearing clad like a scarecrow, and refusing to attend the bridal feast. At his own home, he
distresses Katherina further by several mad pranks and finally takes her back to her father's
house. Katherina's sister, Bianca, has also found a husband, and another suitor has married a
widow. The bridegrooms make a wager as to which wife shall prove the most docile, and
Petruchio wins triumphantly when Katherina turns into a quiet, obedient wife.
Shakespeare's early history plays appealed to all the diverse elements of his audience, which,
filled with national pride by the defeat of the Armada, wanted pageants and patriotic
speeches. Shakespeare provided these, and more, in the three parts of Henry VI, in Richard
III and King John. Contemporary playwrights, especially the University wits Greene, Peele,
and Marlowe, did not always like the versatility of the newcomer from the provinces. They
saw in Shakespeare a clever and ruthless opportunist hobnobbing with the rich and mighty,
such as the earl of Southampton, and giving the public what it wanted, not what it ought to
have. There was much self-interest behind such reproaches. William Shakespeare did satisfy
public appetite for theatrical crime and violence in his first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, which
provides a remarkable mixture of massacre, rape, torture, and cannibalism. In everything he
did, whether it was poetry, comedy or tragedy, Shakespeare tried to outdo his predecessors.
The most glorious period of Shakespeare's activity began with Romeo and Juliet, a lyrical
tragedy. The play has everything to please the kind of audience he wrote for fights, low
comedy, philosophy, romantic love, and untimely death.
Based on an Italian romance by Bandello that was often translated into English, Romeo and
Juliet was probably written around 1595. It focuses on the bitter enmity between the two chief
families of Verona, the Montagues and the Capulets. Romeo, the son of old Lord Montague,
falls in love with Juliet, and she with him, when he attends in disguise a feast given by Juliet's
father, Lord Capulet. Romeo wins Juliet's consent to a secret marriage, and they are wedded the
next day by Friar Laurence. Complications ensue when Romeo's friend, Mercutio, quarrels with
Tybalt, of the Capulet family, and Romeo, coming on the scene, kills Tybalt. Romeo is then
banished from Verona, and Capulet proposes to marry Juliet to Count Paris. Friar Laurence
advises Juliet to drink a potion before the wedding which will render her lifeless for 40 hours,
and he also promises to inform Romeo of this trick so that he can rescue Juliet from the vault
and carry her to Mantua. Juliet does as the friar tells her, but his message to Romeo miscarries,
and Romeo hears that Juliet is dead. Equipped with poison, he comes to the vault to have a last
sight of Juliet. Outside the vault, he happens upon Count Paris; they fight and Paris is killed.
Romeo drinks the poison and dies, and when Juliet awakes she guesses what has happened,
stabs herself and dies. The friar and Count Paris's page tell the story to Montague and Capulet
who, when confronted with the tragic results of their hate, are reconciled.
A variety of comedies followed in quick succession. A Midsummer Night's Dream revealed
Shakespeare's poetic genius in drama, combining mythical Athens with his own Warwick-
shire. The clown becomes a complex and important character in Shakespeare's next three
comedies: Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, and Falstaff in The Merry
Wives of Windsor are all examples of this. Much Ado about Nothing is another entertaining
comedy while The Merchant of Venice, written about 1596, is one of Shakespeare's most pe--
culiar plays, mixing tragic elements with comedy and romance. The play follows Marlowe's
The Jew of Malta in its conventional antisemitism and has in Shylock, the Jewish usurer, a
complex character better suited for tragedy than comedy.
During the period 1594-1600 Shakespeare wrote a number of historical plays, returning to
English history with Richard II, which has often been interpreted as a work of propaganda
in favour of Robert Devereux, earl of Essex. This was followed by the two Henry IV plays,
which are more than mere histories, for Sir John Falstaff holds up the action gloriously and
also plays out his wit in Henry V.
A certain sense of gloom then seems to enter the plays that followed, even the comedies.
Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, and Jacques in As You Like It, show a bitter pessimism
that was now to come to the fore. The comedies written between 1600 and 1608 are not
meant primarily for laughs. Troilus and Cressida is a dark comedy of Greek myth that failed
as a play in Shakespeare's day because it preached too much about order and the need to
maintain it. Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well are still romantic comedies,
full of improbabilities and bathed in a light of exquisite fancy, yet they contain undeniable
notes of melancholy. Gloom and melancholy also pervade the great tragedies from that
period: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, Timon of Athens, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and
Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. They picture the world as full of evil forces, and man as either
thoughtless and dominated by passions or in the case of Hamlet meditative and unable
to take action. Shakespeare took his plot for Hamlet from the thirteenth-century Danish hist-
orian Saxo Grammaticus and an earlier version of the play that may have been written by
Thomas Kyd.
The story opens with Claudius on the throne of Denmark. He has murdered his brother and with
indecent haste married Gertrude, the king's wife. Hamlet, the dead man's son, is urged by his
father's ghost to take revenge. But Hamlet's melancholy, introspective and scrupulous nature
makes him irresolute and paralyses his will. In order to escape Claudius's suspicion, he feigns
madness and treats rudely his former lover, Ophelia. Hamlet has a play acted before Claudius
reproducing the circumstances of the murder, and Claudius betrays himself. In the following
scene, Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius, Ophelia's father, and is then sent by Claudius on a
mission to England. During that journey Hamlet is supposed to be killed by order of the king,
but the ship is captured by pirates and Hamlet returns to Denmark. There, he finds that Ophelia,
crazed with grief, has committed suicide. Her brother Laertes, the complete opposite of
Hamlet's character, has come home to take vengeance for the deaths of his father and sister.
Claudius arranges a fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes, in which the latter uses a
poisoned sword, and kills Hamlet; but only after Hamlet has mortally wounded Laertes and
stabbed the king. Gertrude drinks from a poisoned cup intended for her son.
Othello, the Moor of Venice was written between 1602 and 1604. It is a study in jealousy, a
theme Shakespeare also treated in his comedies.
The first act is set in Venice. Othello, a moor in the service of the state, has secretly married
Desdemona, the daughter of a Venetian senator. When Othello is accused of having abducted
Desdemona, he justifies his deed, and the Senate then orders him to lead the Venetian forces
against the Turks.
The plot continues on Cyprus, where Othello has landed with his wife and soldiers. His friends
include Cassio, a young Florentine, who has helped Othello when he courted Desdemona, and
Iago, an older soldier, who is bitterly disappointed at Othello's decision to promote the young
Cassio. Iago decides to take revenge on all and everyone: he arranges for Cassio to get involved
in a fight, so that Othello deprives him of his lieutenancy; and he suggests to Othello that Cassio
is Desdemona's lover. With the help of his wife Emilia, who is Desdemona's waiting-woman,
Iago manages to have Othello see Cassio in possession of a handkerchief which Othello had
offered to Desdemona. Giving in to Iago's promptings, and almost mad with jealousy, Othello
strangles Desdemona in her bed. Both Iago's guilt and Desdemona's innocence are finally
revealed to Othello. Iago is arrested, and Othello, trying unsuccessfully to stab him, kills him-
self.
King Lear and Timon of Athens are near-hysterical condemnations of ingratitude. Shake-
speare exploited a chronicle play, King Lear (printed in 1605 but performed much earlier),
and collections of histories and sagas for his tragedy about the unwise old Lear, king of
Britain, who is victimized by two of his daughters.
Intending to divide his kingdom among his daughters Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, Lear asks
them to say which loves him most. Goneril and Regan declare their love without hesitating, and
Cordelia, disgusted with their falsity, merely speaks of filial duty. Infuriated with Cordelia's
answer, Lear gives two thirds of the kingdom to Goneril and Regan and divides the remaining
third between them, leaving Cordelia with nothing. But he soon finds out about the true
character of his daughters when Goneril and Regan refuse to maintain the old king and turn him
out of doors in a storm. Meanwhile, Cordelia has become the wife of the king of France. The
earl of Gloucester takes pity on Lear and is blinded by his enemies. Gloucester's son Edgar,
who has been cheated by his bastard brother Edmund, tends his blind father until the latter's
death. Lear, now insane with rage and ill treatment, has been conveyed to Dover, where he
finds Cordelia. Goneril and Regan fall in love with Edmund and finally turn against each other;
Goneril poisons Regan, and then takes her own life. Commanded by Edmund, the English
forces defeat the invading French; Lear and Cordelia are imprisoned; and by Edmund's order,
Cordelia is hanged. Lear dies from grief, and Edgar eventually proves his brother Edmund's
treachery.
While Othello and Lear become victims of their jealousy and imprudence, Macbeth is over-
powered by destiny and the entreaties of his wife. The tragedy of Macbeth was first per-
formed at the Globe Theatre in 1606.
The play opens with Macbeth and Ban-
quo, generals of Duncan, returning from
a victory over rebels. The two friends
meet three witches who prophesy that
Macbeth shall be "thane of Cawdor" and
then king, and that Banquo shall beget
kings. When Macbeth learns that the
Scottish king Duncan has indeed created
him thane of Cawdor, he gives in to the
arguments of his wife and kills Duncan,
who is visiting his castle. Further blood-
shed follows, as Macbeth orders the mur-
der of Banquo and his son Fleance. But
Fleance and Duncan's sons escape, and
Macbeth, haunted by the ghost of Ban-
Engraving after Fuseli for Macbeth. 1785 quo, again consults the witches. They tell
him to beware Macduff, the thane of Fife.
Thereupon Macbeth has Lady Macduff and her children murdered and learns that Macduff has
joined Duncan's son Malcolm. Lady Macbeth becomes insane and dies, and Macduff, returning
with Malcolm's newly gathered army from England, kills Macbeth and thus makes the pre-
diction of the witches come true.
Many of Shakespeare's tragedies figure heroes embodying common human faults, such as
pride, jealousy, ingratitude and prodigality, and it is their weaknesses, however slight they
may be, that ruin them. Thus Brutus, in Julius Caesar, may be the most righteous of Ro-
mans, but Cassius knows his weak points and persuades him into killing Caesar.
Shakespeare's last plays, written after his retirement to Stratford in 1610, are of a very dif-
ferent character. Cymbeline, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale show a soul at rest with it-
self and with the world and may reflect something of the comfort Shakespeare found in his
daughters Judith and Susannah. The Tempest is a romantic drama that has inspired numerous
other works of art, including an incomplete opera by Mozart and music by Berlioz and
Tchaikovsky.
The play is set on a lonely island where Prospero, formerly duke of Milan, has spent twelve
years with his daughter Miranda. By his knowledge of magic, Prospero has released several
spirits imprisoned by a witch. He is served by the spirit Ariel and by Caliban, the witch's son.
When the play begins, Prospero's magic wrecks a ship on the island carrying his brother
Antonio, who ousted Prospero from the throne, and some of Antonio's friends and their
children. As is usual with Shakespeare, a series of misunderstandings and aborted schemes for
treachery follows, and all turns well in the end through the guiding benevolent art of Prospero:
Miranda falls in love with young Ferdinand, Prospero gets back his dukedom and renounces his
magic, and they all embark for Italy, leaving Caliban alone on the island.
These romantic comedies, together with Pericles, which Shakespeare probably wrote in
collaboration with another writer, have a new and delicious vein of lyricism the tragic bit-
terness has gone. Shakespeare wrote his last historical play, Henry VIII, with John Fletcher.
The Globe Playhouse burned down during its first performance, and the end of the Globe
also marked the end of Shakespeare's career: he died three years later.
Why, one may ask, is Shakespeare's work considered so great? To begin with, there is his
verbal genius, which is even more striking than his almost cinematic scene-changes. The
meaning and the sound of words were all-important to Shakespeare. Thus he displayed a
lyrical and musical gift in his early plays, backed up by beautiful poetic imagery. This
imagery reached extraordinary heights in the great tragedies and later plays, in which lan-
guage became compressed and at times harsh. His versatility as a writer of various types of
comedy, tragedy, and history plays is unparalleled in the world's literature. No other play-
wright achieved his consistency of quality, and his dramatic excellence allowed him to
match the specialists in almost any area of drama. It is just because Shakespeare ignored
contemporary dramatic rules the famous unities of action, time, and place that he was
superior. His sole aim was to divert and to move his audience. In Shakespeare's plays trag-
ical, romantic, humorous, and farcical elements are often interwoven: the coarse competes
with the sublime, and the serious with the humorous. One of the reasons why this should be
so is that Shakespeare wrote plays for, and was aware of writing them for, an Elizabethan
audience made up of aristocrats, gallants, thieves, sailors, soldiers, and apprentices. This
"mixed bag" of people wanted a variety of things, and Shakespeare gave them action and
blood, beautiful phrases and wit, thought and debate, subtle humour, boisterous clowning,
love stories, songs, and dances.
Admittedly, Shakespeare, like Molire12, was a great borrower, copying previous plays and
quarrying for subjects in Holinshed's Chronicles, Plutarch's13 Lives, William Painter's Palace
12 Molire (pseudonym of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-73) was the outstanding French comic
playwright of the seventeenth century. He was the creator of French classical comedy and has
left a gallery of portraits and human types. His plays were exploited by Dryden, Wycherley, and
Vanbrugh, and by many other writers during the Restoration period. Molire's most influential
plays are L'Avare, 1669, Le Tartuffe, 1664, Le Malade imaginaire, 1673, Le Bourgeois gentil-
homme, 1660, and Le Misanthrope, 1666.
of Pleasure, and Boccaccio's Decameron. But he almost always produced something better
than his sources, and his unique gift for characterization, with which he created unforget-
table types, makes up for the lack of verisimilitude in some of the plays. No other dramatist
has given us so vast a gallery of unforgettable characters.
Shakespeare's fame overshadows the merits of a group of dramatists who were his contem-
poraries. Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was immensely rich, and writers of talent were
numerous. After Marlowe, Ben Jonson (1572-1637) was Shakespeare's greatest contempo-
rary. Jonson was a classicist, a moralist, and a reformer of the drama. His plays generally
obey the rules of the unities of time, place, and theme. Ben Jonson created abstractions,
types of characters controlled by the medieval theory of the "humours", i.e. sanguin, chol-
eric, phlegmatic, and melancholic. Thus his comedy Every Man in His Humour (1598) is
little more than a demonstration of the humoral theory, which defines characters as influ-
enced by one quality, such as avarice, cowardice, or boastfulness. Despite his limiting theory
of characters, Jonson was an outstanding playwright in the area of comedy. By studiously
observing and ridiculing the types of men of his day, Jonson became a sort of Dickens of the
seventeenth century. His best plays were written after 1600: Volpone (1607), The Alchemist
(1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614). The first two focus on the same theme rogues
getting rich on the credulity and stupidity of the ignorant. Since Jonson was a realist, he
made Elizabethan London the setting of his dramas. Thus Bartholomew Fair, which is con-
cerned with contemporary low life, presents in a farcical light various scenes of the most
popular fair in London; its most important character is Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, one of sev-
eral hypocritical Puritans.
The element of realism was pursued by a number of playwrights, notably Thomas Dekker
(1572-1632), John Webster (c. 1580-1625), Thomas Middleton (1570-1627), George
Chapman (1559-1634), John Marston (c. 1576-1634), and Thomas Heywood (c. 1573-
1641). Collaboration between these playwrights was common and frequent. Heywood ap-
parently participated in the writing of 220 plays. Among the important dramatists providing
living pictures of London were Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-
1625). Working together on several plays, they achieved a common style and produced their
best work with the tragi-comedy Philaster, or Love Lies A-Bleeding (1608-10). In A Woman
Killed Kindly (1603), Heywood adapted tragedy to the sensibilities of the middle class. Yet
the most profound of the tragic dramatists was John Webster, who is still known for his
revenge play The Duchess of Malfi (1613-14). Cyril Tourneur (1575-1626) further devel-
oped the tragedy of horror and revenge and displayed a strong taste for the perverse in The
Revenger's Tragedy (1607). This is also true of John Ford (1586-1639). His 'Tis Pity She's
a Whore (c. 1625-33) deals with incest and murder. Finally, Philip Massinger (1583-1640)
and James Shirley (1596-1666) followed Ben Jonson's example in comedies and tragedies.
Massinger's finest play is a comedy, A New Way to Pay Old Debts (c. 1625), in which he
portrays in Sir Giles Overreach a miser who can easily compare to Volpone or Molire's
Harpagon. Shirley wrote about 30 plays and produced some of the best comedies before the
closing of the theatres.
13 Plutarch (Plutarchos, 50-125), Greek philosopher and historian. His 44 biographies of great
Greeks and Romans are written in a lively style and contain many anecdotes, but they are not
accurate historical records.
When the Puritans finally prohibited stage plays and closed down the theatres in 1642, they
did not stop English drama at its height. At this time there was little new development and
much imitation of earlier examples. Still, with their decision the Puritans destroyed a tra-
dition of writing and acting. When it was revived two decades later, English drama was not
the same. The break between 1642 and 1660 was not absolute, as some sort of theatrical en-
tertainment in private houses continued, Sir William Davenant's "entertainments" being the
best-known example.
With the return of Charles II both the Wrens Theatre Royal. Drury Lane. 1674
drama and its audience changed. Theatre-
going now became a monopoly of the upper class and the court. The fashionable Restoration
audience wanted wit, humour, and sex, but little else, and the playwrights catered to these
narrow tastes. The new theatres brought some changes affecting productions, such as a re-
duction in size of the platform-stage which meant less contact between the actors and the
audience and the introduction of women players. The old intimacy of the Elizabethan stage
was lost, but the actresses (women's roles were formerly played by boys) introduced a more
realistic sexual atmosphere. Charles and his court had spent their exile in France, at the
splendid and frivolous court of Louis XIV, and the new English drama absorbed some of the
French spirit in language (correctness and lucidity), manners, and attitudes toward love.
It was in comedy that the Restoration found its peculiar excellence. Typically, Shake-
speare's comedies were now disliked, but those of Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher and Shir-
ley found imitators. The main ingredients of the new comedy of manners were lust, cuck-
oldry, and intrigue, covered by a smart veneer of wit. It was in the work of five dramatists,
who belong to two different generations, that the comedy of manners was evolved: Etherege
and Wycherley produced their plays between 1665-1676, and Congreve, Vanbrugh, and
Farquhar between 1692-1707. Dryden, too, tried his hand at comedy, yet his The Wild
Gallant (1663) and the slightly more popular Marriage la Mode did not hold the stage. Sir
George Etherege (1635-91) was the senior Restoration comedian. He discovered the new
formula for successful plays with The Man of Mode (1676). Dispensing with morals and
romanticism, Etherege provided witty portrayals of elegant ladies and educated gallants in
their dissipations, love-affairs, and intrigues.
With William Wycherley (1640-1716) the comedy of manners progresses to satire and even
cynicism. In his first plays, Love in a Wood (1671) and The Gentleman Dancing-Master
(1672), he was still experimenting, reaching the full potential of his powers with The Country
Wife (1674) and The Plain Dealer (1676), the second influenced by Molire's Le Misanthrope.
The Country Wife is one of the wittiest of his plays. The plot illustrates the folly of excessive
jealousy and credulity in lovers. Mr. Pinchwife comes to London for the marriage of his sister,
Alithea, and brings with him his innocent country wife. His exaggerated jealousy puts ideas into
her head. Sparkish, who was to marry Alithea, has too much trust and confidence in her, losing
her to a new wooer. The central figure of the play is Horner, an ironic libertine who pretends to
be impotent in order to seduce his victims the more easily. Horner is eventually able to convince
Pinchwife of his wife's "innocence." The theme of cuckoldry is thus dominant in this play, as in
many other Restoration comedies.
Wycherley's satire is founded on his cynical mockery of human puppets pursuing illusory
pleasures.
The following decade saw some plays by Thomas Shadwell (1640-92), who rejected the
principles and conventions of the Restoration comedy and tended more to Jonson's comedy
of humours. His best plays are The Squire of Alsatia (1688) and Bury Fair (1689).
The Restoration comedy reached its zenith with the works of Congreve, Vanbrugh, and
Farquhar. Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) was the least skilled of these dramatists, though
he was an important architect who designed and built Blenheim Palace for the Duke of
Marlborough, and his own Haymarket Theatre. Vanbrugh's major comedies, The Relapse, or
Virtue in Danger (1696) and The Provok'd Wife (1697), suffer from faulty style and plot; yet
the plays were successful for a while. It was definitely William Congreve (1670-1729) who
contributed most to the development of the later Restoration comedy. Congreve returned to
the surface gaiety of Etherege in dealing with the world of fashion, courtship, and seduction,
yet he conducted his comedies with a brilliance of dialogue and wit which Etherege never
achieved. Congreve concentrated very consciously on the formal and artistic aspects of com-
edy and saw himself as the reformer of the stage. With The Old Bachelor (1693), he made
his reputation suddenly and early in his life. Modelled on Etherege's Man of Mode, the play
portrays the chase for erotic pleasures, the cynical despise of marriage, and the desire for
money and property. Technically, the later comedies The Double Dealer (1694); Love for
Love (1695); and The Way of the World (1700) are even better, though they all conform in
theme and strategy to the model of the successful Restoration comedy of manners.
Restoration drama produced few important tragedies. Sir William Davenant (1608-68) intro-
duced what came to be called heroic drama. His The Siege of Rhodes (1656 enlarged in 1662)
impressed Dryden. Like Davenant, Dryden exaggerated the "love versus honour" theme, and
in his tragedies he gave his characters grandiose and ranting speeches declaimed in regular
heroic couplets (see Aurengzebe, 1675, and The Conquest of Granada, 1672). In his later trag-
edies, such as All for Love (1677), Dryden gave up the heroic couplet for blank verse. The
more important writers of tragedy were Thomas Otway (1652-85) and Nathaniel Lee (1642-
92). Both stood under the influence of Elizabethan heroic tragedy and the plays of Corneille14
and Racine15. Otway's best tragedies are those in blank verse: The Orphan (1680) and Venice
Preserved (1682). They contain strong elements of sentimentality, but it was Lee who gave in
completely to sentiment and bombast. The Rival Queens (1667) was perhaps the most accept-
able of his eleven tragedies.
The witty and immoral comedy of manners was thus the outstanding achievement of the
Restoration period. But now the great names in European drama were French Molire in
comedy, and Racine and Corneille in tragedy. They influenced English drama considerably
and not always for the better. As England now had no Shakespeare, English drama slowly
began to decline. After 1700, this decline was hastened by literary attacks on the theatre and
the increasing importance of middle-class sentiments and taste.
4. Fiction
Poetry and drama took pride of place throughout the
seventeenth century. It was left to the Age of Enligh-
tenment to consolidate prose fiction as an acceptable
and respectable form of literature. Seventeenth-cen-
tury English prose was fed by three different sources:
the prose romance, the realistic and picaresque tale of
low life, and spiritual autobiography.
Surprisingly, the beginnings of fiction were not
further developed. The religious debates, with their
pamphleteering wars, and the many wars of the sev-
enteenth century may be responsible to a certain ex-
tent. If anything flourished, it was the prose romance
that came from France with the interminable books
by Madeleine de Scudry16. Her Le Grand Cyrus
was translated in 1655 and enjoyed great popularity.
A new type of fiction did not emerge for several Engraving from A Pilgrims Progress.
decades. It came with John Bunyan (1628-88), the Vanity Fair
14 Pierre Corneille (1606-84), French playwright and creator of the classical French tragedy. Le
Cid (1637) is one of the plays that exerted a powerful influence on the English dramatists of the
Restoration, especially on Dryden. Corneille portrayed the conflict between passion and duty at
a crucial point of moral crisis, and the heroism of his protagonists is grounded in social and psy--
chological facts.
15 Jean Racine (1639-99), French dramatist who wrote at first under the influence of Molire and
Corneille but then found his own style of tragedy. His most important play is Phdre (1677).
Racine was inspired by Greek and Roman literature and history, and his plays were often trans-
lated into English.
16 Madeleine de Scudry (1607-91), French writer of heroic romances that were extremely pop-
ular. Such works as Artamre, ou le Grand Cyrus (1649-53) extended to 10 volumes and com-
bined stories of love and war, set in ancient countries, with allusions to contemporary French
society.
son of a Bedfordshire tinker. Bunyan received little education and knew only one book
really well the Bible. Both his style and imagery depend heavily on it. John Bunyan was a
soldier in the Republican Army, a preacher, and a mystic who defended Puritan principles.
At the time of the Restoration he was sent to prison for twelve years. Released in 1671, he
continued to preach until his death. Bunyan's work shows that religious fervour had not died
with Milton. Of his several works it is The Pilgrim's Progress, begun in Bedfordshire jail
and fully published in two parts in 1684, which has left a lasting impression. Bunyan used as a
basis for his book neither his education nor literary tradition but rather his own religious
experience and the prose of the Authorized Version of the Bible.
The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegorical story in the form of a dream. The hero, Christian, trav-
els from the City of Destruction to the Eternal City, leaving behind his wife and children who
will not heed his religious advice. Part I describes Christian's arduous pilgrimage through such
allegorical locations as the Slough of Despond, the Valley of Humiliation, and Vanity Fair.
Among the various personages he encounters are Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Faithful, and Giant
Despair. Part II of the book relates the journey of Christana his wife and their children to the
same celestial destination.
Despite its Puritan and biblical allegory and overt didactic-religious tendencies, The Pilgrim's
Progress is remarkable for the beauty and simplicity of its language. Bunyan possessed great
narrative skill and his book has been translated into over one hundred languages.
Bunyan's spiritual autobiography and the realistic description of low life by Nashe, Greene,
and Deloney were soon united by another dis-
senter, Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), a contemporary
of Bunyan and one of the fathers of the English
novel.
5. Nonfiction
The masterpiece of early seventeenth-century prose
is the Authorized Version of the Bible. Undertaken
at the request of James I, it was brought to comple-
tion by some fifty scholars and first published in
1611. There is hardly an English writer who has not
been influenced by it, and few books have exerted a
more beneficial influence on the style and grammar
of the English language.
Two writers stand at the beginning of seventeenth-
century prose. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), a learn-
ed, worldly, and ambitious nobleman with a power-
ful mind, wrote most of his works in Latin, but
what he has left us in English also proves his ex-
cellence. His The Advancement of Learning (1605)
described the conditions of knowledge and the
ways in which they might be improved. However,
his fame rests upon his brilliant Essays (1597), pub-
Frontispiece of Burtons lished in enlarged editions in 1612 and 1625. These
The Anatomy of Melancholy essays (58 in the latest edition) are compact in style
and balanced in their phrasing. They discuss moral and political issues in a precise and almost
scientific manner.
In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) the Anglican clergyman Robert Burton (1577-1640)
analysed Hamlet's disease, the mental ailment we would now call neurosis or depression. Like
many other Elizabethan writers, Burton was fascinated by the issue of melancholy and wrote a
huge, strange, yet enthralling work full of the most bizarre stories, recondite learning, and
curiosities. It has given pleasure to many writers since its revival during the Romantic period.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82) was a deeply religious and learned physician standing between
the modern and medieval ways of thought. In his major works, Religio Medici (1635), Pseudo-
doxia Epidemica (1646), and Hydriotaphia (1658), he enquired into the meaning of life and
the search for truth, discussing the relationships between science, authority, and faith.
The sermon was an important seventeenth-century prose form. John Donne and Lancelot
Andrewes (1553-1626) were famous preachers, and so was Jeremy Taylor (1613-67), who
is remembered for the passion
and splendour of his sermons.
The Puritans had a whole phal-
anx of clergymen who wrote
sermons. They developed a
particular kind of hortatory
sermon, the jeremiad17 (the
best examples of which come
from New England). Richard
Baxter (1615-91) was one of
their outstanding preachers.
The ideological and religious
controversies of the age drove
many authors to write prose,
such as John Milton's Areopa-
gitica (1644) in defence of the
free press. One writer, how- The Fools Cap World Map. 1590
ever, stood apart from these Anonymous satirical print showing the outlines
tendencies, and his work has of the world known around 1600
made the greatest appeal to
posterity: Izaak Walton's (1593-1683) The Compleat Angler (1653) has seen hundreds of
editions. The book is a gentle praise of the sport of angling and of the English countryside.
The philosophical influence of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke has already been discussed
in the introduction to this chapter. In literary criticism John Dryden played the role which Dr.
Johnson and T.S. Eliot fulfilled in subsequent centuries. Dryden stated his classicist phil-
osophy, which was to bear fruit in the early eighteenth century, in the Essay on Dramatic
Poesy (1668), the Preface to the Fables (1700), and his Essay on Satire (1679, sometimes
attributed to the earl of Mulgrave). For Dryden, literature was to give a picture of truth and to
imitate nature in the manner of the ancient Greek and Roman authors. According to his prin-
ciples, literature must appeal to reason and obey rules.
17 See the prose section, below, in the chapter on colonial American literature.
Finally, the diaries of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) and John Evelyn (1620-1706), covering
the years 1660-69 (Pepys) and 1631-1706 (Evelyn), recorded history in terms of its imme-
diate impact on people. Both diaries are fascinating prose documents of the Restoration
period.
Finally, travel writing proved one of the most influential areas in prose. A fascinating genre
which, initially, hovered between fact and fiction since some of the authors (e.g., Captain
John Smith, the founder of Jamestown in Virginia) were also businessmen who "embel-
lished" their reports with fictional passages. This was to attract settlers for the colonies and
boost the sales of their books. Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) is to a large extent a satirical
reaction to the exaggerated and fictionalized travel reports marketed throughout the late
sixteenth and entire seventeenth centuries. It was Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616) who dedi-
cated a large part of his life to the compilation of the accounts of the major English explor-
ers (e.g., William Drake, Sir Walter Ralegh, and Martin Frobisher). First published in the
late sixteenth century, Hakluyt's books were reprinted over several centuries (a Hakluyt
society was founded in 1846) and eagerly read, imitated, satirized (see Swift) and exploited
by writers. His works include Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America (1582);
Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), which was
enlarged and re-issued in three volumes between 1598-1600 and contained accounts of the
voyages of the Cabots, Sir Hugh Willoughby to the Near East, Sir John Hawkins's journeys
to Guinea and the West Indies, Sir Francis Drake's travels and circumnavigation, and the
voyages of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Martin Frobisher, John Davy, Sir Walter Ralegh, and
many others. Thomas Coryate's (?1577-1617) reports of his journeys through Europe and
India became the prototype of the eccentric travel account. His fame as a traveller was leg-
endary in his lifetime. In 1608 he travelled through central Europe, mainly on foot, reporting
on this trip in a long narrative entitled Coryats Crudities (1611). In 1612 he set out for an
overland voyage to India, which he reached in 1616. Another compiler of travel reports,
Samuel Purchas (1577-1626), was to reprint some of Coryat's material. Apart from Purchas
His Pilgrimage. Or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages (1613),
his most influential collection is Hakluytus Post-humus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, Con-
tayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Land Travell by Englishmen and Others
(1625). Based to some extent on manuscripts left by Richard Hakluyt, this consists of 20
books in two sections, with accounts of voyages to India, China, Japan, Africa, and the Med-
iterranean; the second part deals with expeditions to the West Indies and Florida. Many
writers, especially the Romantics, were to draw on this travel writing.
V. The Eighteenth Century
Many terms have been used to describe the eighteenth century: the Age of Reason and
Revolution, the Augustan Age or Neoclassicism, and the beginnings of Romanticism. These
terms indicate philosophical, political, and
literary trends, and they also provide an idea
of the varied facets of an epoch that saw the
advent of modernity, of democracy, progress,
and alienation, though hierarchical and hered-
itary patterns remained. Change occurred, but
at a pace people could adapt to.
The century began with the reign of Queen
Anne (1702-1714), heralding a time of rela-
tive stability after the social and political up-

heavals of the seventeenth century. Great
Britain was created in 1707 when Scotland
joined the Union of England and Wales. The
four Georges gave little more than their name
("Georgian England") to an era dominated
first by the Whigs1 (1715-1761) and then by
the Tories2 (1783-1830). Under the Georges
George I, 1714-1727; George II, 1727-1760
it was Robert Walpole who ran the govern-
ment, guaranteeing economic growth and
peace at home, even though he had to resort
to bribes and blackmail. As the outstanding
political figure of the first half of the century
he was followed by William Pitt the Elder in
James Gillray, The Zenith of French Glory.
whose time as Foreign Secretary (1756-1761)
1793
Great Britain became the leading power in
Europe and the colonies. Between 1783-1801
William Pitt the Younger guided Britain as Prime Minister through a much more difficult
time into the nineteenth century. Throughout the century, France remained England's arch-
enemy and both countries were engaged in a series of wars. From the 1760s on, revolutionary
1 The Whigs were an English political group or party which, from 1679, was opposed to Catho-
lics on the throne. The Tories were their political opponents. The Whigs defended parliamen-
tary and individual rights in the Glorious Revolution (1688) and helped the House of Hanover
to take over the English monarchy in 1714. For several decades, the Prime Minister came from
their ranks. The modern British Liberal Party developed from the Whigs.
2 Initially (1640) the term "Tories" was used to refer to Irish Catholics and the opponents of the
Long Parliament and the Commonwealth. From 1679 the Tories supported the monarchy and
became the opponents of the Whigs. They controlled the government between 1710-14 and be-
tween 1784-1830. After 1832 the modern Conservative Party emerged from their ranks.
forces began to make themselves felt. Parliament emerged as the most influential political
power, with John Wilkes and Charles James Fox acting as the outstanding figures among the
opposition. Amazingly, the two major revolutions of the century left Britain almost un-
scathed, though the reverberations of the American War of Independence (1775-1783) and the
French Revolution in 1789 also caused a few tremors in England.
The most spectacular social phenomenon was the growing influence of the middle class and
the decline of aristocratic power. Although the landed nobility remained in power until the
nineteenth century, the plutocracy of
the trade "barons", the merchants, and
the shop owners was eventually the
driving force behind the national eco-
nomy. In religion, the influence of the
middle class was noticeable in the rise
and spread of Methodism3, founded by
John Wesley (1703-91) and his bro-

ther, Charles.
England preserved her agrarian char-
acter, for even toward the end of the
century, when the "Agricultural Revo-
lution" was followed by the Industrial
Revolution, seventy-five per cent of
the population lived in the country
W. Hogarth, Marriage -la-Mode. Plate 1. 1745 while the population of London doub-
led. The contrast between city and
country always a favourite subject of eighteenth-century literature deepened in the last
third of the century, accompanied by more rapid economic and social changes. Slowly but
steadily, the growing proletariat began to organize itself, finding radical spokesmen among
the intellectuals.
To a certain extent, these were the consequences of the Enlightenment. In England, where
the middle class and the aristocracy set the tone in culture and philosophy, nature and reason
were essential terms based on the belief in man's benevolence and common sense. In his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) John Locke had established a psycholog-
ical and empirical theory of cognition which focused on the individual and demanded reli-
gious and political freedom. And David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
(1748) carried further into skepticism the theory of impression and association. It was the
pursuit of happiness, here and now instead of hereafter, which occupied moral philosophy
from Shaftesbury4 to Jeremy Bentham5 and was codified as a human right in the Declaration
3 An evangelical Church founded in 1729 by John and Charles Wesley and dissenting from the
Church of England. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it had a large following among
the poor. Methodism stresses grace through faith. The use of lay pastors who travelled around
the country and practised open-air preaching proved successful for recruiting new members.
The Methodist Church has a powerful voice in Britain and the United States.
4 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), moral and aesthetic philosopher,
greatly influenced by Deism and Platonic ideas. Strongly opposed to the selfish theory of con-
duct propounded by Hobbes, he argued that man has "affections" for himself but also for the
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 43
of Independence beyond the Atlantic. Deism6, the child of the union between religion and
the Enlightenment, was supported by the French "philosophes", above all by Voltaire7, but
in England Methodism began to rule the field after mid-century. If hedonism and material-
ism also survived, it was mainly among the aristocracy. Noblemen still went on the custom-
ary Grand Tour (a tour through Europe) as part of their education, and in France they be-
came acquainted with the theories of d'Holbach, Helvtius, La Mettrie8 and Voltaire. Some
English rakes, notably Sir Francis Dashwood and John Wilkes and the members of the Hell
Fire Club, put into practice the French philosophy of pleasure and enjoyment. It found lit-
erary expression in Wilkes's parody, An Essay on Woman (1763), and John Cleland's no-
torious Fanny Hill (1748/9). The English libertines, however, imitating French examples,
were a minority and certainly not as influential as the Frenchmen they tried to emulate.
creatures around him and that man, in order to achieve rectitude and virtue, must respect society
and the public. His principal work is Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times
(1711, rev. in 1714).
5 Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), English lawyer and philosopher. He formulated the political and
ethical theory of utility in his Fragments on Government (1776) and Introduction to Principles
of Morals and Legislation (1780 and 1789). According to Bentham, the greatest happiness of
the greatest number of people must be the measure of right and wrong both in everyday conduct
and in legislation.
6 The religious-philosophical belief, held by many philosophers of the Enlightenment, which
rejects the supernatural doctrines of Christianity and advocates a "natural religion" with a
Supreme Being who created, but does not interfere in, the world. Its major spokesmen in Eng-
land were Charles Blount (1654-93) and Matthew Tindal (1657-1733), and in France, Voltaire
and Diderot.
7 Voltaire (Franois Marie Arouet, 1694-1778), French writer and philosopher and one of the
major spokesmen of the Enlightenment. He left an enormous number of works in the fields of
literature, journalism, politics, history, and philosophy and was respected, and even feared, by
the sovereigns of his age. Voltaire was opposed to any kind of fanatical or doctrinal religion.
His guidelines were reason and the empirical sciences, and he never tired in defending the
rights of man. Outstanding among his publications are his witty and frivolous epics directed
against the French monarchy and the Catholic Church (e.g. La Henriade, 1728, and La Pucelle,
written in 1733 and published in 1762), his comments on England and the English (Lettres
philosophiques sur les Anglais, 1734), his novels (e.g. Candide, 1759) and tales. He also wrote
several excellent histories and a brilliant Dictionnaire philosophique, 1764.
8 Paul Heinrich Dietrich Baron von Holbach (1723-89), a German-born philosopher who moved
to Paris in 1735 and belonged to the circle of the "encyclopdistes" and the "philosophes", a
group of writers and thinkers who advocated skepticism in religion, materialism in philosophy,
and hedonism in ethics. The group included Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Buffon,
d'Alembert, Condillac and Helvtius.
Claude Adrien Helvtius (1715-71), one of the philosophes who developed a moral philosophy
based on mechanism, materialism, and the senses.
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-51), French philosopher, atheist, and materialist. He was per-
secuted because of his materialist view of man (L'homme machine, 1748), and, like Voltaire and
a few other men of the Enlightenment, was welcomed by Frederic the Great in Berlin, who
provided him with an income.
English art truly came into its own during the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas around 1700
continental artists still dominated history and portrait painting in England (the German-born
Gottfried Kneller died in 1723 as the English court painter), English painters gradually took
over in the 1730s. At first, they still imitated continental examples or schools (e.g., history
paintings by Sir James Thornhill), but with the creation in 1768 of the Royal Academy of
Art English styles could develop. The most
remarkable portrait painters were Joshua Rey-
nolds (1723-92), the first president of the Royal
Academy and also a theoretician who defended
his grand manner style in his treatises; Allan
Ramsay (1713-84), and Thomas Gainsborough
(1727-88; see The Blue Boy, 1770), the latter
also a distinguished landscape painter. But the
most important contributions came from anti-

establishment figures, artists who were opposed
to or not interested in the principles propagated
by the Royal Academy. The first was Rey-
nolds's opponent William Hogarth (1697-1764),
the creator of highly influential engraved series
(e.g., A Harlot's Progress, 1732; A Rake's Pro-
gress, 1735) and the author of The Analysis of
Beauty (1753), which proposed a radically new
idea of (popular) art focussing on ordinary life.
W. Hogarth, The Four Times The rising middle class found artistic spokes-
of the Day: Noon. 1738 men not only in Hogarth but also in Joseph
Highmore and Francis Hayman; their works
directly illustrated or were based on Samuel Richardson's seminal sentimental novels.
Landscape painting was further developed by George Lambert, Samuel Scott, and Paul
Sandby. Other outstanding and singular painters were George Stubbs (1724-1806), who
took a great interest in animal anatomy and is known for his realistic horse paintings; and
Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97), the creator of conversation pieces and the chronicler in
oils of the Industrial Revolution (see An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768).
Foreign artists who made an impact during their stay in England include the American
Benjamin West, and the Swiss Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807) and Henry Fuseli (i.e.,
Johann Heinrich Fssli, 1741-1825), who lived in London from 1779 until his death and
gave an early expression to the dark side of Romanticism with The Nighmare (1781). To-
wards the end of the century, the visionary poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827)
revived the illuminated manuscript in such works as Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs
of Experience (1794), which reflect his eclectic reading as well as the influence of the
French Revolution and the Romantic spirit. Caricature became an established genre in art,
pioneered as it was by William Hogarth in the first part of the century, and taken to first
heights by the daring approaches of Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) and the political sat-
ires of James Gillray (1757-1815) and Richard Newton (1776-98).
2. Poetry
In poetry, as in literature generally, the eighteenth century was a time of transition and new
beginnings. After the end of the Restoration period, the principles of Neoclassicism as ex-
emplified by Pope and Swift ruled the field until well into the second half of the century
when sensibility and sentimentality announced Romanticism. Neoclassicism, also called the
Augustan Age, derived its rules from antiquity (Aristotle, Horace, Longinus)9 and French
Classicism (Boileau)10 considering social conventions more important than individual con-
victions and seeing reason as superior to emotion. Form often determined content, while the
imitation of nature was to reflect an order combining the general, Horace's "dulce et utile"
("sweet and useful"), reason, wit and common sense. Originality in form was not asked for,
rather the masterful use of prescribed literary genres, such as the epic, the ode, the verse
satire, and the numerous imitations of classic authors. In the poetry of the first part of the
eighteenth century reason and emotion no longer work together. In fact, emotion is almost
despised as inferior. Hence it is understandable that after 1760 emotion began to displace
reason. In many ways, sentimentality, the Gothic, and Romanticism can be explained as a
reaction against the intellectual rigour of Neoclassicism, as the individual rebelling against
society and conventional artistic forms. Eighteenth-century poetry, then, had two strong
currents fed by reason and emotion; the latter came to the fore at the time of the French
Revolution.
The poets one associates most with Neoclassicism are Jonathan Swift and Alexander
Pope, the latter being the most influential figure. Swift (1667-1745), who is better remem-
bered as a prose-writer, was an outstanding humorist and a savage satirist whose tales and
satires in verse have left a lasting impression. In 1711 he published several Miscellanies in
Prose and Verse, among them "Baucis and Philemon", a verse tale and parody of Ovid's
metamorphosis, and the two "town eclogues", "A Description of the Morning", and "A
Description of a City Shower", both parodies of classic originals but also satires on Lon-
don's dirt and confusion. Perhaps unjustly, Swift has acquired the reputation of being a mis-
ogynist. As a modern follower of Juvenal11 and Ovid, however, Swift did not put down
9 Aristotle (384-322 BC), Greek philosopher and scientist and a disciple of Plato. His extensive
works in logic, ethics, metaphysics, physics, rhetoric, and poetics shaped the development of
medieval thought. His writings were then harmonized with Christianity and were central in the
teaching of higher education from the 13th to the 17th centuries. Aristotle's treatise on poetics
came into prominence rather late (in the 1550s) and was instrumental in the rise of Neoclassi-
cism.
Longinus was the author of a Greek critical treatise (On the Sublime) written in the first century
A. D. Locating the sources of poetic skill in the intensity of the writer's emotions and thought,
the work was translated in the seventeenth century and had a marked effect on eighteenth-cen-
tury critics and writers. The idea of the "sublime" paved the way for Romanticism.
10 Nicolas Despreaux Boileau (1636-1711), French critic and poet, whose Art Potique (1674), a
poem in four cantos, established canons of taste and poetic form that achieved international
importance. In England, Dryden, Pope, and Addison considered Boileau as a literary and cri-
tical authority.
11 Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis, c. 60-136), Roman satirist, who attacked the vices of his
age. His works were translated and adapted to English conditions in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries. John Dryden was one of the principal translators and was influenced by him.
women, but rather human vanity, falsity, and pretension. Thus, in "A Beautiful Young
Nymph Going To Bed" (1734), he shows the miserable reality of a prostitute's life, a far
from glamorous aspect that eighteenth-century males preferred to ignore. Swift shocked his
readers with his mock-heroic couplets hiding an essentially moral message about Corinna:
Corinna, pride of Drury-Lane,
For whom no shepherd sighs in vain;
Never did Covent Garden boast
So bright a battered, strolling toast;
No drunken rake to pick her up,
No cellar where on tick to sup;
Returning at the midnight hour,
Four stories climbing to her bower;
Then, seated on a three-legged chair,
Takes off her artificial hair:

Now, picking out a crystal eye,
She wipes it clean, and lays it by.
Her eye-brows from a mouse's hide,
Stuck on with art on either side,
Pulls off with care, and first displays 'em,
Then in a play-book smoothly lays 'em.
Now dextrously her plumpers draws,
That serve to fill her hollow jaws.
Untwists a wire; and from her gums
A set of teeth completely comes.
The description of Corinna's undressing not only reveals
a decaying body but also ridicules and exposes the
Satire on Pope erotic interest of male readers. In the tradition of Ovid's
Remedia Amoris, Swift wrote a number of poems on the
folly of love, such as "The Lady's Dressing Room" (1732), "Strephon and Chloe", and
"Cassinus and Peter", both published in 1734. They stress the need to be sensible, even
when in love, and are thus typical examples of Neoclassical poetry which puts reason above
emotion.
Alexander Pope (1685-1744) was the outstanding poet of the first half of the century. In
many ways Dryden's heir, Pope was dwarfish, weak, ugly, and venomous, but elegant and
strong in his work, which shows a rare singleness of purpose. In his early teens, Pope wrote
his "Ode to Solitude" and the "Pastorals", and at twenty he produced the Essay on Criticism,
a work in Dryden's tradition that preaches correctness in literary composition and the filing
and polishing of phrases and lines until perfection is reached. If this was literary criticism in
verse, Pope also tackled philosophy in verse in his Essay on Man, published pseudonymous-
ly in 1733. This didactic poem owes much to the philosophies of Viscount Bolingbroke and
the Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), the former a Deist and the latter propounding rational-
ism and tolerance. Pope's pithy couplets contain moral precepts summing up the rational
notions of the early decades of the century. In the history of poetry, however, Pope has gone
down for two other works he wrote, both of them delightful satires The Rape of the Lock
and The Dunciad. It was in The Rape of the Lock (1714) that Pope was at his best as an
effective satirist, mocking the whole of the fashionable society of the eighteenth century,
while nevertheless indicating that he had some attachment to its elegance. The ironic de-
scription of Hampton Court in canto iii is typical of the attitude and tone of this poem:
Close by those meads, forever crowned with flowers,

Where Thames with pride surveys his rising towers,
There stands a structure of majestic frame,
Which from the neighboring Hampton takes its name.
Here Britain's statesmen oft the fall foredoom
Of foreign tyrants and of nymphs at home;
Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take - and sometimes tea.
Hither the heroes and the nymphs resort,
To taste awhile the pleasures of a court;
In various talk the instructive hours they passed,
Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last;
One speaks the glory of the British Queen,
And one describes a charming Indian screen;
A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes;
At every word a reputation dies.
Snuff, or the fan, supply each pause of chat,
With singing, laughing, ogling, and all that.
Influenced by Boileau's Le Lutrin (1683), Pope's satirical story of the theft of a curl from the
hair of a young lady of fashion develops to its full potential the absurdly dignified style
known as mock-heroic, in which irony is created by the disparity between the trivial subject
and the highflown language. In The Dunciad (1743) Pope made a severe attack on dullness
in general, and the contemporary dunces from Grub Street (minor poets who wrote aggres-
sive satires) in particular.
Pope certainly set the tone and standards for his age, and for his followers to take up the
heroic couplet meant also taking up Pope's diction, his epigrams, and his wit. Some poets,
though, had enough individuality not to be dominated by Pope's authoritative figure. Thus
Matthew Prior (1664-1721) is remembered for the formal elegance of the songs, philo-
sophical poems, and verse tales collected in his Poems on Several Occasions (1718). John
Gay (1685-1732), after imitating Pope for a while, found his own style, too, in the parody of
pastoral poetry, The Shepherd's Week (1714), and the popular versified Fables (1727). The
heroic couplet as a poetic form remained influential. Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774) chose
it for both his long poems The Traveller (1764) and The Deserted Village (1770). In these
works he turned away from the city and lamented the decay of English village life. This was
an achievement in itself, for Pope kept the reader's attention fixed on urban society. Gold-
smith, and George Crabbe (1754-1832) with his harsh and bitter images of the country in
The Village (1783), were thus indebted to Pope only in form, but their preoccupation with
nature indicates an independent theme of eighteenth-century poetry that came to the fore
with the precursors of Romanticism. Like many others in his time James Thomson (1700-
1748), a Scot, sought fame in London. He turned away from the heroic couplet and imitated
Milton's powerful blank verse. Thomson's great cycle of poems about nature is The Seasons,
completed in 1730. It became popular throughout Europe and also had an audience among
ordinary people, whom Pope's elegant satires never reached. The Seasons is a minute de-
scription of the changing countryside under snow, rain, or sunlight, but its diction is still con-
ventional and too much indebted to Neoclassicism to make it a Romantic poem. Thomson's
other great poem is The Castle of Indolence (1748) in which he attempted the Spenserian
stanza while describing pilgrims enticed by the magician Indolence into a castle full of sen-
sual joys. The inhabitants of the castle gradually lose all initiative and are thrown into a
dungeon to perish. Two knights, however, storm the castle, capture Indolence, and set the
prisoners free. Thomson's revival of Spenser's heritage, his preference for blank verse and
dislike of the heroic couplet, characterize him as a poet between Neoclassicism and the
growing current of Romanticism which, around mid-century, was also fed by Young, Gray,
Collins, and Cowper.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, English poetry had no domineering figure like
Dryden or Pope. However, a number of poets produced a most interesting and diverse body
of verse that gave more room to sensibility, though this also meant the development of an
exclusive poetic diction as an expression of refined taste. The poets' focus gradually shifted
from moral and social aspects to the more personal and individual, and to emotion. The first
reactions against the long rule of reason were beginning to show in melancholy poems,
visions of the dark and of death, and in the obvious inclinations of some poets towards the
grotesque, exoticism, and the subconscious. The very titles of the published poems and col-
lections indicate the poetic preoccupation. Between 1742-1745 Edward Young (1683-
1765) had his Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality published, evoking a sombre
atmosphere of night, tombs, and loneliness in some 10,000 lines of blank verse. Young's
work set a fashion for gloomy lyrics like Harvey's Meditations among the Tombs (1745-
1746); Robert Blair's The Grave (1743); and Thomas Warton's The Pleasures of Melan-
choly (1747). Thomas Gray (1716-1771) wrote only ten poems, almost all of them melan-
cholic in tone, which were nevertheless vastly influential. The opening of his Elegy Written
in a Country Churchyard, first published in 1751, and written in the masterly form of Dry-
den's heroic quatrain, captures the sentiment of the precursors of Romanticism:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.
In Gray's poem, every effect is worked for, creating a carefully chosen harmony of sound
and imagery.
Significantly, William Collins (1721-1759) poured his poetic energy not into an adoration
of the rising sun or the dawn of day but into an Ode to Evening (c. 1747), which became a
successful poem. It opens thus:
lf aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,
May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
Like thy own solemn springs,
Thy springs and dying gales,
O nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun
Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts,
With brede ethereal wove,
O'erhang his wavy bed:

Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat,
With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,
Or where the beetle winds
His small but sullen horn,
As oft he rises 'midst the twilight path,
Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum.
Indebted and inspired by the form of Horace's odes, Collins, who became insane at the age
of 30, attempts in this poem a combination of dream-like effects, a musical expression of
emotions, and of formal elements still reminiscent of Neoclassicism there is pastoral and
mythological personification, adoration of "Fancy" and "Friendship", and a distinct poetic
diction.
William Cowper (1731-1800) was the poet of nature and is mainly remembered for The
Task (1785), a poem of more than 5,000 lines of blank verse pitting friendly nature against
the wicked town in rural scenes foreshadowing the work of Wordsworth.
The quest of the ancient and the exotic, a characteristic trait in eighteenth-century English
culture, also left its traces in poetry. Although fabrications, James Macpherson's Fragments
of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Gaelic or
Erse Language (1760) and his "episodes" from the Gaelic epic Fingal took Europe by storm.
Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) attributed his poems to the fictitious fifteenth-century
poet, Rowley, and they too were rather successful. Chatterton, however, disappointed and
humiliated at the early discovery of his forgery, committed suicide when he was eighteen and
thus became the hero of the later Romantic poets. Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of An-
cient English Poetry, published in three volumes in 1765, is a mixture of folk ballads and
poems from his own pen. His collection opened up the forgotten world of the ballad. Percy
adapted its wild and coarse vigour to eighteenth-century taste.
Finally, two poets remain to be mentioned who are better described as individual figures, if
not misfits, than within any particular literary period Robert Burns and William Blake.
Scotland's bard, Burns (1759-1796) was a farmer at Mossgiel until the publication of a col-
lection of his poems opened for him the doors of fashionable society in Edinburgh where,
for a brief period, he was admired as a peasant poet. In his personal life, he was the paradig-
matic poetic rebel, revolting against the restraints of conventional morality and Scottish
Presbyterianism12 by indulging in drink and love affairs. Burns was capable of writing in
two distinct styles: that of a cultivated English poet he had read Pope, Gray, Thomson,
and Shakespeare and the rougher and more earthy style of his own land, although he
obviously manipulated what are only seemingly naive dialect pieces. A man of the land,
Burns wrote about what he liked, including women and drink. His famous songs were
greatly influenced by popular Scottish poetry. Ploughing up a mouse's nest, he wrote a per-
fectly serious ode "To a Mouse".
12 A Protestant form of church organization that has its origin in the teaching of John Calvin and
was popular in Scotland and America. It implies the election of members of the church com-
munity who then serve as representatives of the church at general meetings called synods.
Apart from his songs and short poems, Burns

went down in poetic history for his Tam
O'Shanter (1791), a satirical poem written after
his return from Edinburgh. It tells the story of
Tam's encounter with witches and his breath-
taking flight, described in a mixture of ironic
distance and compassionate humour which
make this satire a unique poem in English liter-
ature.
William Blake (1757-1827) has been called a

Romantic poet. Some critics have interpreted
his work, together with the poetry of Words-
worth and Coleridge, as that of a member of
the first generation of the Romantics. While
his poetry is not devoid of Romantic themes
and elements, it would be misleading to see
him merely as a proponent of Romantic ideas
and ideals. In fact, Blake's work as a painter,
engraver, and poet he tried to combine both
the visual and the literary in his poems is
W. Blake, The Man Who Taught Blake
to Draw in His Dreams. c. 1818
original enough to make it stand alone in Eng-
lish literature. Admittedly, he straddled the
turn of the century and was a contemporary of several Romantic poets, yet only Milton
(1804-1808) and Jerusalem (1804), his great prophetic books, appeared after 1800; the main
bulk of his poetry was produced during the French revolutionary period. Using the twin arts
of drawing and poetry, Blake depicted his visions and mystic views of life in a system of
carefully created symbols and cosmic figures derived from various traditions. Blake printed
most of his poetry himself, with the text in his own handwriting and illustrations commonly
intertwined, by a method of etching he invented for the purpose. Modern editions of his
lyrics, mostly type-set, cannot compete with the clarity and beauty of the original illustrated
books produced by the poet. His widely known "The Tyger" from Songs of Experience
(1794) is a good example. In this poem he juxtaposes beauty and fear, energy and terror,
in a simple form and in symbolic allusions to contemporary events in France. William Blake
saw himself as a prophet whose duty it was "to open the immortal Eyes of Man inwards into
the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity" (Jerusalem, I, 5).
The Tyger
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? And what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears

And watered Heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
If he is to be believed, Blake actually communicated
with the angels and beings his pictures portray. His
contemporaries misunderstood or ignored him, The
Examiner dubbing Blake "an unfortunate lunatic", a
term that stuck with him; and it was only in the twen- W. Blake, Title-page to Milton
tieth century that the greatness of his visionary poetry
was recognized. Trained as an engraver, Blake developed a taste for Medieval and "Gothic"
art which his imagination reworked into a huge mythology of his own making. In this he
portrayed symbolically the forces always at war with each other in the soul of man. In his
early Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) he showed "the two con-
trary states of the human soul" that later took shape in the cosmic figures of Orc and Urizen.
His Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) demonstrates his philosophic-visionary ideas in a
world that is upside-down. God, in this book written mainly in prose, is a tyrant destroying
his rebellious children, while Satan stands for energy and freedom. It is Satan who is cast
into the role of Messias, and Hell offers truth. In the first of his mythical poems, Visions of
the Daughters of Albion (1793), Blake exemplified what he saw as the disadvantages of
laws and conventions. A rebel at heart and in his mind, and a prophet in words, William
Blake wholeheartedly embraced revolutionary thought and action. He celebrated the events
in France in The French Revolution (1791); he saw it not only as the liberation from po-
litical oppression, but also as the liberation of human imagination. In the same exuberant
terms he welcomed the struggle for freedom of the American colonies. In his America. A
Prophecy (1793) the American fight for independence appears in visions alluding to the
Last Judgment. The hero of this poem is Orc, a rebellious Prometheus who puts to death the
dragon of English tyranny. The action is set in the fabled continent of Atlantis. Blake's
vision of history and life as a cycle appears in his symbolism, which draws on numerous
European and Eastern myths. His essential message is the identity of God and man, and the
rejection of the mysterious God of the Church, of Deism, and of natural religion. But he also
rejected the "common sense" of the Enlightenment and tried to pour his philosophy into one
great epic: between 1795-1804 he worked on it, first calling it Vala and then The Four Zoas,
developing the themes of the fall and the subsequent rise of man and the world. These
themes are also significant in his final works, Milton and Jerusalem. In view of his vision-
ary world view Blake saw nature as the fallen world, not as God's magnificent creation
he must be seen as a poet at variance with his Romantic contemporaries. For when Words-
worth and Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads (1798), a sort of manifesto of Roman-
ticism, they defined nature as a central and positive force, as the great teacher of words and
the prime bringer of happiness. William Blake, then, was an original and highly idiosyncrat-
ic poet and painter who carried eighteenth-century English poetry into the nineteenth cen-
tury.
The bizarre and vastly fascinating world below the "genus grande" of eighteenth-century
poetry is usually ignored by literary histories. Throughout the century Grub Street writers
poor hacks, journalists, and impoverished poets who catered to public taste and were badly
paid by avaricious publishers produced popular poetry, parodies, skits, and ballads that,
more often than not, were as successful as the works of the great poets. Bawdy travesties of
classical works became good sellers, such as Charles Cotton's Scarronides (1664), a scato-
logical satire on the first and fourth books of Virgil's Aeneid featuring a storm of farts.
Scarronides went into more than ten editions and remained in demand for half a century. In
a similar way, many of the century's great works were ridiculed in burlesque parodies rang-
ing from the ribald to the obscene. Pope's Rape of the Lock, for instance, was mocked by
Joseph Gay's The Petticoat (1716) and Giles Jacob's The Rape of the Smock (1727). John
Wilkes's obscene An Essay on Woman (1763) made more headlines than its target, Pope's
Essay on Man. The eighteenth century saw the end of the tradition of erotic bawdry, for the
taste of the rising middle class forced coarser stuff which had been publicly accepted
earlier underground. In their private clubs, aristocratic libertines continued the Restoration
custom of writing erotic and comic verse (the Earl of Rochester remained popular in erotic
poetry throughout the eighteenth century, but he found no true successor) and obscene
songs, yet they were hardly heard of in public. But even without them, the average reader
had great choice in the area of the "genus medium" or "genus humile" of poetry. One author
writing in these genres was Thomas Stretser, who was employed by the notorious pub-
lisher Edmund Curll. In the manner of Charles Cotton's Erotopolis. The Present State of
Bettyland (1684), Stretser produced a number of bawdy poems exploiting the established
tradition of geographical or topographical allegory. In his A New Description of Merryland
(1740) and Merryland Displayed (1741) Stretser describes the female body as if it were an
unknown land. Both titles became bestsellers. Such poetry gradually disappeared after mid-
century as the guardians of morality ushered in an unprecedented prudery in taste and man-
ners to which Queen Victoria would later contribute her name.
3. Drama
The beginning of the eighteenth century saw the end of the boisterous, ribald, and witty Re-
storation comedy. In 1700 William Congreve (1670-1729) wrote one of the last and most
brilliant plays of this genre, The Way of the World, which despite its initial failure still holds
the stage. The central characters are Mirabell, an experienced and refined man of the world,
and Millamant, a proud and beautiful coquette yet also intelligent and capable of love. The
plot develops around Mirabell's successful attempt to win both Millamant and her fortune,
and the unsuccessful intrigue of Fainall and Mrs. Marwood, who are after Lady Wishfort's
money. The play presents an excellent combination of social criticism, comedy, and witty
dialogue, and something quite unique in Restoration comedy serious love and genuine
affection. The two lovers, Mirabell and Millamant, are pitted against their corrupt enemies,
and there are also a number of comical types, such as Witwould and Sir Wilfull Witwould,
and the nymphomaniac Lady Wishfort. Congreve's greatness lies in the accuracy with which
he shows the values of a shallow world. The elegant

triumphs over the inelegant, and the witty over the
dull. Sentiment hardly ever intrudes, and the closed
doors of fashionable society keep out morality, too.
If The Way of the World is less coarse than previous
comedies of manners, it is because criticism had set
in against the "immorality" and "sinfulness" of Res-
toration society and its comic reflection in drama. In
the prologue to his play, Congreve made a mocking
allusion to an attack that had "reformed" the Lon-
doners and their theatrical tastes. This was Jeremy

Collier's A Short View of the Immorality and Pro-
faneness of the English Stage, first published in
1698 and often reprinted and enlarged on in the
eighteenth century. A clergyman and strict moralist,
Collier (1658-1726), and some other writers, pro-
duced scholarly and elaborate accusations that
brought the weight of the Church and middle-class Peter Angellis, A Company at Table.
society to bear against the drama. 1719
The Puritan hostility towards the stage was one of the reasons why eighteenth-century dra-
ma produced only a few works of value. Congreve, for one, felt the impact of moralism. His
The Way of the World was not well received and he renounced any further writing for the
stage. The few comedies that appeared in the first decade of the new century express the
gradual change of taste. Thus George Farquhar's plays are not true Restoration comedies;
they indicate the transition to sentimental drama. In 1706 Farquhar (1678-1707) wrote The
Recruiting Officer, a play not set in London like previous comedies but in Shrewsbury
where Corporal Kite and Captain Plume demonstrate intricate problems of recruiting in a
provincial town. The province, this time Litchfield, is also the setting of Farquhar's The
Beaux' Stratagem (1707). Though he wrote it on his deathbed, the play is brimming with
humour and action.
Aimwell and Archer, the penniless gallants known as types from earlier plays, arrive at an inn
in Litchfield, in search of adventure and money. They hide their identities, Archer passing as
Aimwell's servant. Boniface, the landlord, concludes that they are highwaymen. Dorinda,
daughter of the wealthy Lady Bountiful, falls in love with Aimwell in church, and the latter
manages to get admitted to Lady Bountiful's house, together with Archer who has fallen in love
with Mrs. Sullen, the wife of Lady Bountiful's son. Aimwell and Archer rescue the ladies
during an attack by rogues, and they both intend to cash in on the advantage thus gained. But
Aimwell, who has posed as his elder and wealthy brother, confesses the fraud in the presence of
the trustful Dorinda. Good news arrives of the death of Aimwell's brother and of the accession
of Aimwell to title and fortune. Sullen agrees to the dissolution of his marriage, and all ends
happily with Mrs. Sullen free to marry Archer, and Aimwell his Dorinda.
With the plays of George Farquhar, the comedy of manners came to an end. Drama in gen-
eral, and comedy in particular, then suffered a sad decline. A number of causes contributed
to this development. To begin with, the moralists gradually achieved their aims, which
meant that comedy became less shocking, less witty, and much duller. Dramatists no longer
wrote for the nobility, the audience of Restoration comedy, but more and more for the
middle class. Sentimentality was substituted for wit, and the Italian opera13, pantomime, and
"entertainments" stole much of the limelight from drama. In 1737 the Licensing Act14 re-
stricted dramatists' freedom of expression, driving a number of good men out of the theatre,
among them Henry Fielding who turned to the novel as a more exciting field. The Licensing
Act was the government's answer to political allusions and slander on the stage. By 1747,
when theatrical activity was completely halted, the theatres had to resort to clever advert-
ising if they wanted to survive. To evade the law, patrons were now invited to attend "ex-
hibitions", "coffee and pictures", etc. It is hardly surprising then that the outstanding work in
the early decades of the century was not traditional comedy but John Gay's musical, The
Beggar's Opera (1728). This burlesque arose out of a suggestion by Swift to Gay that a play
set in Newgate would be an "odd pretty sort of thing."
The main characters are Peachum, a fence and informer; his pretty daughter, Polly; Lockit,
warder of Newgate prison, and his daughter Lucy; and Captain Macheath, highwayman and
lighthearted winner of women's hearts. Polly falls in love with the robber, who marries her. But
when her father informs against Macheath, Polly's husband is arrested and sent to Newgate.
Here he conquers Lucy's heart, and both women have a spirited conflict. Lucy overcomes her
jealousy and makes possible the escape of Macheath.
A great success, this play was the English response to the Italian opera that was beginning
to flow into London. As it contains numerous satirical allusions to the Whigs and Walpole,
the latter managed to have the sequel to the play, Polly, banned. The great charm and delib-
erately unromantic setting of The Beggar's Opera attracted Bertolt Brecht in the twentieth
century who brought it up to date in The Threepenny Opera.
The gradual intrusion of middle-class values into drama is also obvious in tragedy. Joseph
Addison's Cato (1713) is very much a rigid Neoclassical play in blank verse and with the
strict observation of time and place. Nicholas Rowe wrote The Fair Penitent (1703), an
extremely successful tragedy in blank verse which is much concerned with emotions and
sentiment. But it was with George Lillo (1693-1739) that domestic tragedy arrived in plays
with great moral emphasis and melodramatic themes with a wide and immediate appeal.
Very little is known about Lillo, who was possibly the descendant of Flemish refugees.
With The London Merchant or the History of George Barnwell (1731) he wrote a play
whose influence extended beyond English literature.
In this drama, for the first time, the lives of ordinary people are portrayed with all the se-
riousness which had been formerly restricted to the upper strata of society. It is based on an old
13 Italian opera became a very popular form of theatrical entertainment in the eighteenth century.
Italian singers, such as Senesino, worked in London and were known throughout the country.
Significantly, the German-born Georg Friedrich Hndel (1685-1759), who settled in London
and became a naturalized Englishman, had the libretti of his operas written in Italian (e.g.
Rinaldo, 1711).
14 Many plays in the early eighteenth century contained social and political satire and obvious
allusions to such politicians as Walpole, prime minister from 1715-17 and 1721-42. Matters
came to a head when Walpole was satirized in Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), and in some
of Fielding's farces (e.g. Pasquin, 1736). In 1737 Walpole introduced the Licensing Act. This
made the Lord Chamberlain licenser of theatres in London and Westminster. All plays were
now censored before they could be performed. The Act brought Fieldings's career in the theatre
to an end and has been blamed for the decline of English drama in the eighteenth century.
ballad and deals with the seduction of Barnwell, an apprentice, by the heartless courtesan
Millwood. Barnwell becomes so infatuated that he not only robs his employer, Thorowgood,
but is even induced by Millwood to murder his uncle. For this crime Millwood and Barnwell
are executed.
But tragedy was not as popular as the new sentimental comedy. The plays of Richard Steele
(1672-1729), for instance, such as Grief -la-Mode (1701), The Lying Lover (1703), his
successful The Tender Husband (1705), and The Conscious Lovers (1722) are a sort of
propaganda of bourgeois virtues,
and dramatic presentations of moral
lessons. The depths of sentimen-
talism were reached in Hugh Kelly's
False Delicacy (1768) and Richard
Cumberland's The West Indian
(1771), both obscuring human is-
sues in a welter of emotions. A few
playwrights like Colley Cibber
(1671-1757) and George Colman
the Elder (1732-94) tried to stem
the tide of sentimentality with more

humorous plays. But they were less
successful than Henry Fielding
whose plays from the 1730s are the
only ones worth remembering from
this period. Refusing to write in
Steele's manner, Fielding made co-
medy the vehicle of social satire.
There is a great resemblance be- W. Hogarth, Masquerades and Operas. 1724
tween his plays and his novels,
which both attack the moral corruption of the high and mighty. In The Modern Husband
(1732), for instance, the protagonist lives on the proceeds of his wife's prostitution. Fielding
was best in the area of burlesque farce. His greatest success in this genre was The Tragedy of
Tragedies, or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731). Ridiculing contemporary
playwrights and heroic tragedy in particular, it tells the story of Tom Thumb at the court of
King Arthur, where he kills millions of giants, falls in love with the princess Huncamunca,
and is swallowed by a cow. In a sort of Hollywood showdown, the members of the court then
kill each other.
By mid-century, however, when Fielding and others had turned their backs on the theatre,
drama had become so feeble that a blood-transfusion was needed. Two Irishmen, Oliver
Goldsmith (?1730-74) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), breathed new life
into comedy. Goldsmith attacked the sentimental drama, calling it "bastard tragedy", and
praised the virtues of what he termed "laughing comedy", the kind of comedy of manners
Sheridan and he wrote. His early play, The Good-Natured Man (1768), is not a particularly
good example of his principles; but with She Stoops to Conquer (1773) he wrote a master-
piece. Its plot, though highly improbable, adds appreciably to the humour of the play by
creating hilarious situations.
The major characters are Hardcastle, his wife, and their daughter. There are also Mrs. Hard-
castle's son by a former marriage, Tony Lumpkin, an ignorant, idle, and mischievous drunk who
is spoiled by his mother; and young Marlow, a womanizer posing as a bashful young man.
Marlow and his friend are on their way to pay the Hardcastles a visit, since Sir Charles Marlow
has proposed a match between his son and Miss Hardcastle. However, young Marlow loses his
way and ends up in Tony Lumpkin's favourite pub, where he is directed to a "neighbouring
inn", which is really the Hardcastles' house. The resulting misunderstanding Marlow treating
Hardcastle as the landlord of the "inn" and taking his daughter for one of the servants con-
tributes to the fun of the play. It is with the arrival of Sir Charles Marlow that the misunder-
standing is cleared up, and all ends well.
Sheridan's achievement is even greater than Goldsmith's. His fame rests upon three come-
dies, The Rivals (1775); The School for Scandal (1777); and The Critic (1779). Sheridan
was early distracted from his career as a dramatist and in 1780 became a successful politi-
cian. He brought back to comedy something of the brilliance of Restoration dialogue, tem-
pered with a more genial and romantic atmosphere. The Rivals, written when he was only
24, shows him as a master of comical situations, good characterization, and elegant dia-
logue. The play exposes the foibles and preoccupations of the fashionable society at Bath,
with several love affairs and intrigues. It features, among other characters, Mrs. Malaprop,
who has gone down in theatrical history as the stock type misapplying long words. Sheridan's
The School for Scandal has become a classic English comedy.
Sheridan's best play contrasts two brothers, Joseph Surface, a hypocrite, and Charles Surface, a
kind though reckless spendthrift. Charles is in love with Maria, the ward of Sir Peter Teazle,
and Maria returns his affection. Joseph courts her for her fortune, and at the same time declares
his love for Lady Teazle. Sir Peter suffers from the frivolity of his young wife, which provides
the conversational topics for the scandal-mongers, Sir Benjamin Backbite, Lady Sneerwell, and
Mrs. Candour. When Sir Oliver Surface, the rich uncle of Joseph and Charles, returns from
India, he decides to test the characters of his nephews before revealing his true identity. The
following scenes prove Joseph's wickedness while Charles wins his uncle's heart. Finally,
Charles is united to Maria, and Sir Peter is reconciled to Lady Teazle.
Sheridan's third comedy, The Critic, is a farcical satire on the pretensions of contemporary
tragedy and sentimental drama, but also on the aggressive literary criticism of the day. With
its verbal dexterity and sarcastic humour, it is brilliantly funny. However, Sheridan was
exceptional, and eighteenth-century drama was a rather dry stretch relieved by only a few
oases. Literary greatness was achieved in other areas.
4. The Novel
The appearance and quick success of the novel fluttered the literary dovecotes of eighteenth-
century England. Until well into the second half of the century, many critics regarded the
novel as a new and inferior invention. Poetry remained in high esteem. It is significant that
Henry Fielding, when he turned to prose fiction after 1737, called his novels "comic epic
poems in prose". Despite the bad reception the novel was initially given, its victorious
advance could not be stopped.
The rise of the novel owes much both to the increasing importance of readers and authors
from the middle class and the introduction of an element of realism in prose fiction. The
man who experimented most with the representation of realism in prose writing was Daniel
Defoe (c. 1660-1731). A dissenter15 from the lower middle class, Defoe had a bizarre career
that mirrors his interests and achievements: he was in turn shopkeeper, journalist, and gov-
ernment spy; he was a bankrupt, an inventor, and a
traveller; and he stood in the pillory and was on sev-
eral occasions imprisoned. Daniel Defoe was a bigot
and hypocrite at heart. At the age of forty he added
the genteel French prefix "de" to his name, Foe; and
he was capable of writing pamphlets against prosti-
tutes, recommending to send them to the workhouse
or to the colonies. But his factual fiction, his new way
of writing, the "circumstantial method", helped to

create what has come to be known as the novel. As a
journalist, Defoe thought little of art and literary
theory. He was fifty-nine when he wrote the first part
of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. Before this suc-
cessful book appeared, he had been publishing all
sorts of journalistic, political, and moral tracts, among
them The Shortest Way With the Dissenters (1702), a
satire on the Church of England that was at first mis-
understood; and A True Relation of the Apparition of
one Mrs Veal (1706), a fictionalized ghost story based
on actual contemporary events. Defoe enjoyed trying
out new forms of prose in the border area between Frontispiece by Clark and Pine
fact and fiction. Robinson Crusoe (1719), with its for Defoes Robinson Crusoe. 1719
semblance of a travel report, its simple language,
"authentic" narrator, and wealth of details, is just another example of his method. It became
the first influential novel of the century. The story of the book is generally well known,
having its basis in the true adventures of Alexander Selkirk, the sailor who lived alone for
several years on the island of Juan Fernandez. Defoe supported it with his wide reading in
travel literature, and with his own experiences. Crusoe embodies the practical and religious
Englishman who makes good because he is diligent and pious. Cast in the autobiographical
form of a diary, this novel, and others Defoe was to write, tried to create the impression of
authenticity.
The reader was to regard it as true, not as fiction. Defoe avoided all stylistic decoration and
fine writing, concentrating instead on the semblance of reality and on moralizing. Robinson
Crusoe had an immediate and permanent success. It was translated into many languages and
led to numerous imitations. Defoe exploited its success with two sequels, The Farther
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), and The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe
(1720). He then turned to stories with stronger picaresque elements. In Captain Singleton
(1720), the hero, like Robinson, recounts his exotic adventures in Africa and as a pirate in
the Pacific. Colonel Jack (1722) features a criminal, tracing the stages of his life as a thief, a
servant, and as a slave owner and soldier in Europe and America. The structure of these
novels is always the same: they are fictitious autobiographies with picaresque episodes. This
is also the case with Defoe's best works, Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724). Both
15 Dissenter was another term for Nonconformist.

develop the theme of the single woman who is left to fend for herself. Moll Flanders shows
Defoe at his best.
The protagonist of the novel, Moll, is born in Newgate prison, the daughter of a woman who is
to be transported to Virginia for theft. Thus abandoned and left in ignorance of her origins, Moll
grows up in the household of the compassionate mayor of Colchester. Although she is seduced
very early in her life, she makes her fortune through a respectable marriage. However, upon the
death of her husband, she goes through five marriages, some of them bigamous, and enters into
all sorts of liaisons to earn money. When she visits Virginia, she discovers that her current
husband is her half-brother. Leaving him behind, she returns to England and, for want of
money, becomes a highly successful pickpocket and thief. When she is caught, she ends up in
Newgate Gaol where she meets her future husband, James, a highwayman. They are both
transported to Virginia, but they manage to take their gains with them. In America, Moll finds
that she has inherited a plantation from her mother, and she and her husband spend the
remainder of their lives in prosperity and penitence.
Roxana, also termed The Fortunate Mistress, presents a similar story but is set in a higher
social class. The heroine is a kept woman who amasses wealth during her career in England
and on the Continent. The novel has a rich social and cultural background but, like Defoe's
other works of fiction, suffers from a lack of literary art. Defoe was too much interested in
his themes and his moral message to care about the development of the novel as a literary
genre.
In this he resembled Swift. If Daniel Defoe was a moralist, Jonathan Swift was a merciless
satirist who believed that man had hardly advanced beyond the stage of barbarity. As a
writer, Swift did not cherish the novel but rather short prose fiction and poetry. Like Defoe,
Swift tried his hand at a number of literary and journalistic forms. He preferred to write
prose satires or satirical essays. His target was the corruption he perceived in politics and
the Church in particular, and in society in general. In A Tale of a Tub (1704) he tells the
farcical and wildly funny story of three brothers Jack, Martin, and Peter, who represent
Calvin, Luther, and the Catholic saint and what they do with their inheritance, the Christ-
ian religion. Queen Anne was so shocked at this satire, which she considered blasphemy,
that she would not allow the clergyman Swift to be made a bishop. In the most bitter of his
prose satires, A Modest Proposal (1729), Swift defended Ireland and ironically suggested
that the terrible famine could be eased by cannibalism, and that the Irish children should
serve as food for the rich. Gulliver's Travels (1726) is by far his greatest book, though it is
not a novel in the usual and modern sense of the term.
Its form indicates Swift's debt to Defoe, for the preface tries to establish authenticity by declaring
that Richard Sympson, the "editor" of the "book", had received documents from Lemuel Gulliver.
Gulliver begins his report with a factual record of his education and training in medicine and
navigation, and of his first voyages as a ship's surgeon. In the same sober manner he introduces
his first adventure, the sinking of his ship, and his struggle ashore as the sole survivor. Up to this
point, the book reads as if it were written by Defoe. So the reader is lulled into confidence and
credulity.
But then the tale takes a different turn in the scene of Gulliver's awakening, when he finds himself
the prisoner of the Lilliputians. The description of life in the kingdom of Lilliput is one of the
most devastating and painful satires in literature, once one realizes that Swift is really talking
about English public life which he effectively lampoons. With the description of Gulliver's
services for the Emperor, Swift parodies English politics he even has Gulliver urinate on the
palace in order to put out a serious fire. After some further adventures in the Empire of Blefescu,
Gulliver returns home to England, but only to finance another voyage by exhibiting Lilliputian
cattle he has brought with him.
'A Voyage to Brobdingnag' has the same introduction as part I. This time, Gulliver is cast among
the giants and suffers from the huge animal world around him. The King's unexpected and dis-
gusted reaction to Gulliver's proud
report on eighteenth-century Eng-
lish social and political institutions
mirrors Swift's anger and contempt.
An eagle carries off the hero and
drops him into the sea, where an

English ship eventually picks him
up.
To the modern reader, part III of the
book, entitled 'A Voyage to Laputa,
Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan',
is perhaps the one that is the most
difficult to understand because it is
a satirical attack on targets of
Swift's own period. W. Hogarth, The Punishment inflicted on
The most fascinating voyage Gul- Lemuel Gulliver. 1726
liver undertakes is the one which
leads him to the land of the wise horses known as Houyhnhnms and contrasted with the dirty,
man-like creatures called Yahoos. A good deal of this section of the book consists of
conversations, debates, and general descriptions of the Houyhnhnm view of life; this creates an
atmosphere of grave discourse and also sets the satirical tone, showing the eighteenth-century
Englishman as vastly inferior to intelligent, clever, and reasonable horses. Every question the
horses put to Gulliver elicits answers that inexorably reveal the evil uses to which men have put
their much-praised faculty of reason.
Gulliver returns to England. This time, his readjustment takes much longer, and the process is
brilliantly shown by a great number of details.
With this book Swift conveyed terrible truths about human nature and civilization, so much
so that many critics see misanthropy as the predominant element in Gulliver's Travels. This
is certainly too exaggerated a view, for Swift's rich satirical resources and his wit tone down
his sarcastic message and show an amazing vitality of imagination. It has been argued that
Gulliver's Travels is not a novel but rather a string of loosely connected adventures. But
there is an undeniable purpose of arrangement in this book, and an organic unity which
helps create the total impact. Gulliver's Travels is thus an early example of the fable type of
novel, with such modern descendants as Butler's Erewhon (1872), and Orwell's Animal
Farm (1945), to name just two examples.
Daniel Defoe believed in common sense and in the advancement of civilization, and he
created prototypes of the realistic novel. Swift, however, was a skeptic; his Gulliver's
Travels is to be seen within the tradition of the Utopian travel report distorted by exagger-
ation and parody. Defoe was simple, serious, and moralistic; Swift was ironic, complex, and
satirical. What they had in common was a disregard of formal aspects they were more in-
terested in what they had to say.
W. Hogarth, A Harlots Progress (I)
W. Hogarth, A Harlots Progress (II)
W. Hogarth, A Harlots Progress (III)

W. Hogarth, A Harlots Progress IV)
W. Hogarth, A Harlots Progress (V)
W. Hogarth, A Harlots Progress VI)

Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels have the rare merit of appealing to both old and
young, and the versions for children are still being widely read. This is not the case with the
novels of Samuel Richardson. But it was Richardson who, after the death of Defoe, did
most for the flowering of the novel in England. Richardson (1689-1761) was the son of a
joiner and was trained as a professional printer. Asked by a publisher to prepare a series of
model letters for those who could not write for themselves, he composed love letters and
others for use on various occasions. Thus he discovered that he had the gift of expressing
himself in letters. His three major works Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1747/8), and Sir
Charles Grandison (1754) are all novels in the form of a series of letters. It was with
Pamela that he had an instant and spectacular success.
Pamela is the first example of the modern English novel of character. Pamela Andrews, the
heroine, tells her story in a series of letters while she is employed as a lady's servant. When the
story opens, Pamela's mistress has just died, and the young servant girl is pursued by the lady's
son, Mr. B., who takes dishonourable advantage of Pamela's position. He attempts everything
he can to force her to his will, even imprisoning her in the charge of two villains, Mrs. Jewkes
and Monsieur Colbrand. At one stage, Mr. B. is on the point of raping her, but he is scared off
when she swoons. Pamela indignantly repels all his advances, and finally B., being much in
love with her, decides, despite her humble birth and position, to marry her.
In 1742 Richardson added a second part, showing Pamela and Mr. B. in happy married life,
which is merely interrupted by a brief interlude when he becomes involved with a widowed
countess at a masked ball. With dignity and sweetness, Pamela suffers the burden of an occa-
sionally profligate husband. This second part, to a modern reader, has an almost unbearable
moral tone.
Pamela's victory is a strange sort of reward, and the morality of the book is somewhat
dubious nowadays, for it is obvious that her fight for virtue is also governed by down-right
calculation. Her chastity is a commodity to be bargained for, and she never considers Mr.
B.'s true character, which is that of a vicious, cruel libertine. The novel has a number of un-
pleasant aspects, such as a prurient inquisitiveness about women, and a combination of stern
morality and a secret interest in sexual matters. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel (1957)
rightly called Pamela a striptease in the form of a sermon.
But the novel has some positive aspects. For the first time in the history of prose fiction, a
writer put the war of the sexes and the class war at the centre of a novel. Pamela's story of
success naturally appealed to exploited servant girls, and above all to middle-class women.
Yet Pamela is more than just an eighteenth-century social document, for with this novel
Richardson gave a new dimension to prose fiction. The technique of letter-writing, which
was not invented by Richardson, was not as awkward and restricting as it might seem at first
glance. Of course, seen in a realistic light, Pamela an eighteenth-century servant girl is
unusually well educated and writes an unnaturally large number of letters of interminable
length. The novel as a genre, however, profited from this technique. Introducing an element
of control, it led to a tightening of plot through a strong organizing principle that was
lacking in earlier works of fiction. The new method also enabled Richardson to describe
immediate impressions, thus providing analyses of conduct and consciousness. In many re-
spects they are prophetic of the modern "stream of consciousness" in the novels of James
Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Thus Pamela was an important breakthrough in the development
of the English novel. For the modern reader, though, its negative aspects, such as the
priggish morality and the lengthy and boring didactic passages, are too obvious, and more
often than not too much stressed. It has more historic than artistic value.
Richardson's second novel, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, was published in
seven volumes and is probably the longest novel in the English language. A sort of pendant
to Pamela the novel has as its major
character a young lady of wealth and
beauty, virtue and innocence, who,
in order to avoid a marriage her pa-
rents are trying to arrange, seeks
help from Lovelace, a handsome yet
unscrupulous young man. Lovelace
drugs and rapes Clarissa. Repentant,
he asks her to marry him, but she
refuses. Worn out by shame, she
dies, leaving Lovelace to his re-
morse. Though this sounds like the
plot from a cheap modern novelette,

Clarissa offers close analysis of
character, and a complexity of make-
up in some figures that is most un-
usual in the literature of the age.
Sir Charles Grandison introduces a
hero full of the highest virtues, and
so moral that, to the reader, he be-
comes unbearably perfect.
It is undeniable that Richardson in-
fluenced later novelists even those,
like Fielding and Smollett, who con-
sciously wrote in reaction against
him. What he introduced into fiction
were the analysis of emotion and
motive, introspection, and the belief
in the value of feeling. Richardson's
Engraving by W. Hogarth of Henry Fielding
combination of emotion, sensibility,
and morality, presented in a form ac-
commodating psychological realism, touched the hearts of European readers. From this
point in the history of the novel, it was only a short step to the sentimental as it was de-
monstrated by Sterne's Tristram Shandy and, later, by Dickens and Thackeray.
Henry Fielding (1707-54) disliked Richardson's work, and both writers waged literary war
almost continuously, Fielding satirizing Pamela with his Shamela (1741) and Joseph
Andrews (1742), and Richardson creating Charles Grandison as a counterpart to Fielding's
Tom Jones (1749). Like Richardson, Fielding was very conscious of the literary genre, the
novel, but his approach and viewpoint were fundamentally different from Richardson's
mixture of Puritan-bourgeois morality and sensitive psychology. Fielding developed a type
of novel that is comic and realistic, and which features not ideal protagonists, but men and
women with typical human faults. Fielding's plots are characterized by the picaresque and
by comments from an ironic and understanding author. Educated at Eton and in Leyden,
Henry Fielding came from an upper middle-class family with aristocratic branches. Until Sir
Robert Walpole's Licensing Act of 1737 drove his plays from the stage, Fielding was a
moderately successful playwright. He became a lawyer and then a political journalist before
being appointed Justice of the Peace for Westminster and Middlesex. As such he was in-
defatigable in his duties and the originator of many reforms. His novels may be a by-product
of a busy career, but they also express his first-hand knowledge of the social conditions in
eighteenth-century England. It was Fielding's friend, William Hogarth16, who gave pictorial
expression to the social problems of the age, and Fielding voiced his own criticism and
moral message in novels whose social panorama, humour, and literary finesse make them
masterpieces of eighteenth-century fiction. Essentially, Fielding saw himself as a moralist
and satirist; and it was as a satirist that he launched into his novelwriting career.
With Shamela, Fielding ridiculed the content and method of Richardson's Pamela the pun
of the title ("sham") indicates the heroine's hypocrisy. Her virginity and innocence are
merely means to an end, the end being the property of the man she wants to marry. Fielding
also mocked Richardson's epistolary form by having Shamela write in impossible situations
and in a style that is studded with grammatical and lexical mistakes. His first major work in
fiction, Joseph Andrews (1742), also started out as a parody of Pamela: Joseph was devised
to serve as Pamela's brother, but Fielding then developed his novel into something far
bigger than a mere skit.
Joseph is the brother of Richardson's Pamela, a role which provided Fielding with a useful
device for exposing the priggish and calculating elements in Pamela's behaviour. As a
handsome young footman, Joseph has to fight for his virtue against the amorous advances of his
employer, Lady Booby. Joseph resists, mainly because of his sweetheart, Fanny, and is dis-
missed from Lady Booby's service. On his way home he is attacked by robbers who leave him
half-dead by the roadside. Discovered by the passengers of a passing stagecoach, he is carried
to an inn and there he meets an old friend and mentor, Abraham Adams, a curate. Parson
Adams decides to accompany Joseph on his journey. They encounter all kinds of characters and
meet with numerous adventures, Adams getting into a number of hilarious situations. Finally
arriving in Joseph's home town, they prepare Joseph's wedding. Unfortunately, however, Lady
Booby has also arrived at her country seat in the same village, and she tries to avenge herself on
Joseph by having him and Fanny arrested for stealing a hazel twig. Just before being sent to
prison, they are saved by the arrival of Lady Booby's son, Squire Booby, and his newly-wed
wife, Pamela. The Squire rescues both Joseph and Fanny, and when it turns out that Joseph is
really the son of gentlefolk, he can finally marry his Fanny and live on a property given him by
his new-found parents. Parson Adams gets a comfortable living by Squire Booby while Lady
Booby sets off for London to find solace in the arms of a young captain of dragoons.
For this novel, and for the others that followed, Fielding drew on ancient classical authors as
far as style and narrative method are concerned. But he was also indebted to medieval sat-
16 William Hogarth (1697-1764), an important English painter and engraver. He provided the illu-
strations for several works of literature, including 12 engravings for Butler's Hudibras. Hogarth
became immensely popular with his series of engravings on what he termed "modern moral
subjects": A Harlot's Progress (1732) describes the career and the death of a prostitute; A
Rake's Progress (1733-35) traces steps of a libertine toward ruin and madness; and Marriage
la Mode (1743-45) depicts the tragic consequences of a marriage arranged by greedy parents.
Fielding and Smollett were two writers who cherished the art of Hogarth and compared char-
acters and scenes in their novels to his prints. Hogarth's moralism is obvious in the series men-
tioned above, and in his later engravings; the Industry and Idleness series (1747) and the two
prints Beer Street and Gin Lane (1750-51).
ires and morality plays, and to the works of Franois Rabelais and the dramatist Molire.
The greatest influence was exerted, as Fielding himself admitted, by Cervantes's Don
Quijote (1605) and Le Sage's Gil Blas (1715-1735), the most influential picaresque novels
for eighteenth-century writers. From drama, Fielding took the idea of types. In Lady Booby
and her amorous maid, Mrs. Slipslop, but above all in Abraham Adams, he created some of
the most significant comic characters in English literature. Parson Adams, however, is not
merely a figure of fun. Like Cervantes's Don Quixote, he demonstrates the vast difference
between the ideals of Christianity and its practice in contemporary society. More often than
not, Fielding contrasts Adams's genuine Christian charity with the harshness and super-
ficiality of people who live by materialistic standards while paying lip-service to those of
Christianity. Adams is thus in many respects the real hero of the novel, which shows that
Fielding was as much a moralist as Richardson, for beneath the lively comedy of Joseph
Andrews there are the ever-present themes of charity and justice.
Henry Fielding's theory of the novel as put down in the preface to Joseph Andrews helps
one to understand his work, even though in practice he did not always abide by his rules.
His experience as a writer of comedies and burlesque plays often shows in the characteriza-
tion and the structure of his novels. In his satirical novel, The History of the Life of the Late
Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), he produced a fictional biography of a thief and or-
ganizer of robberies who had been hanged at Tyburn, London, in 1725. Fielding describes
Wild as the superman of crime, a man beyond good and evil, and demonstrates the small
division between a great criminal and a great soldier or a politician like Sir Robert Wal-
pole, who is one of the satirical butts of the novel. With Jonathan Wild Fielding also paro-
died contemporary history writing and the popular epic celebrating great personages.
It was with Tom Jones (1749) that Fielding came nearest to the realization of his own con-
cept of the novel. Tom Jones is three times as long as Joseph Andrews, but it has a better
coherence of plot.
The hero of the novel is discovered as an infant in the house of the wealthy and benevolent Mr.
Allworthy, who lives in a country house in Somerset with his sister Bridget. Allworthy, who
assumes that a nurse, Jenny Jones, is the mother of the child, takes a fancy to the boy and de-
cides to bring him up. Jenny and the alleged father, Benjamin Partridge, leave the neighbour-
hood.
Tom Jones grows up with the son of Bridget Allworthy. Bridget's husband, Captain Blifil, dies
a few years after the birth of young Blifil. It turns out that Tom is good-natured and easy-going
while Blifil is clever, hypocritical, and nasty. Several times, Blifil tries to get Tom into trouble.
Blifil ingratiates himself with their tutors Square, the philosopher, and Thwackum, the parson
and Tom has to endure many beatings at their hands. The situation is not eased when Tom
finds Square in bed with Molly Seagrim, the gamekeeper's daughter.
Tom now makes the acquaintance of Sophia, the daughter of Squire Western, the owner of a
neighbouring estate and a hard-drinking, hard-riding, and hard-swearing man. Squire Western
likes Tom because of his manliness, and Tom and Sophia fall in love.
Meanwhile, Blifil also has his eye on Sophia, and when her aunt arrives from London, a mar-
riage is prepared between Blifil and Sophia, the aunt misunderstanding Sophia's feelings. Blifil
manages to convince Allworthy to banish Tom from his house, and Sophia Western, refusing to
marry Blifil, sets out for her aunt's house in London. The following part of the novel traces
Tom's picaresque journey to London, during which he quarrels at an inn, meets his future
companion, Partridge, and rescues a lady named Mrs. Waters. She lures him to bed in an inn at
Upton, where Sophia has also arrived. Furious at Tom's infidelity, she departs with Mrs.
Fitzpatrick. In London, Sophia is introduced to several important people, among them the
sophisticated and lecherous Lady Bellaston, who takes the naive Sophia under her wing.
When Tom arrives in London, he is seduced and kept by Lady Bellaston; but when he meets
Sophia in her house, the two lovers are reconciled. More adventures now follow. It is dis-
covered that Mrs. Waters is none other than Jenny Jones, which shocks Tom, for he thinks he
has committed incest. But eventually the truth is revealed Tom's real mother is Bridget, Mr.
Allworthy's sister. The odious Blifil is banished, though, at Tom's insistence, with a yearly
stipend, and all ends happily, with Tom and Sophia married and living on Squire Western's
estate.
It is quite obvious that the story of the novel depends on the stock theatrical contrivances of
the day, such as tag names (Allworthy, Thwackum, etc.), missing heirs, incredible coincid-
ences, and accidental meetings. Yet Fielding handles his plot with great dexterity, and even
the minor figures contribute directly to its unfolding. The structure is also quite impressive:
the first section, consisting of six books, deals with events in Somerset (the country); the
second section, also six books, takes us to the road; and the third section, again divided into
six books, carries the action to London (the city). Thus the formal structure of Tom Jones
adheres even more to classical models than that of Joseph Andrews. Fielding also introduces
into the narrative numerous allusions and what he calls "similes" most of them derived
from the ancient classics, such as mock-heroic battles. As an author, Fielding constantly in-
terferes in the narrative, holding up the action and weakening the illusion of the reader.
What he wanted to achieve with this method was to counteract the dangerous falsities and
evasions of reality of romantic illusion. As a matter of fact, Fielding becomes a member of
the cast, so to speak, discussing the philosophical and moral issues arising from the actions
of the characters. Seen in modern terms, this moral commentary may be a deficiency
moderns like Henry James believe that the art of fiction demands that everything should be
conveyed through the words and actions of the characters. But Fielding attempted a com-
bination of story, character, and authorial comment, a combination that is not altogether un-
convincing.
Compared with other eighteenth-century novels, Tom Jones offers superb characterization,
including not representatives of virtue but almost unheroic figures. Tom, for instance, is
brave and generous, but he also has no control over his impulses and instincts; he is, in other
words, an ordinary human being. Weak and even immoral as he may be on occasion, Tom
does not enjoy his sins, and he is able to learn and to repent. Tom Jones is thus not an
immoral book because Tom goes to bed with several women and indulges with Lady
Bellaston. The novel is, in fact, moral insofar as Fielding suggests that there are worse sins
than those of the flesh. Tom regrets his immoral behaviour, and he makes amends. By
contrast, Richardson's Pamela is too angelic to be a realistic character and to convince the
reader.
In Tom Jones Fielding addresses himself to a wide range of moral and social issues that
include his satirizing of pretension and hypocrisy and his appeal for tolerance and Christian
charity. In essence, his authorial comments are meant to carry these issues to a higher
intellectual and philosophical plane and thus to educate the reader.
If Tom Jones is still a popular novel today, it is because of its rich variety of characters, each
with his own individualistic idiom, and its acceptable philosophy of man's nature. These
aspects are ideally complemented by boisterous humour and good sense.
W. Hogarth,
A Rakes Progress (I). 1735
W. Hogarth,
A Rakes Progress (II)
W. Hogarth,
A Rakes Progress (III)

W. Hogarth,
A Rakes Progress (IV)
W. Hogarth,
A Rakes Progress (V)
W. Hogarth,
A Rakes Progress (VI)

W. Hogarth,
A Rakes Progress (VII)
W. Hogarth,
A Rakes Progress (VIII)
Fielding's most fully drawn heroine is Amelia, in the novel of that name published in 1751.
As Fielding idealizes the main woman character, this leads to an excess of pathos depriving
Amelia of the balance which Tom Jones possesses. From a literary viewpoint, the domestic
novel Amelia is not quite successful. It lacks Fielding's earlier lively spirit and exhibits de-
ficiencies in plot and characterization. So Tom Jones remains incomparably his finest novel.
As far as plot and character are concerned, Fielding dominated the English novel for more
than a century.
Henry Fielding's influence can perhaps best be studied in the novels of Tobias Smollett
(1721-71). Born in Scotland, Smollett studied medicine and later became a ship's surgeon.
To the novel he brought nothing that was new in form, but he introduced a background of
realistic and picaresque descriptions of low life. To this he added a superficial element of
sentiment. Smollett's most characteristic novel is Roderick Random, published anonymously
in 1748.
Roderick Random is closely modelled on Smollett's early career. The hero, a Scot of gentle
birth and much neglected during his youth, sets out for London together with his friend Strap.
There, Roderick is cheated by a succession of rogues. After serving as an assistant of a French
apothecary, he falls into the hands of a press gang, and so joins the navy, though not in the role
he had imagined for himself. He is present at the siege of Cartagena (like Smollett himself ) , is
shipwrecked and robbed and, as the footman of an eccentric poetess, falls in love with her
niece, Narcissa. Other adventures follow thick and fast. After his return to England, Roderick is
kidnapped by smugglers and even joins the French army. Back in London, he tries unsuccess-
fully to marry a rich heiress, but losing all his money in gambling he is thrown into prison for
debt. He is saved by the appearance of his uncle, and embarks on a journey to South America,
where he meets his long-lost father, now a rich trader. Together they return to Scotland.
Roderick's father buys back the family estates and helps his son to marry Narcissa.
The plot of the book is much like those of Defoe's novels in its disjointed series of ad-
ventures among sailors, soldiers, and city scoundrels. Also, the influence of Don Quixote
and Gil Blas is quite obvious. Thus Roderick Random belongs firmly to the old picaresque
tradition, showing society from below in realistic descriptions and caricature-like figures.
Smollett's strong points are fast and furious action and muscular prose, and he provides
vigorous pictures of naval life.
The picaro's series of comic travels is the basic pattern in all of Smollett's novels. Peregrine
Pickle (1751), though stressing erotic aspects, relates the adventures of a swashbuckling
sailor on land, who meets with all
sorts of characters in England and
on the Continent. And Smollett' s
last novel, too, The Expedition of
Humphrey Clinker (1771), which
reverts to Richardson's technique
of telling the story in the form of

letters, is fundamentally a picar-
esque novel. Smollett translated
the novels of Cervantes and Le
Sage. His own The Adventures of
Sir Launcelot Greaves, published
between 1760 and 1761, tried to
Thomas Rowlandson, Matthew Brambles Trip to Bath:
transpose Don Quixote to English
Private Practice Previous to the Ball soil. But Smollett also developed
themes and methods that were to
influence later writers. His Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) features an utterly evil char-
acter, and the book foreshadows the horror scenes of the Gothic novel toward the end of the
century. With his gallery of curious characters, Smollett gave important impulses to his own
countryman, Walter Scott, and to the early Dickens. Smollett is remembered not for his
literary art, but for his gift as a fabulist.
The most eccentric novel of the eighteenth century is Laurence Sterne's The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67). It breaks all the rules, including those
of language and punctuation, and deliberately avoids even the idea of a traditional plot.
Although written in the first person, the novel arrives at the hero's birth only half-way
through the book. It may not be easy to pidgeonhole Tristram Shandy, yet as a novel it is
indebted to both Richardson and Fielding. From Fielding, Sterne (1713-68) borrowed his
method of authorial intrusion and ironic yet lenient commentary, and from Richardson he
took the seemingly spontaneous dialogue between a writer/speaker and his addressee. Es-
sentially, Laurence Sterne tried to show with Tristram Shandy the difficulties involved in
writing a novel and in communicating with language. His achievement consists in the
development of both ironic distance and emotional subjectivity.
Characteristically, there is very little of the "life", and even less of the "opinions", of the hero in
this book. Instead, there is a group of humorous figures: Walter Shandy, the hero's father, who
is wrapped up in all kinds of fantastic and paradoxical notions which he defends with an im-
pressive parade of pseudo-scientific learning; "my Uncle Toby", his brother wounded in the
groin at the siege of Namur and, though a gentle and modest man, a dedicated follower of the
science of fortifications and military attacks; and Corporal Trim, Toby's servant and assistant in
his war games. Behind these three
major figures, Yorick the parson, Dr.
Slop, an incompetent local quack,
and the widow Wadman play impor-
tant roles, and there is a gallery of
minor characters.
The first three volumes of the novel
are mainly concerned, besides many
digressions, with the circumstances

attending the hero's birth, such as the
precise date and manner of Tristram's
conception. Eventually, the narration
arrives at the night of Tristram's
birth. The incompetent Dr. Slop is
summoned, and he manages to flat-
ten Tristram's nose with his forceps,
mistaking the infant's hip for its
head. After the birth, Sterne finds
time to write his preface, and then
Tristram's story is resumed, with
numerous digressions and discus-
sions of noses, the naming of babies, Bunbury, Illustration for Tristram Shandy.
and with the unfortunate incident in 1773
which Tristram is "unmanned" by a
closing window. Much of volume VI of the novel is concerned with the breeching of Tristram;
and volumes VII and VIII abandon the story altogether to describe the author's travels in France
and to relate the story of the King of Bohemia. The last volume is concerned mainly with Uncle
Toby and the amorous advances of the widow Wadman. Featuring a naive and bewildered
Toby, and an enterprising widow who is curious to find out where exactly Toby was wounded,
this is one of the high and bawdy points of the book. Finally, when Corporal Trim enlightens
his master as to the real intentions of the widow, Toby makes a hasty retreat from the danger of
marriage.
Tristram Shandy is a parody of many things, among them the methods of telling a story, and
the various types of learning and pedantry. Like Swift, Sterne ridicules pseudo-scientific
lore. Much of Sterne's humour, when it is not erotic or bawdy, is based on the parody of the
theory of the association of ideas as expounded by John Locke in his vastly influential
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Language in Tristram Shandy is always
ambiguous, which leads to great misunderstandings and hilarious situations.
Sterne's psychological approach in this novel marked an advance in sophistication like

human beings, Sterne's characters are strange and unpredictable, and the novel shows that
behaviour is governed as much by heredity as by environment. Sterne's notion of time, and
its handling, are extremely modern. Based on Locke's theory, time is shown to be both sub-
jective and objective; Sterne employs time on several levels, always playing with eight-
eenth-century conceptions of how man notices the passing of time. Tristram Shandy is a far
more coherent book than its apparent formlessness would suggest. Despite Sterne's constant
play with formal elements, such as typography, his novel possesses an inherent unity, which
is, however, not that of normal chronological sequence. The story of the book, if story it can
be called, is closely bound to the narrator and his method of telling his tale, which is the
association of ideas. It is this principle which allows Sterne great variation in plot and
chronology.
Tristram Shandy made Sterne a literary celebrity in the whole of Europe. Some critics ob-
jected to his frequent use of "double entendre" and bawdy humour. The sentimental pas-
sages of the book were generally preferred to Sterne's rough humour, which often borders
on the obscene. In his second book, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
(1768), he tried to accommodate critical voices and contemporary literary taste by stressing
sensibility and sentimentality. Portraying a journey through France typically, the author
never reaches Italy, which is promised in the title Sterne allows tears to flow freely. Un-
like the popular travel reports of the factual and fictional types, he concentrates on trivial
and accidental meetings and observations. A Sentimental Journey offers a much quieter
mood as well as moral and philosophical reflections, but it is not without ironic humour,
erotic incidents and allusions, and occasional parody. To some extent, these elements coun-
terbalance the sentimental aspect of the novel. The very title of Sterne's last novel an-
nounces a new current in the development of the English novel: the rise of sentimentalism.
It grew out of sensibility, and its offshoot, the Gothic novel.
Fielding died in 1754, Richardson in 1761, Smollett in 1771, and Sterne in 1768. In only
four decades the English novel had made some giant steps forward. After the work of these
four great writers, a relatively barren period followed. Though the stream of fiction broad-
ened continually, nothing of intrinsic literary value was written in the form of the novel. For
the novelists writing in the closing decades of the century, "heart" and "feeling" became
central terms. Oliver Goldsmith, who was also a poet and playwright, contributed to the
field of the novel a country idyll called The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). Goldsmith had a
great deal of sentiment to offer, but unlike later sentimentalists he did not drown his tale in
it; his gift for comedy and characterization, and his dramatist's eye for effective situation,
are equally noticeable in his book. Sentimentalism thrived with such Richardsonian suc-
cessors as Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831) and Fanny Burney (1752-1840). Mackenzie's
The Man of Feeling (1771) features a hero who is forever weeping under the stress of some
pathetic scene or emotion. In one tearful exposition this novel unites the influence of
Richardson and Sterne, but also of such foreign fiction as Marivaux's17 Le Paysan parvenu
17 Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763), French writer and playwright. He is

known for his 30 comedies dealing with intrigue and love, and for several novels (many of
them unfinished) whose refined and subtle analysis of sentiment became known as "mari-
vaudage" and ushered in the wave of novels concerned with sensibility.
(1734-35) and Marianne (1731-42), and Rousseau's18 La nouvelle Hlose (1764). Fanny
Burney's Evelina (1778), a novel in letter-form modelled on Humphrey Clinker, took
London by storm. With admirable illustrative incidents, it describes the entry of a country
girl into fashionable London society. Evelina is a sentimental love story, but there is enough
irony and humour to interest even a twentieth-century reader. Henry Brooke's The Fool of
Quality (1766-70) is an educational novel that was written under Rousseau's influence, but
its sentimentalism is overdone.
The popularity of the Gothic novel (also called the novel of terror) in the last three decades
of the eighteenth century is a fascinating phenomenon. In a way, this type of fiction, with its
mystery, emotionalism, and hor-
ror, is a reaction against the rat-
ionalism of the Enlightenment,
and it also foreshadows the very
real terrors and the bloodshed of
the French Revolution. A number
of sources have been identified

for the Gothic novel, among them
Elizabethan drama, pre-Romantic
poetry from England and Ger-
many, the sentimental novel, and
the popular Oriental tale. Horace
Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
(1764) is generally regarded as
the prototype of the Gothic novel.
"Gothic" is above all an architec-
tural term, denoting the kind of Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare. 1782
European building which flour-
ished in Medieval times and showed no classical influence. Toward the middle of the eigh-
teenth century, Gothic architecture began to become popular again in England. Horace
Walpole himself built a sort of "Gothic castle" at Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, Lon-
don. Through its associations with medieval ruins, this kind of building suggested mystery,
wildness, and romance.
The Castle of Otranto is set in Italy and deals with a gigantic helmet that can kill people.
There are also tyrants, supernatural events, and secret terrors. William Beckford's Vathek
was first written in French in 1781-82 and translated into English in 1786. It shows both the
influence of the tale of terror and the Oriental tale. This last type had become popular with
the translation at the beginning of the century of The Arabian Nights. As early as 1759 Dr.
Samuel Johnson had published his Rasselas (not a Gothic novel but rather an Oriental tale
written for didactic purposes), and Beckford's Vathek eventually combined Gothic horror
18 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), Franco-Swiss writer and philosopher and one of the domin-
ant intellectuals of his age. His influential works include studies of art and culture; a plan for a
new scheme of education (the novel Emile, 1762) in which the child was to develop its talents
in natural surroundings; a theory of politics (Du Contrat social, 1762) advocating equality
before the law and a more democratic distribution of wealth; and a novel (Julie, ou la nouvelle
Hlose, 1764) which provides a critical view of contemporary manners and ideas within the
framework of a love story. Also of interest is his autobiographical Les Confessions (1781-88).
with Oriental mystery. His novel relates the story of a caliph who pursues his sophisticated
cruelties and intricate passions, aided by his mother and supported by an evil genius. The
main impression of the book is of a fantastic world of lavish excesses. The most able and
popular of the later practitioners of the Gothic novel were Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) and
Matthew Gregory Lewis (1755-1818). Radcliffe produced five novels, of which the best
are The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). The first links the novel of
terror to the Enlightenment by providing a rational frame for the action everything can be
explained. There is also no shortage of sentiment as well as sentimental descriptions of
scenery in the story of an innocent and sensitive girl fallen into the hands of a powerful and
sadistic villain named Montoni, who owns a grim and isolated castle where mystery and
horror stalk in lonely chambers and haunted corridors.
Matthew G. Lewis perfected the novel of horror in The Monk (1796). Influenced by Goethe
and the German Romantic writers, he used a modification of the Faust theme for a portrayal
of seduction and sensuality. The hero is a monk who gives in to his passions and fantasies,
indulging in sex, perversion, murder and black magic, until he is finally punished for his
treaty with the devil. Lewis was nicknamed 'Monk Lewis' after the great success of his
book, which offended contemporary taste and was subsequently published in a cleaned-up
version. In the nineteenth century, this type of novel was continued with Charles Robert
Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which also features an evil hero who is Faust,
Prometheus, and Don Juan in one person. Finally, William Godwin's The Adventures of
Caleb Williams (1794) combines elements of social criticism and themes that were to
become important in the crime novel. Godwin, the father of Mary Shelley (the author of
Frankenstein, published in 1818), concentrates on a sort of psychological horror in the story
of Caleb Williams, who has witnessed a murder and is chased by the murderer, Falkland.
Man destroys man, and the rich and powerful torture the poor, both physically and mentally.
The flowering of the Gothic novel indicates that in eighteenth-century prose fiction, as in
poetry, there was a vast underground of popular literature. Most of these works have gone
unrecorded in literary histories. One of the most underrated novels is Chrysal or the
Adventures of a Guinea. Written by Charles Johnstone, it was published in 1760 and met
with great success. The hero is not a person but an inanimate object, a piece of gold. This
literary device was not original; yet it allowed a wide range of scenes and profound social
satire that is of the calibre of Swift and Fielding.
However, the most successful, and equally the most neglected, novel of the eighteenth
century is John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748/9), better known as
Fanny Hill. In the past, literary histories have preferred to ignore this book. Many critics de-
nounced it as pornography, with the implication that such literature ought not to be dis-
cussed, either for moral or aesthetic reasons.
In 1985, however, Oxford University Press and Penguin Books decided to publish Fanny
Hill in their reputable series of classic English novels. This indicates a reassessment of what
has often been termed either a dirty or a trashy book. In fact, Fanny Hill is neither. Its author
was an impoverished hack writer of Scottish extraction. Cleland had read widely in contem-
porary literature, including French erotic novels, and attempted something quite unique with
Fanny Hill.
To begin with, the novel is a clever parody of the moralistic whore biography as exemplified by
Defoe's novels and William Hogarth's pictorial series, A Harlot's Progress (1732). The better-
known whores in English fiction and art before 1748 ended in misery or death, but Fanny rises
from poverty to a comfortable middle-class existence as wife and mother. Like Pamela (who is
also satirized in style and content), Fanny sees money and status as important aims in her life,
though she continuously stresses the importance of love, including emotion and sex. Unlike
Pamela, Fanny is not horrified by sex; it is precisely by giving in to temptation, not by resisting
it, that she makes good in the end. The plot of the book is very simple, relating Fanny's social
rise from a poor and innocent country girl, via several stages as a prostitute and kept woman, to
a happily married wife. Cleland attempted a fusion of natural sexuality, acceptable to a middle-
class audience, and an aesthetic framework incorporating the current of sentimentalism. This
combination of sex and pathetic sentiment is one of the characteristic features of the novel.
W. Hogarth, Before and After. 1736
Written in the form of an exchange of letters between two whores Fanny Hill mocks Pamela
and sums up more than two centuries of erotic fiction, most of it of French origin though
well known in England. While Fanny Hill is no doubt a highly erotic book, its periphrastic
style is bound to amuse modern readers rather than enflame them. It is also important as an
example of libertine fiction, a current in eighteenth-century literature which was more in-
fluential than literary histories usually admit: a wave of erotic and licentious books poured
into England from France throughout the century, and it was this sort of literature that
helped pave the way for the French Revolution through attacks on social and moral order.
John Cleland gave expression to the spirit of this stream of libertine fiction in French and
English literature. Thus Fanny Hill is a novel that should not be hidden away or ignored for
reasons of postmodern propriety. It deserves a place beside the works of Richardson,
Smollett, and Sterne.
5. Nonfiction
Prose developed into a serviceable medium for the powerful minds in the age of the En-
lightenment. The subjects of study became more numerous, and with the advancement of lit-
eracy there was much speculation and fierce questioning. Individual human experience was
the focus of attention.
Journalism flowered throughout the century. No fewer than 250 periodicals were published,
and from Jonathan Swift to William Godwin there was hardly a writer who did not put pen
to paper for a newspaper or journal. Defoe, Fielding, Johnson, Goldsmith, and Smollett
were all editors of, or major contributors to, literary periodicals. Offering information, edu-
cation, and entertainment in a balanced mixture that also accommodated fiction, the journals
became important voices in public life and literary criticism. Vastly influential were the
periodicals of the essayists, Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele (1672-1729).
Between 1709-1711 Steele published The Tatler, in which he wrote under the pseudonym of
Isaac Bickerstaff. Addison also contributed to this weekly journal. Together, they published
The Spectator (1711-12), a moral-literary journal which appeared daily. Other important
periodicals were The Gentleman's Magazine, published from 1731 onward. It contained gos-
sip, news, literary pieces, and reviews. Journals like The Monthly Review (1749-1845) and
The Critical Review (1756-1817), although basically concerned with London and the liter-
ary world, did not hesitate to take sides in politics.
Apart from journalism, biography and letter writing also prospered. James Boswell's The
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) and Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son (1774) are out-
standing examples.
In moral philosophy, the Earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711) propagated nature and moral sense as important categories. Philosophy gained
additional momentum with the works of the sceptical writers. Bernard de Mandeville
(1670-1733) exposed the difference between private morality and the morality of states in
The Fable of the Bees (1714). Unlike Chesterfield, he suggested ironically that the more
corrupt a state is the more successful it will be. David Hume, originally an historian, laid
bare the inadequacies of the human mind in his Treatise of Human Nature (1738) and his
"opus magnum", An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748).
The art of history writing gained substantially from Edward Gibbon (1737-94). His The
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, successively published between
1776-1788, was to become the classic work in English history.
In the area of political writing it was Edmund Burke (1729-97) who made a name for him-
self with his speeches in Parliament (later published), when he tried to prevent the sepa-
ration from England of the American colonies, and with his Reflections on the Revolution in
France (1790), in which he rejected the French Revolution while proving the advantages of
the British political system. Literary criticism was dominated by Dr. Samuel Johnson
(1709-84). He published biographies, such as his Life of Sarpi (1738); and Life of Boer-
haave, a famous doctor, but is mainly remembered for his great works, the Dictionary of the
English Language (1755), the predecessor of the modern Oxford English Dictionary, an
edition of Shakespeare; and his Lives of the English Poets (1779-81). The Lives is a collec-
tion of critical introductions to the major English poets, written at the request of some pub-
lishers and combining biography and critical appreciation. Dr. Johnson exerted great influ-
ence on his contemporaries with the essays he wrote and published in his own journal, The
Rambler (1750-52). The aim of this series of moral-didactic issues (about 200 in all) was
mainly to educate; it was often reprinted. Johnson had taken over as the leading figure in
literary criticism after the death of Alexander Pope in 1744. For Johnson, reason and good
sense were the basis of all fiction; inspiration was less important. Other critics, such as
Edmund Burke, stressed taste as an important aspect. "Taste" and "sensibility" are central
terms in Burke's study of aesthetics, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). Among the works on literary criticism published in the
second half of the eighteenth century, the most important are Edward Young's Conjectures
on Original Composition (1759), which stresses genius and originality as opposed to mere
imitation; and Richard Hurd's seminal Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), a book
which prepared the ground for the developing Gothic taste in literature.
Travel writing was boosted as the Grand Tour, which had begun in the sixteenth century,
became a fashion among aristocrats and the newly rich bourgeois in England. It involved a
leisurely tour through
Europe, mainly for
men and lasting up to
three years, during
which the travellers
enriched their know-
ledge of the classical

past and developed
the skills of the con-
noisseur in art and ar-
chitecture. Favourite
targets were the clas-
sical sites of Italy in
Rome, Naples, and
Venice, and the newly
excavated Hercula- Illustration from William Combe, The English Dance of Death.
neum (1711 ff.) and 1815-16
Pompeij (1733 ff.)
Paris, and the sublime landscape of the Alps. The foreign influence was noticeable in
England with the fashion of Italian painting, the introduction of the Palladian villa and the
landscape garden inspired by Claude Lorrain. The foundations of the travel guide were laid
with Joseph Addison's Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705) and Daniel Defoe's Tour
Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, in three volumes (1724-26), a lively first-hand
account of the state of the country, based on his many travels. A typical Grand Tour
undertaken by Horace Walpole and the poet Thomas Gray (1716-71; see also Gray's
Journal, 1775) in 1739-41 is described in their letters, and there are numerous travel
writings, many of them repetitive. Outstanding examples are the accounts by James Boswell
(Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, 1785), William Beckford (1759-1844; see Dreams,
Waking Thoughts, and Incidents, 1783, rev. 1834; and Recollections, 1835), and Edward
Gibbon (1737-94; see Miscellaneous Works, 1796). Tobias Smollett's Travels Through
France and Italy (1766) were mocked in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through
France and Italy (1768), and the sometimes frantic search of the travellers for the sublime
and the picturesque was often satirized, notably in the collaboration of William Combe
(1741-1823) and the caricaturist Thomas

Rowlandson. Although published in the ear-
ly nineteenth century, the three books (with
verses by Combe and pictures by Rowland-
son) describing The Tours of Dr Syntax in
Search of the Picturesque (1809-21; collect-
ed in one volume in 1826) mock the pictur-
esque travels of the eighteenth century, parti-
cularly the illustrated works of William

Gilpin (1724-1804) describing his trips to
Wales (1782), the Lake District (1789), and
the Scottish Highlands (1800). The most
remarkable travel book by a woman is Mary
Wollstonecraft's (1759-97) account of her
travels through Scandinavia, Letters Written
During a Short Residence in Sweden, Nor-
way and Denmark (1796).
William Gilpin, Landscape with Ruined Castle.

c. 1790
VI. The Nineteenth Century
It would be convenient, but not altogether correct, to call the nineteenth century the age of
the middle class. The merchants solidified their newly gained importance in the economic
and political fields, and the Reform Bill1 of 1832, later followed by the Act of 1867, finally
guaranteed more genuine representation for the people, an aim William Cobbett (1762-
1835) had been agitating for in his Weekly Political Register.
The second half of the century saw an unprecedented economic growth which seemed to
confirm both bourgeois capitalism and Jeremy Bentham's philosophical "utilitarianism".
Under Queen Victoria, who gave her name to an entire age, the Empire achieved its largest
extension, thus increasing the feeling of
contentment among the middle class. But
materialism and pride in progress could not
hide contradictory ideas and insecurities. At
the beginning of the century, the French
revolutionary ideas of "liberty, equality and
fraternity" were displaced by the terror that
followed the execution of Louis XVI in

1793, and by 1804 Napoleon threatened
England's freedom from the Continent. A
decade was to pass before the Emperor was
deposed and banned to Elba. Thus Eng-
land's middle class could never feel really
secure. The widespread revolutionary move-
ments on the Continent in 1848 were ac-
companied by the publication of Karl Marx's
Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (to-
gether with Friedrich Engels), followed in
1867 by Das Kapital. The security of the William Nicholson, Queen Victoria
Victorian middle class was further endan- (1837-1901). 1897
gered by the rising agnosticism after 1860.
Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) seemed to disprove the book of Genesis. Some
representatives of religion and a few artists fought agnosticism and materialism. The Church
of England split into a High Church, initiated by the Oxford Movement2 that was led by
John Keble and E.B. Pusey, and a Low Church much influenced by rational and Deist ideas.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and John Ruskin (1819-1900) opposed the ideological main-
1 The Reform Bill of 1832 increased parliamentary representation by extending the vote to the
rich middle classes and it removed some of the inequalities in the system of representation.
2 A movement of thought and doctrine within the Church of England. It was begun by Keble in
1833 and attempted to revive the High Church traditions of the 17th century. The members of
the movement influenced intellectual, religious, and cultural life with their publications, creat-
ing an interest in the medieval and 17th-century church that affected Tennyson, Morrison, and
the Pre-Raphaelites.
stream of their time. Carlyle hated materialism and progress and advocated both social and
moral reforms. If Carlyle was concerned with history and politics, Ruskin concentrated on
art and beauty. His works praise modern painters and attempt a synthesis of art and faith.
Ruskin was also in favour of social reforms and national education and strongly opposed
utilitarianism.
In literature, the nineteenth century witnessed three periods: Romanticism (c. 1790-1830),
Victorianism (1830-1890), and the Decadence or "fin-de-sicle" of the 1890s. Prepared by
Thomson, Gray, Collins, Blake and Burns, the Ro-
mantic movement produced a rich harvest in the first
three decades of the century. At first inspired by the
ideas behind the French Revolution, the Romantics
revolted against the rules and conventions of the
eighteenth-century classicists. Intellectual attitudes
were to be replaced by a wider outlook, recognizing
the claims of passion and emotion. The critical spirit
was to give way to imagination, and wit was to yield
to humour and pathos. The romantic poets in par-
ticular proclaimed the return to nature, both in sub-

ject and style. But their humanitarian idealism was
bitterly disappointed by the incidents in France after
1792, and poets like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott,
and Shelley learned more from German culture and
literature.
The longer period of Victorian writing, in which
middle-class authors entertained middle-class read-
ers with a mixture of optimism, guilt, and doubt,
came to an end in the 1890s. It was an age largely
dominated by the ideals and ideas of the bourgeois.
W. Turner, The Great Falls of the A strict but sham morality prevailed which demand-
Reichenbach. 1804 ed that such subjects as sex were to be ignored in
popular literature. Significantly, Thomas Bowdler
(1754-1825) published his expurgated Family Shakespeare in 1818, thus creating the term
"to bowdlerize". And though some writers revolted against the prudishness, priggishness,
and narrow-mindedness of the middle class (Ruskin denounced materialism, Thackeray
ridiculed snobbery, and Matthew Arnold attacked philistinism) hypocrisy could never be
eradicated: the seemingly moral Victorian period saw the rise of pornography in under-
ground literature, and an unprecedented increase in prostitution in London. Queen Victoria
embodies the hypocrisy of the age to which she lent her name: her public image was that of
a virtuous and morally upright monarch, yet in her private life she had a long-drawn-out
affair with her Scottish groom.
If the eighteenth century saw the rise of a decidedly bourgeois art and, beginning in the
1780s, the Romantic movement, these trends were fully developed in the Victorian age.
J(oseph) M(allord) W(illiam) Turner (1775-1851) was England's towering genius and not
only among the Romantic painters. Turner challenged, and often surpassed, the European
Old Masters in every genre: Claude Lorrain in landscapes, Poussin in history painting, and
Van de Velde and Rysdael in seascapes. Produced under the impression of his voyages in
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 81
Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, his later works proved unique in their use of impressionist
techniques far ahead of their time (see, for instance, Venice from the Steps of the Europa
Hotel, 1842). Like the extraordinary Turner, John Martin (1789-1854) tried to catch the
sublime in his wild and occasionally apocalyptic landscapes (see also his Belshazzar's Feast,
1821). Also a Romantic painter, John Constable (1776-1837) was less dramatic. He began
with landscapes in the tradition of Lorrain but is remembered for his studies of clouds and
light. One of the last Romantics was Samuel Palmer (1805-1881), who admired Turner and
worked with Blake in a group called the Ancients. Genre painting found a representative in
William Mulready (1786-1863), who is remembered for his oils depicting children.
The general dissatisfaction with the state of English art led to the founding in 1848 of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This was a group of younger idealist artists who applied ex-
treme realistic techniques (as used in painting before the time of Raphael) to mythological
subjects in their search for new forms of expression and moral messages. Until 1853, they
worked together, but individual styles then won the upper hand as John Everett Millais
(1829-96) painted popular subjects for the Academy (see The Blind Girl, 1854-56), William
Holman Hunt (1827-1910) searched the Orient for religious themes (see The Finding of the
Saviour in the Temple, 1854-60), and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) focussed on the
dream world of mythology and religion (see Ecce Ancilla Domini!, 1849-50). Rossetti was a
founding member of the group and also a poet; his canvases often depict either helpless
women in a trance or femmes fatales. The second phase of Pre-Raphaelitism was dominated
by the highly symbolic medievalism and the decorative images of Edward Burne-Jones
(1833-98; see King Arthur at Avalon, 1898).
The sentimental bourgeois spirit that is so obvious in the fiction of Charles Dickens was
caught in painting by Edwin Landseer (1803-73), whose representations of animals are
marred by an overdose of sentiment (see The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, 1837). John
Frederick Lewis (1805-76), a friend of Landseer's, gave expression to Orientalism, which
continued beyond Romanticism (see The Hhareem, 1850).
Simultaneously, England witnessed the flowering of the aesthetic movement. Walter Pater
(1839-94), a theorist, prepared the ground with his demand, art for art's sake. As art became
a substitute for religion, beauty and pleasure were set up as aims in themselves, and hedon-
ism as a way of life. In art, the movement was represented by the American James Abbott
McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), best known for his nocturnal views of London and other
cities. Oscar Wilde was the most prominent writer of this movement which culminated in
the Yellow Decade when Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98) produced illustrations for Malory's
Morte d'Arthur and Oscar Wilde's Salom.
The final decades of the century witnessed a return to classicism which allowed painters the
representation of nudes in the context of Greek or Roman mythology. Examples can be
found in the works of such neo-classicist painters as Frederic Leighton (1830-96; see
Flaming June, 1895), Edward John Poynton (1836-1919), and Lawrence Alma-Tadema
(1836-1912; see In the Tepidarium, 1881). Late Victorian landscape painting was dominated
by two schools. One, the idyllic school, led by Frederick Walker (1840-75), met the zeitgeist
with romantic representations of English scenery; the other, the realistic school (which
found the interest of Thomas Hardy), followed the French precedent (Jules Bastien-Lepage),
as such painters as Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947; see A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach, 1885)
and Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), a leading spirit in the New English Art Club
(NEAC), painted simple country people and rustic scenes from a non-romantic angle. Im-
pressionism was introduced in England by Sickert, Wilson Steer, and the American painter
John Singer Sargent, a friend of Monet's.
As the example of Beardsley shows, the illustrated book was still extremely popular in the
Victorian age. Before Beardsley, Dickens's novels were published with illustrations, and
Thackeray produced drawings and engravings for his own fiction. A revolutionary change
occurred towards the end of the century with the arrival of photography, the first sign of
Modernism, which introduced new ways of seeing and suddenly made Victorian art look
old-fashioned, sentimental, and portentious.
2. Poetry
While it is true that the Romantic period proper may be dated from the publication in 1798
of the Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the ideals
of eighteenth-century Neoclassicism did not come to an abrupt end. They survived in the
fascinating works of Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Charles Darwin's grandfather, who
recorded the botanical system of Linnaeus3 in his The Botanic Garden. This poem is written
in heroic couplets and appeared in two parts, part II, "The Loves of the Plants", in 1789, and
part I, "The Economy of Vegetation", in 1791. Darwin's description of flowers as "beaux"
and "belles" with a love life was soon ridi-
culed and parodied. Among the poets writing
in the tradition of Neoclassicism were George
Crabbe (1754-1832), Samuel Rogers (1763-
1855), and the Scotsman Thomas Campbell
(1777-1844).
The principles of Romantic poetry were for-
mulated by Wordsworth (1770-1850) in the
preface to the second and third editions of the

Lyrical Ballads which appeared in 1801 (but is
known as the 1800 edition) and 1802. Words-
worth opposed the very idea of poetic diction,
demanding an utmost simplicity of subject and
style. The language of poetry, he insisted,
should be the language of ordinary people, and
the poet should be inspired by legend, feeling,
and imagination. The poet was to be a prophet
proclaiming the beauty and splendour of life
and nature. A disciple of Rousseau, and also
of the Augustans and their immediate succes-
sors, Wordsworth taught his contemporaries,
John Martin, The Bard. 1817. who received his ideas rather unfavourably, to
Inspired by Thomas Grays poem of 1757 look at nature with the eyes of imagination and
to recognize in its beauty the presence of an
3 Linnaeus (Carl Linn, 1707-78), Swedish naturalist and botanist and the founder of the inter-
nationally used system for naming animals and plants. His most important works were Species
Plantarum (1753) and Systema Naturae (1735).
unseen Goodness. As a Pantheist, he was neither Christian nor Deist or rationalist, but rather
a believer in the natural universe that signifies God. Wordsworth's theory of poetic language
is based on a nature-philosophy that led him to adore country people, rural life, and natural
scenery. Though the wish to be simple implies the danger of banality, Wordsworth was able
to impress with even very short poems on "everyday" subjects, such as a rainbow:
My Heart Leaps Up
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Wordsworth spent almost all his life in the Lake District4. In fact, he became known, to-
gether with Coleridge and Southey, as one of the Lake Poets. He spent his youth in the
mountains of Cumbria. After studying at Cambridge, he lived for a few months in London
before moving to France where he took an active interest in the revolutionary movement.
His dreams of brotherhood shattered by the reign of terror after 1792, he returned to the
solitude and seclusion of Grasmere in the Lake District. After visiting Germany with Cole-
ridge in 1798, he devoted his life entirely to poetry. Wordsworth's best verse is contained in
the mainly narrative poems of the Lyrical Ballads (1798; sec. ed. in 1801), the Poems in
Two Volumes (1807), and The Prelude, a long reflective and autobiographical poem in blank
verse commenced in 1799 and completed in 1805 but not published until 1850. In 1800 he
finished two other long poems in blank verse, The Excursion and The Recluse, and between
1801-1803 he also wrote two series of sonnets, including "Upon Westminster Bridge":
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
4 The Lake District is now a National Park in the county of Cumbria in northwest England. Its
impressive scenery (lakes, mountains, woods, valleys) has made it a popular holiday area and a
celebrated topic for Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge.
His most productive period seems to have been the decade after 1800 when he wrote his
great ode "Intimations of Immortality."
Wordsworth's closest friend was Samuel Taylor Coleridge (17721834). His work, though
mainly a genial collection of plans and fragments, embodies the ideas and themes of the
Romantic movement by exploring the magical and the mysterious. Like Wordsworth, he
sympathized with the Revolution in France and became acquainted with Robert Southey in
the early 1790s. Together, they planned to put into practice a sort of Communist society,
"Pantisocracy", in America. But this plan, like several others of Coleridge's schemes, never
took shape.
However, it was the friendship with Words-
worth that was to influence Coleridge's life
and work. To their joint publication, the
Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge contributed
poems dealing with the supernatural, such as
The Ancient Mariner, whereas Wordsworth
chose subjects from ordinary life. Coleridge
read literature and philosophy at Gttingen,
thus absorbing German literature, and in

1798 decided to become a clergyman. But
when he met William Hazlitt in 1803 he
gave up this career and went to the Lake
District. After 1803 he suffered from ill
health and became addicted to opium. This
impaired his mental faculties and ruined
both his career as a poet and critic and his
domestic happiness. Coleridge was impor-
tant to the Romantic movement because, in-
fluenced by German writers like Lessing,
Schiller and Kant, he taught England to re-
vere Shakespeare as a literary artist, and
Gustave Dor, Illustration from a because he introduced transcendentalism
German edition of The Ancient Mariner
and mysticism of German origin. Coleridge's
(Der alte Matrose). 1877
greatest poems, The Ancient Mariner, Kubla
Khan, and Christabel were composed during
the period of his closest association with Wordsworth. Written in the style and metre of the
ancient ballads, The Ancient Mariner creates a fantastic dream world in the story of an old
sailor who kills an albatross and is tormented with the most frightening visions and visit-
ations. Kubla Khan, published in 1816, is, according to its subtitle, a "vision in a dream" in
which Coleridge came close to verbalized music. The theme of the poem, the fabulous an-
cient Orient, is one of the major preoccupations of Romantic writing. Here are the first 11
lines of the poem.
Kubla Khan
OR A VISION IN A DREAM. A FRAGMENT
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
Christabel (1816), like Kubla Khan an unfinished poem, shows flexible metre foreshadow-
ing the later Hopkins and is concerned with the mystery of evil.
The treatment of the unknown and of exoticism is a dominant theme that helped to shape
Romanticism. It is apparent in the works of the first generation of Romantic poets, Words-
worth and Coleridge, and also in the poetry of such minor writers as Robert Southey (1774-
1843) and Thomas Moore (1779-1852). Together with Coleridge and Wordsworth, Southey
became known as one of the "Lakers". His Thalaba deals with the Islamic world while The
Curse of Kehama (1810) is set in India. Moore's Lalla Rookh (1817) is also an Oriental
poem made up of a series of tales in verse that are connected by a story in prose.
What distinguishes the first generation of Romantic poets from the second, i.e. from Byron,
Shelley, and Keats, is the fact that the former became old and experienced enough to modify
the ideas of their youth while the latter died young and immature. George Gordon, Lord
Byron (1788-1824), for instance,
would seem to be the archetypal
tragic Romantic poet. Even in his
lifetime, he became a legend. He
was a boisterous student at Cam-
bridge and he very early inherited
the title and estates of Newstead

Abbey, near Nottingham. In 1809
he took his seat in the House of
Lords and soon set out for a long
journey to the Orient (1809-1811).
Back in England, he published the
first two cantos of Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage (canto III appeared in
1816, and canto IV in 1818). This
poem is a veiled autobiographical
description in Spenserian stanzas W. Turner, Death on a Pale Horse. c. 1825-1830
of the travels and reflections of a
young "Romanticist" whose life corresponds in many ways to Byron's own. The two cantos
were followed by tales in verse, such as The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair, written in
heroic couplets and published in 1814, and Lara (1814), which is set in Turkey and Greece.
Byron then began to enjoy himself in the role of the handsome cynic with the club-foot, the
atheist and debauchee, and the hero who had swum the Hellespont5. In 1815 he married a
rich heiress only to separate from her a year later. In the same year he left England for good
and travelled through Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. In Geneva, he met Shelley, and
then he left for Italy, residing in Venice, Ravenna, Rome, Pisa, and Genoa. After a
prolonged love-affair, he decided in 1823 to go to Greece and help that country in its fight
for independence. However, before he could join the Greek insurgents attacking Turkish
troops, he died of a fever in Missolonghi, at the young age of 36. Byron's most important
and convincing poetic works are beyond doubt Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and his epic
satire Don Juan.
Based on a Spanish story dramatised by Tellez and Molire, and on Mozart's Don Giovanni
(1787), Byron's poem is written in ottava rima, in 16 cantos, and appeared between 1819-24.
Like Byron himself, Don Juan is a charming, handsome and unprincipled young man. His
love affairs and adventures serve as the connecting thread for the social satire of the poem.
In canto I of Don Juan, Byron sneered at the ideas of the older Romantic poets:
90
Young Juan wandered by the glassy brooks,
Thinking unutterable things; he threw
Himself at length within the leafy nooks
Where the wild branch of the cork forest grew;
There poets find materials for their books,
And every now and then we read them through,
So that their plan and prosody are eligible,
Unless, like Wordsworth, they prove unintelligible.
[]
Like the Augustan satirists, Byron plays with the reader in his long description of Julia's
seduction, which hides as much as it unveils:
109
Julia had honor, virtue, truth, and love
For Don Alfonso; and she inly swore,
By all the vows below to Powers above,
She never would disgrace the ring she wore,
Nor, leave a wish which wisdom might reprove;
And while she pondered this, besides much more,
One hand on Juan's carelessly was thrown,
Quite by mistake she thought it was her own;
110
Unconsciously she leaned upon the other,
Which played within the tangles of her hair;
And to contend with thoughts she could not smother
5 The Old Greek name for the strait connecting the Aegean and the Marmara seas and separating
Europe (Greece) and Asia (Turkey). The strait is also called Dardanelles or Bosporus Straits and
is prominent in Greek legend.
She seemed by the distraction of her air.

'Twas surely very wrong in Juan's mother
To leave together this imprudent pair,
She who for many years had watched her son so
I'm very certain mine would not have done so.
[]
115
And Julia sate with Juan, half embraced
And half retiring from the glowing arm,
Which trembled like the bosom where 'twas placed;
Yet still she must have thought there was no harm,
Or else 'twere easy to withdraw her waist;
But then the situation had its charm,
And then God knows what next I can't go on;
I'm almost sorry that I e'er begun.
Such poetry was much too daring for Georgian society. The prudery of the Victorian critics
withheld these poems from the public. This is also true of Byron's satires Beppo (1818), which
shows life as a carnival, and Visions of Judgment (1822), in which he ridicules Southey.
Like Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was of aristocratic origin. The son of a
wealthy baronet, he was expelled from the University of Oxford for issuing a pamphlet on
The Necessity of Atheism. Scorned by his father, he went to London and married the daugh-
ter of an innkeeper. In 1814 they separated, and two years later Shelley married William
Godwin's daughter. During a journey to Switzerland he met Byron, and together they read
and wrote ghost stories. Shelley's wife Mary contributed Frankenstein, which, at her hus-
band's request, she developed into a long story. After briefly returning to England, Shelley
left England forever in 1818 and travelled in Italy. In 1822 he drowned in a thunderstorm
while at sea.
Shelley's longer poems, such as Queen Mab (1813), The Revolt of Islam (1818), the allegor-
ical tragedy Prometheus Unbound (1820), and the lyrical drama Hellas (1822) take up the
themes of revolt and human suffering. If Byron expressed the diabolical and Faustian as-
pects that fascinated several Romantic writers, Shelley tried to put into verse the idealism of
the Romantic movement. His "Ode to the Westwind" possesses great melodic power in the
treatment of his favourite themes of freedom, beauty, and love. Equally famous are his fine
short lyrics, such as the sonnet "Ozymandias" which reminds the reader of the vanity of
human pride and power.
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
When Shelley's body was washed ashore in the Gulf of Spezia, a volume of Keats's poems
was found in one of his pockets. Shelley had written an elegy, "Adonais", when Keats died
in 1821. John Keats (1795-1821) was born in London as the son of a stable-keeper. At first
he wanted to become a doctor, but in 1816 he decided to devote his life to literature. His
poems were almost all written in the brief space of the five years before his death and are
models of the sensuous aspect of Romanticism. Keats's themes were love and death, and
beauty in art and nature, tinged with melancholy and heart-ache. His unfinished Hyperion, a
sort of Miltonic epic, tells of the dethroning of the old gods and the rise of the new.
Endymion (1818), his first long poem, deals with the Greek myth of a beautiful youth who
was loved and plunged into eternal sleep by the Moon goddess. Beauty, love, and death are
also dominant themes in his finest lyrics, the "Ode to a Nightingale", the "Ode on Melan-
choly", and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn", all written in 1819. The last stanza of the "Ode on
a Grecian Urn" records Keats's sadness at the thought of the transient nature of beauty and
his wish to adore works of art as the preservers of love and happiness.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
For Keats, the love of beauty became a passion. He found beauty in nature, though without
the metaphysical notions of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and in the worlds of Greek myth
and medieval romance, which he treated in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a ballad written in
1819. Keats died of tuberculosis in 1821 in Rome, where he had gone, much too late, to
improve his health. On the voyage to Italy he wrote one of the most beautiful English son-
nets, his last poem, "Bright Star."
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors
No yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever or else swoon to death.
By 1830, Romanticism in poetry was coming to an end. Byron, Keats, and Shelley had died,
and Coleridge and Wordsworth were poetically silent. A new poetry came with Tennyson
and Browning, though the popular poets in the 1830s were still Byron, Scott, Moore,
Thomas Campbell, and John Clare. Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) has been recognized as
one of the outstanding Victorian poets. Tennyson was the son of a clergyman and went to
Trinity College, Cambridge. By 1830 he had published his first volume of poems, followed
by another book of lyrical verse in 1832. Already in these early poems, which are reminis-
cent of the Romantics because of their supernatural atmosphere, one notices a style marked
by its musical flow. Tennyson often expressed a profound melancholy and a sense of person-
al loss, as in the following poem written in 1834 and published in 1842.
Break, Break, Break
Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
O, well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!
Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.
Tennyson's dramatic monologues, perhaps best exemplified in "Ulysses" (1842), show him
as a masterly technician achieving rhythm and melody even when he used blank verse. At
the end of "Ulysses", the protagonist addresses his mariners and suggests another trip to un-
known worlds in order to escape old age and the boredom of everyday life.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
The death in 1833 of Tennyson's close friend Arthur Hallam may be one of the reasons why
the poetry he published after 1840 assumed a stronger note of melancholy. In Memoriam,
dedicated to Hallam, appeared in 1850. Begun as an elegy, it is a collection of lyrics in a con-
sistant metre and ends in a passionate defense of poetry and the poet's soul. Maud (1855),
like the earlier Locksley Hall (1842) is a dramatic monologue or "monodrama" representing
the story of a disappointed lover who joins
the army to go to war. With Idylls of the King
(1857-72), Tennyson indulged his love of old
legends. It is a series of twelve romantic tales
in blank verse focusing on King Arthur's
Round Table. Tennyson was appointed poet
laureate on the death of Wordsworth in 1850,
and in 1884 he was raised to the peerage6 for

his contribution to literature. When he died
eight years later, he was buried in West-
minster Abbey, by the side of Robert
Browning.
Browning (1812-89) differed in many ways
from Tennyson. As a Nonconformist, he was
denied access to Oxford and Cambridge and
spent a brief period at University College,
London. Browning soon made the acquaint-
ance of a young lady poet and invalid,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Found. 1854-81
Elizabeth Barrett, whom he married in
secrecy and against her father's wish in 1846.
The pair fled to Italy, and until the death of
Elizabeth in 1861 they lived and worked in Pisa and Florence, producing some remarkable
poetry. She recorded her love for her husband in a cycle of poems, Sonnets from the
Portuguese (1845), while Robert wrote some of his best dramatic monologues, published as
Men and Women in 1855. Italy seems to have held a powerful fascination for English poets
of the nineteenth century. Like Byron, Shelley, and Keats, Browning made this country his
temporary home. He returned to England only after his wife's death, but he went back to
Italy and died in Venice. The history, culture, and literature of Italy pervade Browning's
poems which mirror his vast and eccentric reading. His language and imagery are much
closer to our time than to the Victorian period.
In the first two stanzas of "A Toccata of Galuppi's" (1855) he tried to recall eighteenth-
century Venetian music and life in a beautiful rhythm:
O Galuppi, Baldassare, this is very sad to find!
I can hardly misconceive you; it would prove me deaf and blind;
But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind!
6 The British aristocracy comprises hereditary peers (noblemen with inherited titles) and life
peers (titles awarded to one person for his or her life). Hereditary peers may sit in the House of
Lords.
Here you come with your old music, and here's all the good it brings.
What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings,
Where Saint Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?
The proud Duke in "My Last Duchess" (1842) shows a visitor the picture of his deceased
wife and the splendour of his castle while almost giving away his horrible secret. The first
13 lines of this poem illustrate how dexterously Browning could handle the dramatic mono-
logue, a poetic and dramatic form that also dominates in his second collection, Dramatis
Personae (1864).
My Last Duchess
FERRARA
That's my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fr Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Fr Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus.
Browning had been experimenting with drama, and his main poetic achievement, the sophis-
tication and improvement of the monologue, is clearly a result of his deep interest in the
psychological aspects of characters in plays. Italy again provided the theme and setting for
his last great work, The Ring and the Book (1869), which is a long murder story in verse set
in Rome.
Victorian religious and philosophical skepticism found expression in the works of Matthew
Arnold (1822-88) and Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), who were very close friends.
Clough is today remembered mainly for his hexameter poem "Amours de Voyage" (1858).
In his parody of the Ten Commandments, "The Latest Decalogue" (1862), he dealt a blow to
his materialistic compatriots:
The Latest Decalogue
Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipped, except the currency:
Swear not at all; for for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend:
Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
Do not adultery commit;

Advantage rarely comes of it:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When it's so lucrative to cheat:
Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly:
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.
The sum of all is, thou shalt love,
If any body, God above:
At any rate shall never labour
More than thyself to love thy neighbour.
When Clough died in Florence, Matthew Arnold produced a moving elegy, Thyrsis (1866),
on the death of his friend. Arnold, however, was better as a critic than as a poet. His verse is
sombre and pessimistic. Thus the ending of "Dover Beach" (1867) expresses the desperate
hope that love may help to overcome man's feeling of forlornness.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Arnold stopped writing poetry after 1867,
dedicating his time to literary criticism.
Before turning to the Pre-Raphaelite Brother-
hood (hereafter PRB), one ought to mention
the name of Edward Fitzgerald (1809-83)
who produced one poem with a lasting impres-
sion. This is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
(1859), a free translation in quatrains of the
Persian poet Khayyam. The poem brought to

complacent Victorian England a little of the
melancholy spirit of the East, preaching not
the gospel of labour but idleness and hedon-
istic skepticism. Fitzgerald was discovered and
defended by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-
1882), the true soul of the PRB, which was
founded in 1848. The PRB was a group of art-
ists, critics and poets William Holman Hunt,
D. G. Rossetti, Lady Lilith. 1864 John Everett Millais, D. G. Rossetti, William
Michael Rossetti, William Morris, A.C.
Swinburne et al. who refused to accept the methods of conventional art and tried to find
purity of inspiration and moral qualities through a scrupulous study of nature and the
depiction of noble subjects. The name of the group indicates that they considered art from
Raphael onwards as degenerate (the name was first used in a picture by Hunt in 1849). The
PRB looked for the essential qualities of medieval art and wanted to reproduce nature with
painstaking fidelity. At first used only with reference to painting, the term PRB was soon
extended to literature, not least because several members of the group were both painters
and poets. When Rossetti joined the PRB he had already written a poem, "The Blessed
Damozel" (finished in 1846 and published in 1850 in The Germ, a magazine propagating the
ideas of the PRB). This work, like his paintings, suggests an artificial striving for simplicity
and a strange religious atmosphere which does not, however, derive from religious faith. As
the first two stanzas show, the form of the poem is reminiscent of the ballad.
The Blessed Damozel
The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem,
No wrought flowers did adorn,
But a white rose of Mary's gift,
For service meetly worn;
Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.
Rossetti's debt to Italian art and literature (he was the son of an Italian poet and refugee) can
be seen in his series of sonnets, The House of Life, published in 1870 and 1881. His sister,
Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-94), also excelled in the sonnet form. Some of her best
works are collected in the series Monna Innominata, which focuses on unhappy love.
Like D. G. Rossetti, William Morris (1834-96) was much concerned with art and poetry.
His achievement lies more in the field of spreading art in everyday life. Initially a poet and
critic, he became a book illustrator, a designer of furniture, wallpaper and stained glass
windows. In 1861 he founded the firm Morris, Faulkner & Co., and in 1870 the publishing
house Kelmscott Press. Morris was a passionate Socialist and, later, Communist crusading
against the ugliness of industrialism. His verse, inspired by medieval, Greek, and Scandina-
vian subjects, also shows Tennyson's influence, particularly The Defence of Guinevere
(1858). The Earthly Paradise (1868-70) is modelled on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, con-
taining 24 verse tales. After a voyage to Iceland in 1871, Morris took an interest in Germanic
legend and, in 1871, published his gigantic epic Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the
Nibelungs.
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) met D. G. Rossetti at Oxford and later shared a
house with him in Chelsea, London. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads of 1866 were violently
attacked by the critics and outraged Victorian morality with their sensual treatment of lust
and despair. He was much influenced by contemporary French poets, especially by Baude-
laire's7 Les Fleurs du mal (1857). In his attacks on morality and religion, Swinburne dis-
7 Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), French poet and forerunner of symbolism. Les Fleurs du mal
(1857) is a series of 101 poems, including sonnets, in a variety of metres. In musical language
and telling images, they explore isolation, sin, boredom, melancholy, and the power of love as
played a Romantic spirit of revolt. His poems stress sound and rhythm to create an im-
pression of beauty, often at the expense of meaning. Thus his "A Forsaken Garden" (1878),
the first stanza of which follows, is distinguished by its rhythmic splendour rather than by its
message.
A Forsaken Garden
In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.
From Swinburne and the PRB it was
only a short step to the art-for-art's
sake impressionism of the poets of
the 1890s. Again, one notices the
close relations between painting and
poetry. Ruskin's art theories were
being replaced by the ideas of
Walter Pater, and of the American
painter James A. M. Whistler (1834-
1903), who came to England in 1866
and was a friend of Oscar Wilde.

The poets of the fin-de-sicle move-
ment cultivated pleasure and made
hedonism a way of life. Foreshad-
owed by the pessimistic poetry of
James Thomson (1834-82) (see his
The City of Dreadful Night, 1870-
74) decadence arose out of the influ-
ence of the English Romantic tradi-
tion (Keats, Swinburne) and French
symbolism. It found expression in
the prose and poetry of Oscar Wilde
(1854-1900), whose Poems appeared
in 1881, and Ernest Dowson (1867-
1900), who both adored the French
A. Beardsley, Illustration from The Savoy. 1896
symbolists Baudelaire and Mal-
larm8; and in the verse of Lionel
well as the attraction of evil. Some of the poems were banned upon publication as offensive to
public morals. His reputation as a critic has steadily increased since his death.
8 Stphane Mallarm (1842-98), French poet and founder of modern European poetry. His poetry
is highly allusive and symbolical (e.g. Posies, 1887, and Vers et prose, 1893) and employs syn-
tactical and metaphoric ambiguities as well as typographical innovations.
Johnson (1867-1902), Arthur Symons (1865-1945) and A(lfred) E(dward) Housman

(1859-1936). Oscar Wilde's "Impression du Matin" is a good example of impressionistic
poetry which scorns logic and tries to describe effects, synaesthetic sensations, and feelings in
esoteric symbols and musical rhythms. Wilde's poem was inspired by Whistler's painting of the
Thames entitled Nocturne in Blue and Gold.
Impression du Matin
The Thames nocturne of blue and gold
Changed to a harmony in gray;
A barge with ocher-colored hay
Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold
The yellow fog came creeping down
The bridges, till the houses' walls
Seemed changed to shadows, and St. Paul's
Loomed like a bubble o'er the town.
Then suddenly arose the clang
Of waking life; the streets were stirred
With country wagons; and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.
But one pale woman all alone,
The daylight kissing her wan hair,
Loitered beneath the gas lamp's flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone.
The representatives of the fin-de-sicle decadence published their art and literature in such
periodicals as The Yellow Book (1894-97) and The Savoy (1896). Both were illustrated by
Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98), whose fantastic, mannered style is typical of art nouveau.
Robert Bridges (1844-1930) has often been called the last Victorian poet. He was appoint-
ed poet laureate in 1913, and when he published his philosophical poem in Alexandrines,
Testament of Beauty (1929), he had been writing verse for over fifty years. His best known
poems are contained in the Shorter Poems (1890 and 1893). In 1918 Bridges published a
volume of verse of his closest friend, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), who brought a
formal renewal to poetry and is today recognized as the most influential Victorian poet.
Hopkins converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest. After his ordination,
he burned his early poems, but, urged by his superior, he began writing again in his thirties.
He thought deeply about poetry and gave a profound expression to religious experience. His
technical audacity and his specialized vocabulary, his condensed language and syntax, and
his "sprung rhythm" drew on Anglo-Saxon and Germanic poetry in a free variation of the
number of syllables within the unit of a verse. Thus Hopkins can be regarded as the first
modern poet. "The Windhover" (1877) exemplifies his poetic theory and his religious ex-
perience.
The Windhover
TO CHRIST OUR LORD
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sher pld makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
The so-called "terrible sonnets" of his last years speak of the glory of God in nature while
exploring his own self-tormented mind.
A survey of the Victorian period would be incomplete without a brief reference to Edward
Lear (1812-88) whose nonsense rhymes, collected in The Book of Nonsense (1845), became
very popular. Lear revived the limerick, a stanza form used exclusively for light verse. The
limerick is always comic, often nonsensical, and sometimes bawdy, and it is still popular
today. Here is one of Lear's limericks.
There was an Old Man of the Dee
Who was sadly annoyed by a Flea;
When he said, "I will scratch it",
They gave him a hatchet,
Which grieved that Old Man of the Dee.
3. Drama
After the death of Sheridan in 1816, drama suffered a decline in England. This cannot be put
down to one single cause. One reason was the fact that between the Restoration and the
Theatre Regulating Act of 1843 the only licensed theatres in London were Covent Garden
and Drury Lane, and, from 1766, the Haymarket Theatre. The Act of 1843 removed the
monopoly, but there were then few dramatists who were able to provide the old qualities and
the subtlety of drama. The new middle-class audience had no true appreciation for drama as
an art. As a result, melodrama, partly imported from France, became very popular. Initially,
the term meant plays with music, but today it has a pejorative aspect, denoting a play that
depends for its effect on highly sensational and exaggerated situations. In the melodrama of
the early nineteenth century, villains are as bad as possible and the good are angelic. Other
typical elements are conventional moralizing, violence, attempted seduction, and low hu-
mour.
Most of the Romantic poets wrote plays, predominantly five-act blank-verse tragedies.
These "closet dramas" were meant to be read rather than performed; the better known ex-
amples were Shelley's The Cenci (1819), whose theme of incest made it impossible for the
stage, and Byron's Manfred (1817), Sardanapalus (1821), and Werner (1822). Victorian
poets like Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne also wrote dramas, though what they com-
posed was closer to poetry than to the stage.
First attempts to bring the drama to

life again can be detected in the work
of Thomas William Robertson
(1829-71). His David Garrick (1864),
based on one of his novels, and Caste
(1867), though they still contained
pathos, sentimentality, and melodra-
matic elements, prepared the way for
the more realistic problem plays treat-
ing of social and moral issues. Henry

Arthur Jones (1851-1929) learned a
lot from the French drama and from
Henrik Ibsen9. He produced Saints
and Sinners (1884) and Judah (1890),
which are improvements when com-
pared to his popular but still melo-
dramatic The Silver King. Sir Arthur
Wing Pinero (1855-1934) was supe-
rior to Jones. In The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray (1893) he introduced the
theme of the immoral past. Around
1900, Ibsen's shadow was noticeable
everywhere in English drama. It was

William Archer who popularized
and defended the Norwegian's plays
in England. Archer translated A Doll's
House (Nora) and Ghosts (1891) into
English. Another defender of Ibsen
was George Bernard Shaw. Ibsen
concentrated on the social and do-
mestic problems of his age, and, in A
Doll's House, performed in London in
1899, he threw some light on the
intricate aspects of a failed marriage.
But Ibsen's serious criticism was too
strong to be popular in England. Shaw

was the only playwright deeply af-
fected by him. In England, realism
was usually diluted by humour and
sentiment.
Augustus Egg, Past and Present. 1858
9 Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Norwegian dramatist and founder of modern prose drama. In the
1890s, he became established in England as a major playwright. Through Archer's continuing
translations, his plays concerned with social and political themes, with women's rights and the
forces of the unconscious exerted great influence on modern dramatists, who admired Ibsen's
discarding of traditional theatrical effects and his use of ordinary characters (Peer Gynt, 1867;
A Doll's House, 1879; Hedda Gabler, 1890; and The Master Builder, 1892).
Toward the end of the century, the comedy of

manners was revived by Oscar Wilde (1854-
1900). The theatre audience had been prepared for
his brilliant comedies by the witty comic operas of
Sir William Gilbert (1836-1911) and Sir Arthur
S. Sullivan (1842-1900). Gilbert contributed sat-
ire and smart lyrics, and Sullivan produced ravish-
ing music that made such operas as Patience
(1881) and The Mikado (1885) irresistible.
Gilbert, who ridiculed Oscar Wilde in Patience,
shared with him a verbal wit that had been dead
on the stage since Sheridan. Wilde gave back to
the drama fantasy and irony. When he was jailed
in 1895 for homosexual practices, both he and the

English theatre suffered. Wilde made his reputa-
tion as a playwright not in tragedy (the perfor-
mance of Salom, 1893, first written in French,
was prohibited by the censor) but in the light
comedy of manners, such as Lady Windermere's
Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893),
and An Ideal Husband (1895). Although bordering
on farce, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
is the best of his comedies. Full of wit, epigrams,
and paradox, the play has a singular verbal charm
that tends to obscure the social and satirical
themes.
The two London friends John Worthing and Algernon
A. Beardsley, Illustration for Wildes Moncrieff lead double lives. John has invented a
tragedy Salom brother, "Ernest", and has courted Gwendolen Fairfax
under this name, while Algernon travels as "Bunbury"
in the country. Confusion and comic situations develop when Algernon pretends to be Ernest in
the presence of John's ward Cecily Cardew and gets engaged to her. The misunderstandings
increase, as Cecily and Gwendolen believe themselves to be engaged to Ernest Worthing, whom
his brother John declares dead. In the dnouement, the two men confess their lies and manage a
reconciliation between their fiances and themselves. There is also a sort of deus ex machina in
the discovery of John Worthing's true identity. Since he proves to be Algernon's true brother
Ernest, who was thought to have disappeared, he is Gwendolen's social equal and thus ac-
ceptable as a man and husband.
The many confusions and impossible situations of the play preclude any serious treatment of
social or ideological problems. Even the problem of identity, which is central to this come-
dy, is dissolved in epigrams and paradox. Wilde is here too much in love with punch lines
and verbal irony, and with the possibilities of humour in language, plot, and situations, to be
able to develop any serious social criticism. The play should be taken as "a trivial comedy
for serious people", the subtitle Oscar Wilde gave to this comedy of manners.
Oscar Wilde's comedies always seem to hover a few feet above the ground. In his plays, any
attempts to be critical of social conditions and class distinctions in late Victorian England
are immediately ironicised by witty remarks, puns, and aphorisms. It is obvious that his
plays are meant as mere entertainment, and this includes the casual and often superficial
treatment of social issues.
4. The Novel
The Gothic romance was still very popular at the beginning of the new century. It was Mary
Shelley (1797-1851), the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the daughter of the radical phil-
osopher William Godwin and the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who gave the Gothic
novel a new twist as it were. With
Frankenstein or the Modern Prome-
theus (1818), she created what might
be called the scientific Gothic novel.
For a long time, it was neglected by
literary historians and even put
down as a sensational novel. But in
the course of the canon debates that
have taken place over the last dec-
ades, Frankenstein has been re-eval-

uated as an important work in Eng-
lish literature, a work of fiction that
deserves our attention for a number
of reasons. Firstly, it is a prototype
of the modern science fiction novel;
secondly, it is a sophisticated exam- G. Cruikshank, Mer de Glace. 1821
ple of the letter novel; and thirdly, it
is a Victorian woman's reaction to contemporary experiments in the natural sciences, in
particular galvanic electricity.
Originally conceived as a Gothic tale of terror in Switzerland where, in 1816, Mary Shelley,
her husband and Lord Byron spent a wet summer, the story developed into a novel dealing with
creation gone wrong. The second part of the full title of the book ("the modern Prometheus")
indicates that the hero, the scientist Victor Frankenstein, is punished for his theft as it were of a
faculty reserved to God the creation of life. In that sense the title of the book alludes to the
tragical fate of the mythological figure Prometheus who stole fire from the gods and brought it
down to earth. But Victor Frankenstein is also punished for what is essentially seen and de-
scribed as a misdeed he ignores and shows no love for his "child", the monster created from
the bones of corpses in the scientist's Faustian laboratory in Ingolstadt. Endowed with enor-
mous strength and ugly in appearance, the Creature (who, tellingly, never receives a name) re-
mains lonely and miserable but educates himself in human emotion by secretly listening to
private lessons in which texts of Plutarch, Goethe, Milton, and others are read out. When Fran-
kenstein refuses to provide his creature with a female counterpart, the monster takes cruel re-
venge by killing those Victor Frankenstein loves. The scientist pursues the killer to the Arctic,
but dies after relating his story to the first narrator in the book, Robert Walton.
Technically, Frankenstein is an epistolary novel. The story is told by Robert Walton, an English
explorer in the Arctic, in letters sent home to his sister. In a sort of Russian doll model, we first
read Walton's letters, which then contain Frankenstein's report to him, and within Franken-
stein's tale, other stories. This creates a clever framework drawing attention to the telling of the
story.
The setting the Alps near Chamonix and the Arctic provide occasions to develop the Ro-
mantic idea of sublime and beautiful landscape, as the monster and Victor meet in the famous
"Mer de glace" near the Mont Blanc and as the scientist hunts his Creature in the ice near the
North Pole. It is also interesting that Percy Bysshe Shelley edited the manuscript of his wife,
with insertions from his own pen (e.g., in chapters I and II of Book II), and he also misunder-
stood his wife's intentions. He tended to see the Creature as more monstrous and less humane
than his wife did, and he underestimated the flaws in Frankenstein's character. The message that
emerges from the first edition of the novel is, beyond the critique of inhuman science, the idea
of the Noble Savage (clearly an influence of Rousseau): the Creature is potentially good but
driven to evil by social and parental neglect. In 1831, after the death of her husband, Mary
Shelley had a revised edition of the book published. Based on her new reading, this contains
substantial differences. Her earlier organic conception of nature is replaced with a mechanistic
one, and Victor Frankenstein is now portrayed as a victim (a mere puppet of circumstances)
rather than an originator of evil.
As a literary critique of modern science and a study of the social causes of evil, Frankenstein
inspired many film versions and engendered a myth of its own that lies at the heart of post-
modern science fiction, fantasy, and even crime fiction.
At the beginning of the century two novelists stand out who differ greatly in theme and ap-
proach Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. Scott (1771-1832) was both a poet and a nov-
elist. He acquired fame and wealth with such narrative poems as The Lady of the Lake
(1810). When he started writing novels, his printers and publishers, with whom he was in
partnership, went bankrupt (1826), and Scott had to pay off a huge debt. So he turned him-
self into a sort of writing-machine, like the Frenchman Balzac10, producing book after book
while necessarily sacrificing quality to quantity. Scott left behind a great number of romantic
historical novels, the best of which were those dealing with Scotland's scenery and history,
such as Waverley (1814), Old Mortality (1816), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818). His
Ivanhoe (1820), which has been made into films and TV series and is concerned with Eng-
lish history, is still being read by younger readers.
What Scott lacked (humour, psychologically convincing characters, and social criticism)
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was able to provide in novels that have stood the test of time. She
parodied the Gothic novel in her Northanger Abbey (1798; published in 1818) and then fo-
cused on a small corner of her society, the moderately rich country families and the gentry.
Characters from this social stratum people her novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride
and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (1818).
In Mansfield Park the main character is Fanny Price. At the age of nine she leaves her own poor
family and grows up in the house of the Bertrams, Mrs. Bertram being her aunt. Sir Thomas
Bertram is a stern yet good-hearted baronet with two sons, Tom and Edmund, and two daughters,
Maria and Julia. Mrs. Bertram, like her sister, the widow Mrs. Norris, is selfish and indolent.
Although Fanny is constantly bullied by Mrs. Norris, she gradually becomes an important member
of the household and, in the absence of Sir Thomas, maintains the family discipline. She is grieved
10 Honor de Balzac (1799-1850), French novelist, whose Comdie humaine (written between
1827-47 and published between 1842-48) is made up of 91 interconnected novels that provide a
fictional representation of French society at the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half
of the nineteenth century. Balzac aimed at a critical analysis of social customs and manners and
also explored the operation of human passions. He had to write in order to pay his heavy debts.
His influence on later writers, such as Henry James, has been immense.
to see her cousin Edmund fascinated by the wordly-minded Mary Crawford. Mary's brother Henry,
an attractive but dissolute young man, falls in love with Fanny and proposes to her. When she
rejects him, she incurs the displeasure of Sir Thomas. Matters come to a crisis during Fanny's visit
at her own home; Henry elopes with Maria, who has married Mr. Rushworth, and Julia runs away
with Mr. Yates, one of her suitors. Finally, Edmund discovers Mary Crawford's shallow character.
Turning to Fanny for comfort, he falls in love with and marries her.
Jane Austen was impressed neither by the sentimentalism and moralism of the late eigh-
teenth-century novel nor by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. Writing with
great care and craftsmanship, she produced ironic pictures of people and their social rela-
tions. Her plots are convincing, and her characters are not types but complex figures with
faults and virtues, described in a prose that flows easily and naturally.
Scott's historical novels influenced the work of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-73), who is
remembered today for his The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), which has been filmed. The
novels of Thomas Love Peacock (1775-1866), however, have little to do with Scott. Peacock
was a friend of Shelley's and a poet in his own right. He satirized Romanticism in eccentric
characters and comical situations, as in Head-
long Hall (1816), Nightmare Abbey (1818),
and Crotchet Castle (1831). These novels
proved important for the later Meredith and
Huxley. Peacock's odd characters were mere-
ly fanfares to the rich fictional world of Char-
les Dickens.
Charles Dickens (1812-70) was born near
Portsmouth, the second of eight children. His

father was a poor clerk in the Navy Pay
Office and took his family to London when
he lost his job. Although the boy's education
was badly neglected, he read with eagerness
the novels of Defoe, Fielding, Smollett,
Goldsmith, Cervantes, and Le Sage, of
which he found copies in the household.
When his father was arrested for debt and
consigned to Marshalsea Prison, Charles
was sent to work at a warehouse, where he
had to stick labels on bottles. These days of
misery and humiliation left their traces in R. Seymour and Phiz, Illustration for The
Dickens's literary work. Having taught him- Pickwick Papers. The unexpected breaking up
self shorthand, Dickens became a parliamen- of the Seminary for Young Ladies. 1837
tary reporter in 1831 and worked for the
Morning Chronicle. Very soon after he began to contribute articles to several magazines,
and his first literary success came with Sketches by Boz (1834).
For all his faults his novels suffer from unconvincing plots, sentimentality, and clumsy prose
Dickens is still being read because of his vitality, his gallery of grotesque and humorous
characters, and his moral seriousness tempered by humour. It is only in recent years that we
have begun to realize that his fiction needs to be reassessed for two reasons firstly because
most of his works appeared in serial installments and were illustrated, and secondly because
the theatre was of enormous importance for Dickens. He loved to attend plays, acted himself,
and had a mistress who was an actress. Thus his fiction is much better understood when seen
in conjunction with contemporary visual satire (e.g., the works of Cruikshank) and drama.
Structurally, his novels are interesting in that most were first serialized in newspapers and
magazines. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-39) is basically a series of
grotesque incidents involving humorous types. Plot does not matter in the Pickwick Papers,
which is held together by the central figure of Mr. Pickwick. With Oliver Twist, Dickens's
first true novel, pathos and melodrama began to displace humour, and Dickens became
more concerned with social criticism.
Oliver Twist grows up as an orphan in the cruel
environment of a workhouse. After an unhappy
apprenticeship, he runs away to London, where
he falls into the hands of a gang of thieves led by
Fagin, an old Jew. The members of the gang, the
burglar Bill Sikes and his companion Nancy, and
a young pickpocket named "the Artful Dodger",
make every effort to convert Oliver into a thief.
Temporarily rescued by Mr. Brownlow, Oliver

is again kidnapped by the gang at the request of
an evil person named Monks. Accompanying
Bill Sikes on a burgling expedition, Oliver is
wounded and comes into the house of Mrs.
Maylie and her protege Rose. There he is kind-
ly treated and brought up. After a while, Nancy
reveals to Rose that Monks knows something
about Oliver's parentage and that there is some
relationship between Oliver and Rose. When the
gang get to hear of Nancy's action, she is killed
by Bill Sikes. Trying to escape, Bill Sikes acci-
dentally hangs himself, and the rest of the gang
are arrested. Fagin is executed, and Monks, who
G. Cruikshank, Illustration for Oliver Twist. is found and threatened with exposure, confesses
Oliver amazed at the Dodgers mode of that he is Oliver's half-brother and has tried to
going to work ruin him in order to retain the whole of his
father's property. He also reveals that Rose is the
sister of Oliver's unfortunate mother. Finally, Oliver is adopted by Mr. Brownlow while Monks
emigrates and dies in prison.
In Oliver Twist and some of the subsequent novels, such as Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39),
The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), and the autobiographical David Copperfield (1849-50),
Dickens conducted his readers through a nightmare London of prisons, factories, taverns,
lawyers' offices, and thieves' shelters peopled by strange and grotesque figures.
He also tried the genre of the historical novel, focusing on the Gordon Riots11 of the 1780s
in his Barnaby Rudge (1840-41), and on London and Paris during the French Revolution in
A Tale of Two Cities (1859). But as his writing advanced, he became more and more con-
11 Led by Lord Gordon (1751-93), fanatical Presbyterians caused bloody riots in London in 1780
while demonstrating against new legislation granting more religious freedom to Catholics.
cerned with the evils of crime and poverty. The later novels contain much social criticism
and are distinguished by their intricate plots and gloomy atmosphere. Bleak House (1852-
53) attacks and satirizes the slowness and the inhumanity of the English legal system. Hard
Times (1854) was written against the utilitarians and industrial conditions, while Little
Dorritt (1855-57) found its target in the "circumlocution office", i.e. the system of admini-
stration. With one of his last novels, Great Expectations (1860-61), Dickens resumed the
humorous element that distinguishes his early works. This novel marks the peak of his
achievement in the handling of plot, comedy, character, and theme, which his last completed
novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), could not surpass. In Great Expectations Dickens re-
veals his understanding of the mind of a child who is trying to make sense of the world of
the adults.
The novel deals with the youth of Philip Pirrip, called Pip, who is brought up by his sister, the
wife of the kind and humorous blacksmith Joe Gargery. Introduced to Miss Havisham, a lady
who hates men because she was once deserted by her lover, Pip falls in love with the girl
Estella, who is brought up by Miss Havisham. When Pip receives money from a mysterious
source, he aspires to become a gentleman, goes to London and forgets his benefactor Joe
Gargery. Pip learns that his money came from an escaped convict, to whom, as a boy, he had
rendered a service. However, his great expectations soon dissolve in London. Penniless, he is
informed that Estella has married his enemy, Bentley Drummle, who treats her in a cruel way.
Having learned his lesson, Pip eventually returns to Joe Gargery and begins to work hard and
honestly. He is finally reunited with Estella who has also been taught a lesson by adversity.
Dickens was at heart a philanthropist and a sentimentalist. He also wrote some charming
Christmas stories, such as A Christmas Carol (1843). These tales, too, indicate his basic
problem as a writer: his melodramatic tendencies and his sentimentalism often work against
his purpose as a social critic. Nevertheless, Dickens's fictional world is too rich and fascinat-
ing to be ignored. He remains one of the great and original writers of English literature.
The humanitarianism and social criticism which characterized Dickens's fiction were con-
tinued by a number of writers who also adopted his melodramatic plots. Among them were
Charles Reade (1814-84), Charles Kingsley (1819-75), Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81),
Elizabeth C. Gaskell (1810-65), and the first writer of detective fiction, William Wilkie
Collins (1824-89).
If Dickens wrote of low life and drew his material from London's poor inhabitants, William
Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) dealt with the rich in a less sentimental style. Thackeray
was the son of an official of the East India Company12. He was educated at Cambridge and be-
came a journalist, starting with humorous articles for the comic weekly Punch. Thackeray's
realism is ironic and antiromantic and can already be noticed in his early character sketches
contained in The Book of Snobs (1848). His first novel was a satirical romance, The Luck of
Barry Lyndon (1844), which, in 1974, served as the script for Stanley Kubrick's beautiful film
of the same title. In Barry Lyndon an Irish adventurer recounts his wild adventures in the
12 The English East India Company (there were also Dutch and French equivalents) received its
charter from Elizabeth I in 1600. The company was granted a monopoly of trade in Asia, Africa,
and America; it was managed by a governor and 24 directors chosen from its stockholders.
Reorganized under Cromwell, the company flourished, and became a dominant power in India
in the eighteenth century. In 1773 the British government established a governor-generalship in
India, and in 1813 the company's monopoly was abolished.
manner of Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild.

Thackeray's major novel, Vanity Fair, pub-
lished in monthly instalments, followed in
1847-48. The book has as its theme "snob-
land", i.e. Thackeray's England. The subtitle
is "a novel without a hero", indicating that the
plot is less important than the characters.
Vanity Fair traces the careers of two strongly
contrasted girls. Amelia Sedley, the sentimental
and naive daughter of a merchant, marries a

young officer, George Osborne. Osborne's father,
however, is against the marriage, since Amelia's
father has meanwhile been ruined by specu-
lations. When George is killed in the battle of
Waterloo, Amelia is left in poverty, as his father
has disinherited him.
Amelia's friend, Becky Sharp, with whom George
Osborne has an affair before his death, is the
clever and courageous daughter of a poor artist
and a French opera-dancer. After several un-
Illustration by Thackeray for Vanity Fair. successful attempts, Becky finally manages to
Miss Crawleys Affectionate Relatives. 1848 marry into the upper class, though her marriage
with Rawdon Crawley remains a secret until
Rawdon's father, Sir Pitt, proposes to Becky on the death of his wife. Becky flees to the Continent,
where the chief characters are again brought together. Becky continues her intrigues, at first in
Paris and then in London, and wins her way into the highest society. But her adultery with Lord
Steyne is discovered and she leaves England for France and Germany.
Amelia, too, lives a life of poverty with her parents and is still grieved by the loss of her hus-
band. It is only after Becky has told her of George's infidelity that she decides to marry Captain
Dobbin, who has been secretly giving her money over the years. Meanwhile, Becky has suc-
ceeded in seducing Amelia's brother, Joseph Sedley, and she exploits him until his death.
Thackeray manages in this novel to provide a broad satire not only on England's upper class but
also on Paris, Brussels, and Weimar. A quick sequence of episodes and a vast gallery of actors
reveal the "vanity" of the high and mighty and their value system, which is based on wealth and
property.
In Pendennis (1848-50) Thackeray introduces a hero whose career resembles his own, but
again the events and the people around Arthur Pendennis are at least as interesting as the
protagonist. With Henry Esmond (1852) and its sequel, The Virginians (1857-59), William
Thackeray turned to the historical novel and the England of Queen Anne's day, displaying his
love for, and knowledge of, the eighteenth century. Abhorring sentimentalism, Thackeray
preferred to use satirical humour and some cynicism in his novels. He often wavered be-
tween irony and pity and was technically superior to Dickens, though his work lacked the
grotesque and strange glamour Charles Dickens was able to create.
Thackeray's realism found an admirer in Anthony Trollope (1815-82). A civil servant in
the General Post Office, Trollope invented a county called Barsetshire and a town called
Barchester, and in several novels described provincial life. Trollope wrote to please his
readers, turning out almost 50 novels that show more mechanical skill than inspiration.
Today, his six Barsetshire novels are recognized as the most valuable, among them The
Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857).
Some of the best novels of the Victorian period were written by women. In the isolation of a
Yorkshire vicarage, three sisters wrote poems and prose fiction: Anne Bront (1820-49)
was less talented than her sisters Charlotte (1816-55) and Emily (1818-48). The novels of
the Bront sisters feature female heroines described from a female point-of-view. In Char-
lotte's best novel, Jane Eyre (1847), a governess falls in love with her master who is married
to a madwoman. The book presents passion and a love-story, but also realism, observation,
and wit. The charm of Jane Eyre, which is partly autobiographical, arises from the con-
vincing descriptions of passionate sincerity and the author's courage to explore human life
with greater fidelity than was common in her age. With Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily
Bront created a passionate world set against the Yorkshire moors. Emily, the most gifted of
the three sisters, died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty. Avoiding the melodramatic effects
of her sister's Jane Eyre, she accomplished in one novel what other writers tried to realize in
a lifetime.
Wuthering Heights has as its central figure Heathcliff, a gipsy boy of unknown parentage. He is
picked up in Liverpool by Mr. Earnshaw who takes him home and rears him as one of his own
children. Heathcliff is constantly bullied by Hindley, Earnshaw's son, especially after his
benefactor's death, but he falls in love with Hindley's sister Catherine, a girl as passionate and
ferocious as Heathcliff himself. Heathcliff leaves the house when he overhears Catherine say
that marrying him would degrade her. After three years he returns a wealthy man and finds
Catherine married to the neighbour, Edgar Linton. Catherine dies at the birth of her daughter
Cathy, and Heathcliff marries Edgar's sister Isabella, although he does not love her. His
vindictive nature shows in his mistreatment of Isabella and Hindley's son Hareton. Heathcliff
finally manages to get Hindley completely in his power and lures Cathy to his house, forcing a
marriage between her and his own sickly son, his aim being to secure Linton's property. But
when his son dies, Cathy and Hareton are attracted to each other and Heathcliff, now worn out,
dies after unsuccessfully trying to destroy the houses of Earnshaw and Linton. Hareton and
Cathy are left to live a happy life together.
The fact that both Emily and Charlotte Bront originally published their works under men's
names indicates that Victorian society considered novel writing a man's activity. Not sur-
prisingly, Mary Ann Evans also chose a male pseudonym, George Eliot, when she began
writing fiction. Whereas the Bront sisters showed what human passion and emotions could
do, George Eliot (1819-80) was more concerned with intellectual and moral problems.
When her father died in 1849, she went to London and became subeditor of the Westminster
Review, contributing essays and sketches. Equipped with a powerful intellect, she was
deeply interested in philosophy and religion. She translated David Friedrich Strauss and
Feuerbach before turning to the novel. For several years she lived with George Lewis, the
English biographer of Goethe who encouraged her to write prose fiction. As a writer, she
was torn between the rational attitude of the intellectual and religious feelings and emotions.
Most of her novels are constructed around an idea, sometimes much too obviously. Adam
Bede (1859) presents a story of seduction with much psychological insight, and The Mill on
the Floss (1860) is concerned with the simple but honest Maggie Tulliver and her brother
Tom. Simple people like linen-weavers also figure in her Silas Marner (1861). In her later
works Eliot treated social rather than individual problems, producing in Felix Holt the Radi-
cal (1866) a study of political idealism. Her fictional analysis of provincial life at the
beginning of the Victorian period, Middlemarch (1871-72), has become one of the major
novels of English literature.
The novel takes its title from a provincial town and tells the story of Dorothea Brooke, a girl
with a high ideal of life. Rejecting her neighbour, Sir James Chettam, she marries an elderly
pedant, Mr. Casaubon, a cleric and scientist engaged in mythological studies. Because of
Casaubon's lack of sympathy, the marriage is very unhappy. Suspecting that his wife prefers his
young cousin Will Ladislaw, he changes his will and, on his death, Dorothea learns that she
forfeits her fortune if she marries Ladislaw. But in the end Dorothea and Ladislaw are brought
together.
Eliot develops two sub-plots parallel to this first story. The first describes the unhappy marriage
and the career of Tertius Lydgate, a young doctor, and his wife Rosamond Vincy, and the
second tells the love-story of Fred Vincy and Mary Garth.
Eliot uses these three couples to analyse the social and individual changes in an English
province around 1830. Her characters develop because they are shown as products of their
environment. This positivist theory was also shared by Henry James and George Meredith.
It was the concern with intellectual problems that Meredith (1828-1909) had in common
with George Eliot. He revolted against Victorian ideas of a woman's status. Meredith has
been called the Browning of prose. He also wrote poetry, and his sonnet sequence Modern
Love (1862) contains some very beautiful poems. His first novel was The Ordeal of Richard
Feverel (1859).
Richard Feverel, the son of a wealthy baronet, stands in the centre of the novel. Deserted by his
wife, the father has his own system in bringing Richard up, which consists of keeping him away
from school and supervising him at home. However, during Richard's adolescence, this
"system" breaks down, and Richard falls in love with Lucy Desborough, the niece of a neigh-
bouring farmer. When Richard's father objects to their courtship, the couple contract a secret
marriage. But the cruel baronet arranges for the young couple to be separated and sends Richard
to London where he is seduced by a beautiful woman. Lord Mountfalcon, who is interested in
winning Lucy for himself, spreads rumours about Richard who does not dare visiting his wife
until he learns that he has become a father and that Lucy and the baronet are reconciled.
Returning home to his wife, he is informed about Lord Mountfalcon's schemes, challenges him,
and is seriously wounded in a duel. Lucy, severely shocked at hearing this news, goes mad and
dies.
The central characters in Meredith's novels are all subject to a minute psychological analysis
which achieves its purest form in The Egoist (1879). This novel preserves the dramatic
unities. As a novelist, Meredith provided a key to it in his essay On the Idea of Comedy.
Meredith has never been as popular as Dickens or Hardy, and the reasons for this lack of
public response can be found in his demanding and sometimes obscure style as well as in his
psychological approach and exploration of men's actions and motives. A master of language,
and also of humour and pathos, Meredith defended the cause of women (several of his
novels bear women's names, e.g. Sandra Belloni, 1864, and Rhoda Fleming, 1865) and
tended to didacticism and ironic commentary. He steered a course between Romanticism
and realism.
Victorian pessimism entered English fiction in the novels of George Gissing (1857-1903),
George Moore (1852-1933), and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). To some extent, they con-
tinued Dickensian social criticism. Gissing began with Workers in the Dawn (1880), re-
counted the life of a prostitute in The Unclassed (1884),
and described the misery of the proletariat in Demos (1886)
and The Nether World (1889). In New Grub Street (1891)
and Born in Exile (1892), Gissing recorded the fate of
impoverished writers like himself who struggled to make a
living by publishing whatever they could. Like Gissing,
Moore wrote very much under the influence of French
naturalism as represented by Emile Zola13 and Guy de
Maupassant14. His early works are mostly concerned with
the tragic destinies of women (see, for instance, A Mum-
mer's Wife, 1884; A Drama in Muslin, 1886; Spring Days,
1888; and Esther Waters, 1894).
The novels of Thomas Hardy achieved an epic quality,

and he was undoubtedly the most remarkable exponent of
the current of pessimistic realism. His works are master-
pieces of realistic description and psychological penetra-
tion. Hardy produced a whole series of books set in his
native Dorset, the "Wessex novels", which are dominated
by the notion of a relentless fate and an uncompromising
determinism. In his novels, men are slaves to the environ-
ment, to history, and to their instincts. While Far from the
Madding Crowd (1874) is still positive in its message, W. H. Hunt, Isabella and
private sadness and the universe of sorrow dominate in The the Pot of Basil. 1867
Return of the Native (1878) and in The Mayor of Caster-
bridge (1886). Tragic elements come to the fore in Jude the Obscure (1895) and Tess of the
D'Urbervilles (1891), which Roman Polanski made into a film.
In Tess, whose sub-title is "A pure woman", Hardy tells the tragic story of the daughter of a
poor villager who believes he is the descendant of the ancient family of the D'Urbervilles. Tess
is seduced by Alec, who bears the surname D'Urberville, and gives birth to a child. When this
child dies in infancy, Tess starts working as a dairymaid on a large farm and becomes engaged
to Angel Clare, a clergyman's son. On their wedding-night, Tess confesses her affair with Alec,
and Angel abandons her and goes to Brazil. After a period of hardship, Tess again meets Alec.
He has now become a preacher and manages to persuade her to become his mistress again.
13 mile Zola (1840-1902), French novelist and the leading figure in the naturalistic movement.
Influenced by contemporary theories of heredity and experimental science, he chronicled the
lives of individuals and of families in a series of novels that establish a panorama of mid-nine-
teenth-century French life in the middle and working classes while analysing vice, misery, and
human instincts. His major works are Thrse Raquin (1867) and the twenty novels in the series
entitled Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93).
14 Guy de Maupassant (1850-93), French writer of short stories and novels and a member of the
naturalistic group around Zola. He published hundreds of stories about country people and
simple city dwellers, with a few dealing with other social groups. The best known among his
novels are Bel-Ami (1885) and Pierre et Jean (1888).
When Angel returns from Brazil, prepared now to forgive Tess, he finds her with Alec. Tess has
been trying to contact Angel, appealing for help, and, maddened by Alec's second wrong to her,
she kills him so that she can live with her husband. Briefly, they enjoy some happiness while
hidden in the New Forest, but Tess is eventually arrested, tried, and hanged.
Even though Hardy's art was sombre, as this novel shows, it was never nihilistic. Later in his
life, he turned to poetry and again made the countryside and the people of Dorset the main
objects of his writing. His verse is collected in the Wessex Poems (1898). As in his novels,
he proved a great master in depicting nature. At the end of his literary career stands a "closet
drama", The Dynasts (1903-08), an epic in blank verse and prose surveys dealing with the
Napoleonic Wars as seen by men and immortal ghosts.
There was much social criticism but little satire in the English novel of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The great exception is Samuel Butler (1835-1902), a writer who may have most to say
to our own age. Like Meredith and Hardy, he was influenced by the teaching of Darwin and
the biological scientists, yet he recognized man's will as an essential force. After a quarrel
with his father, Butler emigrated to New Zealand. He later returned to England. New
Zealand merely served as the setting for his satirical novels Erewhon (1872), which is an
anagram of "nowhere", and Erewhon Revisited (1901), in which he ridiculed England's in-
stitutions and values. Butler showed no mercy to Victorian England and its ideas of family
life, morality, and religion. His masterpiece was The Way of All Flesh, published in 1903
after the author's death.
This novel studies the relationship between parents and children. And though Butler had bitter
memories of his own childhood, his novel, gloomy as it may be in several passages, is always
more than a mere accusation. It sparkles with wit and irony. The author traces the development
of the members of the Pontifex family through several generations, finally concentrating on
Ernest, the son of the clergyman Theobald Pontifex and his smug wife Christina. During his
childhood, Ernest suffers cruelly from the tyranny of his pharisaical father. After being or-
dained, he has a breakdown and insults a young woman, taking her for a prostitute. As a result,
he is sentenced to six months' imprisonment. Ruined upon emerging from prison, he lives with
Ellen, a former servant of his family, but soon discovers that she is already married. Finally, a
fortune he inherits from an aunt allows him to devote himself to literature.
The novel is an onslaught on everything Victorians held dear. Because of his attacks on the
false gods of his contemporaries, Butler, who lived and wrote in comparative obscurity, has
become a considerable influence on several modern writers. In his prose fiction as well as in
his essays he showed himself one of the most original minds of his time.
Satire was just one means to escape the atmosphere of despondency that reigned toward the
end of the century. Romance, adventure, and sensation were others. Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-94), who emigrated to Samoa later in his life, was one of the more influential writers of
adventure and romance. Also a poet and essayist, he became the pioneer of a new sort of lit-
erature with Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886), which are today read mainly by
younger readers and have often been filmed. From the novel and tale of adventure, Stevenson
moved to historical romances in the style of Scott, and finally to the novelistic treatment of the
duality of good and evil in one man in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).
This book is one of the prototypes of the modern thriller and is also of psychological interest
because it deals with a split personality.
The physician Dr Jekyll discovers a drug that allows him to turn himself into a personality
uniting all his evil instincts. Calling this being Mr Hyde, he assumes this personality from time
to time in order to give in to his evil impulses. Gradually, the personality of Hyde gains a
greater influence and commits a horrible murder. Jekyll now finds that he is frequently trans-
formed into Hyde, even against his own will, and that his drug loses its efficacy in restoring his
original personality. When he is about to be arrested, he takes his own life.
Stevenson had a number of followers who developed the various elements of his fiction
adventure, romance, sensation, and horror in their own ways. Sir Henry Rider Haggard's
(1856-1925) King Solomon's Mines (1885), which is set in Africa, and Maurice Henry
Hewlett's (1861-1923) The Forest Lovers (1898), a medieval romance, have today lost their
popularity, whereas Dracula (1897), by Bram Stoker (1847-1912), continues to hold a
special fascination for the reading and TV audience, especially after Roman Polanski's suc-
cessful and still popular movie Dance of the Vampires of 1966.
The novel of adventure found another representative in Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), the
great singer of the Empire15, who proclaimed in verse and prose the grandeur of all he
deemed best in English tradition. Kipling was born in India, and in his novellas Plain Tales
from the Hills (1888), he described the lives of Englishmen in this country. Time and again,
it was the people as well as the scenery and the charms of India that inspired him for his
works. Thus his novel Kim (1901) relates the adventures of a half-caste orphan, the child of
an Irish sergeant in India. Kipling's obvious weakness was his strident imperialism. It per-
meates all his works, with the notable exception of the famous Jungle Books (1894-1895),
which served as the script for one of the best animated cartoons ever made. Set in the Indian
jungle, with exquisite descriptions of animal life, Kipling's Jungle Books tell the story of the
child Mowgli who is suckled by a she-wolf and brought up by wild beasts of the jungle.
It is remarkable that in the last decade of the nineteenth century several new literary genres
began to develop. The utopian novel reappeared forcefully on the scene with News from
Nowhere (1890), by William Morris, who tried to combine Socialist ideas with a romantic
longing for a better past. And Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) soon turned utopia into a
dreadful dystopia when he described scenes of fear and terror in The Time Machine (1895)
and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899). By contrast, the decadents had no particular political or
moral message for their readers. Their ideology consisted in the description of art and in the
discussion of aesthetics. Reading the works of Walter Pater proclaiming "art for art's sake",
and such French sources as Joris Karl Huysmans's vastly influential novel A Rebours (1884),
the English decadents recorded their hedonism above all in poetry, although Pater's Marius
the Epicurean (1885) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91) are fine nov-
els exemplifying the artistic and literary ideas of the fin-de-sicle movement.
The subject as well as the style of The Picture of Dorian Gray remind one very much of
Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The beautiful and Faustus-like Dorian Gray wishes to
remain eternally young and handsome. And though he leads a life of viciousness and immor-
ality, his wish is granted: while Dorian remains ever-young, his portrait, which he hides away
from the public, shows signs of increasing age as well as the scars of murder, seduction, and
15 Formerly, the British Empire included the United Kingdom and all the colonies. Since the end
of the nineteenth century the Empire has developed into the British Commonwealth of Nations,
and, since 1945, the Commonwealth of Nations. This latter term signifies a loose and mainly
economic union of independent states under the symbolical rule of the British crown (Great
Britain, Canada, and many of the former English colonies in Asia and Africa). There are at
present 49 members in the Commonwealth.
debauchery. Dorian decides to kill the painter and also intends to destroy his portrait. But when
he tries to do so, it is he who dies, disfigured by age and ugliness, and his portrait is restored to
its former state of youthful beauty.
Writers toward the end of the century began to realize that their audience consisted of high-
brow, middlebrow, and lowbrow readers. Thackeray, Meredith and, to some extent, Hardy,
wrote for a highbrow audience, for the intel-
lectuals; Stevenson and Kipling were read by
a much wider section of society. Novelists
began to be aware of the needs of children,
and some, like Dickens, proved that they
understood children's minds and psychology.
Apart from Dickens, Stevenson, Stoker, and
Kipling, another Victorian writer explored

the world of fantasy for children, so much so
that one gets the impression he would have
liked to live in this world rather than in late
nineteenth-century England. This was Lewis
Carroll, pseudonym of Charles Dodgson
(1832-98), a clergyman and lecturer in mathe-
matics at Oxford. Carroll's Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Look-
ing Glass (1871), although allegedly child-
ren's books, are very close to the Dickensian
world of grotesque figures and the absurd.
Illustration for Alice in Wonderland Such literature, at least for those who pro-
duced it, was escapism, and it is hardly sur-
prising that, beside the literature for children and the novel of adventure, the detective story
and crime fiction also appeared on the literary scene. The detective novel developed out of
the adventure story, and with writers like William Wilkie Collins and especially Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle (1859-1930) it became an accepted form of fiction. Doyle's Sherlock Holmes,
who first appeared in A Study in Scarlet (1887), proved to be one of the most famous
characters in the English novel. Doyle pits his amateur detective and his friend Dr. Watson
against the best detectives of Scotland Yard. Holmes is a perfect gentleman, taking drugs in
moderate quantities and exploring the London of the 1880s, with its hansom cabs, gas-
lamps, and eerie streets, a lost world that makes the books all the more fascinating for the
modern reader. In the twentieth century, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot became the suc-
cessor of the always brilliant and mysterious Sherlock Holmes.
5. Nonfiction
A great deal of significant prose was written by four Romantic essayists who are often
grouped together: Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Thomas De Quincey.
They all identified with the younger poets. Hunt's influence on, and encouragement of,
Keats is as well known as the preference the others had for Wordsworth. Charles Lamb
(1775-1834) cultivated a style that shows the influence of Robert Burton and Thomas
Browne. He encouraged a wider appreciation of Renaissance drama and, in his Essays of
Elia (1823) and Last Essays (1833), described everyday people and events in London in an
informal and humorous way which endeared him to generations of English readers. Leigh
Hunt (1784-1859), when compared to Lamb or Hazlitt, is a less important figure, despite
Keats's admiration for him. Some of his essays were published in the periodical The
Examiner (1808-13), which he launched with his brother John, and others were collected in
Men, Women, Books (1847). The prose of William Hazlitt (1778-1830) is much more vi-
gorous. He started out as a portrait painter, which may explain his colourful and lively style.
Reflecting his passionate opinions, his phrases are illuminating and biting. Like Lamb, he
encouraged the reading of the Elizabethan playwrights in The Dramatic Literature of the
Age of Elizabeth (1820). In The English Poets (1818) and The English Comic Writers
(1819), he voices his highly individual ideas on English literature. In 1825 he published
Spirit of the Age, which deals with his contemporaries and includes some harsh judgments
on Wordsworth and Coleridge who, in Hazlitt's opinion, did not fulfil the promises they had
made in their earlier works. Hazlitt was one of the first critics to appreciate the landscape art
of Turner16 and revealed much of his own personality in Liber Amoris (1823), a record of a
love-affair.
What links the work of Hazlitt with that of the more eccentric Thomas De Quincey (1785-
1859) is an absolute frankness accompanied by forceful analysis. At Worcester College,
Oxford, De Quincey became an opium addict, like Coleridge. With incomparable skill, he
recorded his visions and nightmares in The Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822;
enlarged in 1856). This biographical book earned him more fame than his critical work, such
as his essay "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth" and the interesting assessments of
the characters of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey in Reminiscences of the English Lake
Poets. Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) was both poet and essayist. With his Imaginary
Conversations (1824-29), he proved that his prose is superior to his verse. In this book, he
collected a series of about 150 "talks" between historical personalities on various subjects.
After Landor, the essay seems to have declined. R(obert) L(ouis) Stevenson revived it to
some extent in Memoirs and Portraits (1887).
Many essays and a great part of the literary criticism of the nineteenth century first appeared
in periodicals. Critics, poets, and novelists waged bloodless yet often vicious battles in such
journals as The Gentleman's Magazine (1731-1868), the longest-lived of the periodicals with a
continuous publication from Pope to Browning. With the appearance of The Edinburgh
16 J. M. William Turner (1775-1851), the outstanding English painter of landscapes. His pictures
provide an essentially Romantic vision of the beauty and violence of nature. Turner travelled in
England, France, Switzerland, and Italy, and he painted in a variety of styles, from topograph-
ical watercolours to historical landscapes and, in his late work, almost abstract forms dissolved
in brilliant colours. He was often inspired by contemporary poetry, James Thomson being
among his favourite poets.
Review in the first decade of the nineteenth century, political journals began to circulate. The
editor of this journal, Francis Jeffrey, attacked the Romantic poets. The Tory answer to The
Edinburgh Review was The Quarterly Review (1809), to which Scott contributed. It was
followed by Blackwood's Magazine, still remembered for its attacks on Keats, and numerous
other periodicals.
Almost all the poets and novelists of the nineteenth century published their views on liter-
ature. Some writers, however, excelled in literary criticism. In his Biographia Literaria
(1877), Coleridge anticipated the modern philosophical and psychological criticism of liter-
ature and the arts. His approach was later taken up by Arnold and Pater. Thomas Carlyle
(1795-1881), a Scottish Calvinist17, made a reputation for himself as an historian, literary
critic, and novelist. As a translator of German literature (of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and
tales by Tieck and Jean Paul) he was exposed to German culture and philosophy. His own
Sartor Resartus (1833-34) is a sort of "Bildungsroman" recording his philosophical develop-
ment in the story of Professor Diogenes Teufelsdreckh at the university of Weissnichtwo.
Turning to history in The French Revolution (1837), Carlyle rejected materialism and ad-
vocated his own moral views of history. Chaos, he argued in On Heroes and Hero Worship
(1841), could be overcome only by following and obeying outstanding leaders. This doctrine
anticipated the German Fascists, though it must be said that Carlyle's aim was a positive one
to lead England from materialism to a more spiritual life.
John Ruskin (1819-1900) did for art what Carlyle tried to do for history. A humanitarian
moralist and art critic, Ruskin defended the art of Turner in the five volumes of Modern
Painters (1843-60) while constructing a theory of aesthetics that, to him, became a substitute
for religion. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-53),
he attempted to prove the value of Gothic art whose origins he perceived in religious faith.
Ruskin exerted great influence at Oxford, where he was Professor of Art. With religious
fervour he condemned modern materialism and the Utilitarians, suggesting instead the pur-
suit of the beautiful. Ruskin's later works are concerned with poverty and ignorance and the
need to bring beauty and a sense of purpose into the lives of the workers. His proximity to
the ideas of William Morris and Matthew Arnold is undeniable. Morris tried to put into
practice what Ruskin had taught and written. But he was not very successful. Arnold was
Professor of Poetry at Oxford and, for several years, Inspector of public schools. He applied
Ruskin's moralism to England's culture and literature in Essays in Criticism (1865), Culture
and Anarchy (1867), and Literature and Dogma (1873). Arnold demanded of literature a
criticism and explanation of life as well as guidelines and solace. Rebuking the philistines of
his day, he saw in poetry a moral purpose which the writers refused to provide.
Finally, in the later part of the century, Walter Pater (1839-94), who had studied Ruskin,
made art an end in itself. Completely opposed to Arnold, Pater expounded his own theory of
pure aesthetic experience and pleasure as a satisfactory activity in such works as On Style in
17 Jean Cauvin (later Calvin, 1509-64) was a French theologian and Protestant reformer. He settled
in Geneva and became known for his strict morals and his religious views Calvinism which
were based on biblical authority and the moral nature of man. Calvin advocated the doctrine of
predestination, which some economists and philosophers have seen as the ideological source of
capitalism: economic success proves that one has been selected as one of God's saints. Protes-
tant Calvinism proved important for the social and economic development of Western Europe
and North America. His principal written work was Institution de la religion chrtienne (1536).
Appreciations (1889) and Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). He demonstrated
his hedonistic theory in a novel, Marius the Epicurean (1885), which portrays the life and
intellectual conflicts of a Roman patrician in the dying world of pagan beliefs and during the
rise of Christianity.
In addition to Carlyle, Ruskin and Pater, a number of writers contributed to the writing of
history, philosophy, and the sciences. Charles Darwin's (1809-92) The Origin of Species
(1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) possess the qualities of works of art, as far as style is
concerned. Darwin's books challenged orthodox religion, and the consequences of his ideas
were further explained in the prose of T. H. Huxley's (1825-95) Man's Place in Nature
(1863). The more influential philosophers of the century were Jeremy Bentham (1748-
1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-73). Their works advocated utilitarian ideologies that
helped to develop Victorian materialism. The nineteenth century also produced several hist-
orians, but only Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was outstanding. From the
viewpoint of the Protestant liberal Whig he wrote a History of England (1848-61), which
was unfortunately never finished, tracing the English story from James II to William III in
prose that seems to be inspired by the novels of Scott, and also by the philosophy of David
Hume and by Gibbon's mastery of form.
Travel writing developed into a genre of its own in the Victorian period. Thus William
Cobbett (1763-1835) described England's counties with a quick eye for detail in his Rural
Rides (1830) while Robert Louis Stevenson's (1850-94) Travels with a Donkey in the
Cevennes (1879) prove him to be a belated Romantic. The Near and Far East seem to have
been particularly attractive for Victorian writers. Examples can be found in Alexander
William Kingslake's (1809-91) Ethen: Or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East,
published anonymously in 1844; and Isabella Lucy Bird's (1831-1904) Unbeaten Tracks in
Japan (1880) and The Golden Chersonese (1883), a vivid account of a journey through
Malaysia. The "dark continent", as the Victorians chose to call it, attracted the attention of the
self-educated Mary Kingsley
(1862-1900), who left a report of
her ethnological researches and
deep appreciation of African cul-
ture in Travels in West Africa
(1897); and the Scottish mission-
ary and explorer David Living-
stone (1813-73), who was fa-
mously rescued by the Welsh ex-
plorer and journalist H(enry)

M(orton) Stanley (1841-1904) in
1871 during his final expedition
to discover the sources to the
Nile. Stanley reports on this and
other travels in How I Found
F. Lewis, The Noonday Halt. 1853
Livingstone (1872), Through the
Dark Continent (1878), and In
Darkest Africa (1890). Livingstone's accounts have been collected in Missionary Travels and
Researches in South Africa (1857); Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi [] (1865), and
the posthumous Last Journals (1874).
VII. The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Queen Victoria died in 1901, but the period termed Victorian did not suddenly come to an
end. Starting with the writers of the 1890s, a time of transition had begun that lasted until
about 1914 when the Great War marked both an end and a new beginning in literature. Nov-
elists and poets like Hardy, Kipling, and others, continued to write well into the twentieth
century, and the ideas of Victorianism competed with those of the early modernists1.
A number of political and historical events brought about significant changes in England.
The Labour Party was founded in 1893 and immediately became the voice of the working
class in its fight for political influence against the
established middle and upper classes. In 1923, and
again in 1929-31, the Labour Party formed the gov-
ernment. After World War II it even achieved an
absolute majority and put into practice a great part
of its reform programme. Thus the free National
Health System was established in 1946 under the
Labour government led by Clement Attlee (1945-
51). After 13 years of Conservative rule, Harold
Wilson's Labour government (1964-70) again in-
troduced liberal politics, but the election of Mar-
garet Thatcher in 1979 brought significant changes
in British politics and society. Prime Minister
Thatcher, a Conservative champion of free enter-
prise in tune with US President Ronald Reagan
(1981-89), survived until 1990. Thatcher's regime
led to a stable economy in the 1980s, with the
"yuppies" (Young Urban Professionals) dominating
social life, but Mrs Thatcher was also widely criti-
cised for making new divisions in British society.
Mark Boxer, The Prince of Wales. 1981
Some of that criticism came from the literary field,
especially drama. Tony Blair's Labour government,
elected in 1998, propagated a "New Labour", a marriage of some Conservative ideas and
Socialism that was supposed to gain the support of the new middle class. The largely
unsuccessful Blair was followed by his fellow Scotsman Gordon Brown, elected leader of
the Labour Party and Prime Minister in 2007, who has had to grapple with the financial and
economic crisis bursting upon the world in 2008. Paradoxically, Thatcher's attempt to sub-
stitute a new meritocracy, based on personal achievement, for the old British class distinc-
tions, and the similar efforts of the Blair government resulted in the rise of a new under-
class. Bypassed by technological change and disadvantaged by the increasing rarity of
1 In poetry, the modernists included Ezra Pound and the Imagists, and T. S. Eliot; in prose, the
most important innovators were D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. In art, mod-
ernism comprises such schools as cubism, dadaism, and surrealism.
THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES 115
manual labour, this disenfranchised group has found the attention of dramatists and
novelists in the fin-de-sicle literature.
Social changes were accompanied by the dismantling of the Empire under the successive
reigns of George V (1910-36), Edward VIII (1936), George VI (1936-52), and the present
Queen, Elizabeth II, who seems to be determined to rest on the throne while her son, Prince
Charles, must wait for his succession. The loose union of the Commonwealth replaced the
former Empire. In 1913 the Irish Home Rule Bill was passed, though its implementation
was deferred until after the war by which time a bloody rebellion (the Easter Rising of
1916) had taken place. The Irish Free State (Eire) was granted the status of a Dominion2 in
1922, and became a Republic and left the Commonwealth in 1949. The simultaneous crea-
tion of Ulster (six of the nine counties in the north of Ireland) as part of the United Kingdom
has created problems to this very day: Starting with what the Irish call the "Troubles" in
1968, the radical wing (IRA = Irish Republican Army) of Sinn Fin (founded as early as
1900) demanded a unification of Ireland and the retreat of Britain, demands that were
accompanied by bomb attacks and killings, and retaliations of the British army. In 1994 a
ceasefire was agreed; it broke down in 1996, but a new accord was reached on Good Friday
1998. Although as late as 2002, the British government did not seem quite ready yet to
agree to an integration of Ulster into a Catholic Ireland, the process of devolution has ad-
vanced in other areas of the United Kingdom. In 1999 the Scottish Parliament was created
and so was the Welsh Assembly. On the international level, England lost her influence in
Egypt and Iraq, and granted independence to India and Pakistan in 1947. Britain's rapid
withdrawal from Africa began with the independence of Ghana in 1960. The democra-
tisation of the former colonies proved difficult in some cases, with the white-dominated
states of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa still suffering from their colonial
history. The process of de-colonization came to a temporary stand-still with the return in
1998 of Hong Kong to China. At home, Britain faced ethnic and racial problems as suc-
cessive legislation, often accompanied by protests of those concerned, tried to curb immi-
gration from the former colonies: the British Nationality Act of 1948 confirmed the right of
entry to Britain for
the citizens of Em-
pire; this open-door
policy was ended by
the 1962 Common-
wealth Immigration
Act, which intro-
duced quota for
Commonwealth im-
migrants. Further re-
strictions followed
for East Asians
(1968) and with the
Immigration Act of
1971, which limited
domicile to those Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled. 1919
2 One of the self-governing territories of the British Commonwealth.

born in Britain or of British descent. The most significant change was introduced with the
British Nationality Act of 1981, which abolished the automatic right to British citizenship
for children born in Britain. The idea and the organization of the Commonwealth made it
difficult for Great Britain to join the EEC. Refused entry to the Common Market in 1963,
Britain had to wait for another ten years to become a member of the European Community.
Perhaps one of the most important social changes in post-war Britain was brought about by
the success of the Women's Liberation Movement. Consciously aggressive and highly
politicised in the 1960s and 70s, feminism demanded equal pay, equal education and
opportunity, 24-hour nurseries, free contraception and abortion on demand, and, in 1974,
legal and financial independence and the right to self-defined sexuality. These aims were
achieved to a large extent, at least on paper, by the acts passed by the Labour government in
1974 and 1975. More and more, women found themselves in the driving seat of a movement
leading not only to a dramatic change in gender
relations that surpassed the sexual revolution of
the 1960s, but also in the intellectual climate
best exemplified in the rise of "Women's Stud-
ies" as a new subject in universities. Younger
women writers profited from these achieve-
ments, and the 1990s saw the arrival of a critical
post-feminism that sees women's rights em-
bedded in human rights.
The twentieth century has seen two cruel and
devastating world wars. The first is still some-
times called the Great War in English, although
poets like Sassoon, Owen, and the Surrealists3
tried to portray its ugliness. This first mass
slaughter showed that scientific progress and
industrial power harboured evil and inhuman
possibilities. In their art, the Surrealists recorded
the nightmares and the psychological and mental
impact this war made on sensitive people. The
Lucian Freud, Naked Girl With Egg. Second World War proved, if anything, that man
1980-81 could do worse. Technical ingenuity and fanatic
Fascism brought the world to the brink of anni-
hilation. Hitler, and those who followed him, made a mockery of human advancement, and
science announced its terrible potential when in 1945 two atom bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War4 of the
1950s, the human race was, for some time, still in danger of being annihilated by an atomic
holocaust. But the situation changed radically with the sudden and totally surprising
collapse of Communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, first in East Germany, and then
in the entire Eastern block. The Soviet Union dissolved into several independent states, and
3 See Glossary of Literary Terms.

4 The period between 1947 and 1962 in which the United States and the Soviet Union fought
each other on all political and economic levels while avoiding the direct military confrontation
of a war (which would have meant a world catastrophe).
in the new millennium Russia seems to be more of a partner than an enemy of the United
States of America. Britain found herself at the side of the United States, and (in the second
war) in opposition to most European countries in two wars against Iraq. While the first
(1990-91), in retaliation against Saddam Hussein's invasion of a neighbouring state, could
still be justified, the second (2003) has proved an internationally orchestrated and, finally,
enforced attempt of the United States to have a safe military base as well as guaranteed oil
supplies in the Middle East. Thousands of innocent people and Iraqi soldiers had to die as
the troops of George W. Bush and Tony Blair went in search of weapons of mass destruc-
tion that never existed. The poet Tony Harrison, who has always had an ear to the ground in
politics, commented on the war in a short poem published in the London Review of Books
(22 May 2003):
PM am
Why is it, Lord, although I'm right
I find it hard to sleep at night?
I often wake up in a sweat
They've not found WMDs yet!
The thought that preys most on my mind,
is maybe the only arms they'll find
(unless, somehow I get MI6
to plant them to be found by Blix,
that's if the UN sneaks back in)
are Ali's in the surgeon's bin.
Politically, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Marxism proved influential for Europe, but
less so for Britain. The 1980s saw, in addition to the persisting feelings of anxiety in the area
of politics, the return of an economic crisis affecting Europe in general and Britain in parti-
cular. The British trade unions engaged in a last desperate warfare of their own against the
Conservative Government of Mrs Thatcher. In this atmosphere, younger people were ap-
parently unwilling to follow traditional political paths. As a consequence, the membership of
those movements has increased which concentrate on ecology and peace, but there was also
an increase of urban violence as predicted in Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange (1962).
The late 1990s were dominated by a rapidly growing interest in the new technologies of
communication and entertainment (computers, e-mail, cellular phones, video games) which,
in turn, boosted the economy and the stock markets.
Still under the influence of two horrible world wars, the art and literature of the twentieth
century have long been concerned with interrogation and experiment. Artists and writers
have been looking for something to believe in, a most difficult task after Auschwitz and
Hiroshima and in the face of a triumphant materialism that is accompanied by spiritual pov-
erty. Even in the 1990s, British art and literature have, to some extent, reacted to the spiritual
void created by the dominating material interests of the postmodern period. Examples can
be found in the new realism in painting (Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud) and performance art
(Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Gilbert and George) whose obscene and shocking dimensions
find a correspondence in the fiction of the "Chemical Generation" (Irvine Welsh and Alan
Warner) and the "in yer face theatre" of the fin-de-sicle (Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill).
Starting in the 1960s, writers began to consider a changing audience. The reading public, in-
creasingly made up of younger people with little or no experience of the war, demanded a
different sort of entertainment. They got it, for instance, in London's pop culture, in which
music played a dominant role. The Beatles (Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon,
killed in 1980, and George Harrison, d. 2001) dominated pop music world-wide between
1960-1970, and so did The Rolling Stones (Sir Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, d.
1969, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, Ronnie Wood) in rock music. One of the most fascinating
developments of the period from the 1960s to the 1990s has been the appearance of a new
heterogeneous audience of readers and of listeners and viewers. The modern and postmodern
media at first radio, then film, and more recently, television, video clips, and the internet
have become powerful competitors for the book and have in turn provided new subjects for
literature and the theatre. The new reading public is divided into many sections, from high-
brow to lowbrow, each market having its own laws and authors; those writers who can cater to
all divisions are few and far between. New genres, such as Science Fiction and Crime
Literature, which burgeoned in the nineteenth century, have been flourishing. Some critics
complain about a decline in the cultural level, arguing that mass literature, like the movie
industry and television, suffers from clichs and prejudices, and has adopted the tastes of the
lowest common denominator. But one should not exaggerate the alleged consequences of
these new developments. Good poetry continues to be written. And television, though an over-
powering competitor for the book, has provided new markets for script writers and dramatists.
Rupert Murdoch, Britain's modern press baron, once said that Shakespeare, if he wrote today,
would work for television, and although one wonders whether the bard of Stratford would
have produced anything like Dallas, there is no denying the fact that some excellent drama
has been written for television, Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven (1978), also made into a
film, and The Singing Detective (1986) being just two splendid examples.
British art experienced several radical changes in the last century. The Edwardian period
(1901-1910) was hardly different from the Victorian era; in fact, many of the painters who
produced works far into the new
century and the quintessential Ed-
wardian artists e.g., William
Nicholson (1872-1949), Charles
Ricketts (1866-1931), and
William Strang (1859-1921)
had started their careers during
the reign of Queen Victoria. A
noticeable change was brought
about by the impact of the post-
impressionist exhibitions of 1910
and 1912, when Gauguin, van
Gogh, Czanne, Picasso, and
Matisse inspired a new genera-
tion of painters in Britain, among
them Duncan Grant (1885-1978)
Francis Bacon, Sleeping Figure. 1959 and the neo-realists Harold Gil-
man (1876-1919) and Charles
Ginner (1878-1952). They produced the shock of the new in Britain by favouring Cubism
and creating rebel art centres as well as new movements, such as Vorticism, which inte-
grated the machine age rather than rejecting it. The major figures were Wyndham Lewis
(1882-1957), David Bomberg (1890-1957), and Jacob Epstein (1880-1959). As some of the
vorticists experienced the horrors of trench warfare, their views of the place and function of
art changed considerably.
The introduction of new modernist techniques and the integration of technological reality
came to bear on landscape and genre painting in the 1930s and 1940s. A typical example is
Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) with his hallowing of the ordinary (see The Dustman, 1934).
The politicized 30s saw the breakthrough of the sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986; see
Reclining Figure, 1936), as modernism began to take on meaning in the works of Unit One,
a group of 11 artists, among them the painters Paul Nash (1889-1946), Ben Nicholson
(1894-1982), and Tristram Hillier (1905-83). Ben Nicholson went furthest in this group
with non-representational works and experiments with colour. Surrealism had a brief
flourish in the late 1930s, especially after the International Surrealist Exhibition in London
in 1936. Roland Penrose (1900-84) and the poet David Gascoyne boosted the movement,
supported by Eileen Agar (1904-91) and Hugh Sykes-Davies (1909-84).
As a form of protest against what they saw as flamboyant surrealist techniques, realism was
again championed by Victor Passmore (1908-98) and Claude Rogers who emphasized the
humility and honesty of realism in art. Their ideas and those of the Marxist International
Artists Association (founded in 1933) survived World War II in the works of William Cold-
stream (1908-84) and Lawrence Gowing (1918-91). While neo-Romanticism also had a
brief revival during the war in paintings by Graham Sutherland (1903-80) and John Craxton
(born 1922), the art of the immediate post-war period was marked by realism and angst,
perhaps best represented in the starkly naturalistic works of Francis Bacon (1909-92) and
Lucian Freud (born 1922). As members of what has been termed the School of London,
they produced works into the 1990s, with Bacon beginning to distort figures in the 1950s
and Freud experiencing a triumph with his obscenely honest portraits as late as 2002. In the
1950s, the literary movement of the Angry Young Men found a correspondence in the
Kitchen Sink School associated with John Bratby (1928-92), Jack Smith (born 1928),
Derrick Greaves (born 1927), and Edward Middleditch (1923-87). Instead of tasteful still-
lifes, they painted the debris of ordinary domestic life.
Before the arrival of pop art, abstraction was again championed by Barbara Hepworth
(1903-75) and the so-called St Ives School (e.g., Roger Hilton, 1911-75). The British ver-
sion of pop art began in the late 1950s in a first wave with works of the members of the
Independent Group. Stressing style and surface, they wanted art to be popular (designed for
a mass audience), transient, expendable (easily forgotten), witty, sexy, and glamorous. The
major figure of the first wave was Richard Hamilton (born 1922), and painters who have
become internationally known as pop artists include, among the second wave, Peter Blake
(born 1932), Joe Tilson (born 1928), and among the third wave, David Hockney (born
1937), who exported his style to America, and the American-born R. B. Kitaj (1932-2007).
As the British art press exposed the reading public to American movements from the 1960s
onward abstract expressionism, minimalism, etc. these postmodernist schools also found
the interest of artists in Britain. Those who favoured the aesthetics of exclusion and pro-
duced severely minimal works include Bob Law (1934-2004), Peter Joseph (born 1929) and
Edwina Leapman (born 1934) while conceptualism was championed by Victor Burgin (born
1941). Among the new art forms that came to the fore, performance art developed a great
choice of methods and range of expression, including a political aspect that was seized upon
by feminists such as Bobby Baker (born 1950) and, later on, Alexis Hunter (born 1948) and
Mary Kelly (born 1941). In the 1980s, conceptual art was being outpaced as a popular mode
by the revival of traditional media and a new social art propagated by Conrad Atkinson
(born 1940), David Binnington (born 1949), and Desmond Rochfort (born 1949). Estab-
lished artists such as David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj called for a return to figuration and
practiced it themselves. Postmodernism was labelled New Image Painting in England, as
artists took a new interest in narrative, myths, symbols, expressionism, primitivism, and
even landscape painting while emphasizing an anti-intellectual spontaneity. The new cult
was practiced by, among others, Steven Campbell (born 1954) and Adrian Wiszniewski
(born 1948), both Scottish artists. Gilbert and George
(i.e., Gilbert Proesch, born 1943; and George Pass-
more, born 1942) have become something of a post-
modern trademark as living sculptures dressed as or-
dinary citizens (in suits and ties) who have produced
artworks that are always ambiguous.
The Young British Art or Britart of the 1990s has been
as aggressive and socially engaged as the fiction of the
Chemical Generation discussed below. Eminent names
among the younger generation are Damien Hirst (born
1965), Sarah Lucas (born 1962), and Tracey Emin
(born 1963). Hirst first exhibited works in 1988 and
won the Turner Prize.5 He is known for initially shock-
ing installations showing cut-up animals or bodily parts
in glass containers filled with liquids. Hirst always
chooses a quasi-scientific frame and a seemingly med-
ical environment while drawing attention to our in-
human and cruel treatment of helpless fellow creatures.
Tracey Emin's installations reflect the fact that she
wants her life and art to be inextricably entwined. Born
in London and raped at 13, she integrates in her works
Tracey Emin, Everyone I Have Ever private confessions, traces of sex, and defecation as
Slept With 1963-1994. 1995 human forms of behaviour that can be both candid and
offensive. Her best known works are a tent installation,
Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1994 (1995) and the notorious My Bed (1998), com-
plete with dirty sheets, bloody knickers, and used condoms. Emin has worked together with
Sarah Lucas who is famous/notorious for artworks foregrounding the obscene and digusting
aspects of sex and sexual organs, and the violence involved in intercourse. Lucas has also
exhibited portraits of herself in the most intimate situations (e.g., on the toilet) and has pro-
duced collages demonstrating the violence against women in popular papers (e.g., Sod You
Gits, 1990). What these younger artists have in common with their contemporaries in litera-
ture and drama (e.g., Irvine Welsh and Sarah Kane) is not simply the wish to shock and to ex-
plore the last taboos but to make their audience conscious of the violence that is part and
parcel of our culture.
5 The United Kingdom's most publicized art award, the Turner Prize, is named after the Romantic
painter J.M.W. Turner and is presented annually to a British visual artist under fifty. The funding
over the last years was 40,000. Recent winners include the transvestite Grayson Perry (2003),
Jeremy Deller (2004), Simon Starling (2005), Tomma Abts (2006), and Mark Wallinger (2007).
It is at the awarding of the Turner Prize and the Tate

Triennial that contemporary art forcefully explodes in
the face of the public, with conservative newspapers
and politicians regularly asking the question, "Is this
art"? This controversy reached especially high levels
in 2003, when the potter Grayson Perry (and not the
equally controversial Chapman brothers) was given
the Turner Prize and pictures of him dressed up as his
alter ego, Claire, graced all of the major newspapers;
and again in 2005, when Simon Starling won the
prize for his "mobile architecture", his Shedboatshed,
a shed transformed into a boat and sailed down the
Rhine before being reconstructed back into a shed in
the gallery. But despite regular controversies over the
jury's choice, the Turner Prize judges do have an ear
to the ground in art. While in 2006 the German-born
Tomma Abts was the first female painter to win the
prize (and perhaps also the last painter for quite a
while), the jury has drawn the public's attention to re-
cent developments in such new art forms as animated
films, video and aural kaleidoscopes. David Shrigley Grayson Perry at the 2003 Turner
(born 1968) and Steve McQueen (born 1968) are in- Prize reception
ternationally known practitioners in these genres and
have not received the prestigious Turner award for their work, but Jeremy Deller (born
1966) and Mark Wallinger (born 1959) did receive it in 2004 and 2007 respectively, the
latter in Liverpool, the first time the ceremony was held outside London. In 2008 the prize
went to Mark Leckey (born 1964) for his exhibition Industrial Lights and Magic, which
exemplifies his working with collage art, music and video. Evanescent and changing art
objects to the point of their eventual disappearance or destruction seems to be all the
rage at the end of the decade, with Richard Wright's painting installations of 2009 that are
painted over after their exhibition and Roger Hiorns's (born
1975) experiments with liquids and dust as outstanding ex-
amples conveying an impression of instability and insecurity.
Since 2000, the Tate Triennial has showcased new develop-
ments in recent art. The third triennial in 2006 was curated
by Beatrix Ruf, Director of the Kunsthalle in Zurich, and
brought together thirty-six artists who all explored a signifi-
cant strand in contemporary art by reusing and recasting
cultural material both high and low. British artists exhibiting
their works at the occasion included Jonathan Monk with his
collage "Twelve Angry Women", Douglas Gordon with "Pro-
position for a Posthumous Portrait", which draws on Man
Ray, and Angela Bulloch with her disco-installation "Dis-
enchanted Forest X 1001". 2009 was supposed to herald a
radical new direction in art, as the curator of the fourth Tate
Triennial, the French artist and philosopher Nicolas Bour-
riaud, announced the end of postmodernism while proposing The 2008 Turner Prize poster
"altermodern" as his label for the present "void beyond the postmodern." Bourriaud's ideas
expressed in the catalogue of the exhibition favour misunderstandings and displacements
while pitching "altermodern" against consumer-driven uniformization and the menace of
massification. Time will show whether the allegedly "altermodern" works (drawings, sculp-
tures, videos, photographs, slide shows, performances) exhibited by, among others, Simon
Starling, Marcus Coates, Katie Paterson, and Peter Coffin, really mark a new beginning or
just a fresh way forward.
2. Poetry
Some of the Georgian poets (so called because their verse was represented in the five
volumes entitled Georgian Anthologies, edited by Edward Marsh between 1912-22) have
been severely criticized for their alleged lack of emotions and profundity. Yet this charge is
somewhat unjustified, for the poetic works of the Georgians Rupert Brooke (1887-1915),
William H. Davies (1871-1940), John Drinkwater (1882-1937), John Masefield (1878-
1967), Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), Robert Graves
(1895-1985), Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) cannot be dismissed as smooth, gentle
lyrics about rural life. Rejecting the work of their predecessors, the Edwardians (i.e. those
writing under Edward VII, 1901-1910), the Georgians (i.e. those writing under George V,
1910-36), especially Lawrence, Graves, and Brooke, saw themselves as "modern" and
"realistic". Brooke belonged to the avantgarde, despite his romantic view of war and the
patriotism of his sonnets. Walter de la Mare explored the world through the eyes of a child
(examples can be found in his Songs of Childhood, 1902, and Peacock Pie, 1913) and
introduced a fresh exotic imagery in his The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913). He also
wrote a novel, Memoirs of a Midget (1921), in the form of a diary of a Lilliputian. John
Masefield's best works are Salt Water-Ballads (1902) and the narrative poems Dauber
(1913) and Reynard the Fox (1919). He was made Poet Laureate in 1930. Masefield also
wrote fiction and became a noted playwright.
Edmund Blunden started out with poems studying country life in Sussex, Suffolk, and Kent,
but his experience in the war introduced a note of sorrow and pity into his poetry. What has
become known as war poetry, however, is much more bitter and desperate. The patriotic
idealism of the beginning of the war (see, for instance, Rupert Brooke's sonnet "The
Soldier" of 1915) soon gave way to aggressive criticism, satire, and attacks on the hero
worship current at home. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) and Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
wrote about the realities of war, the senseless sacrifices and the inhuman misery. Owen was
killed a week before the Armistice. Owen's sonnet "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (1917)
seems to be a direct answer to Brooke's jingoistic "The Soldier" as it compares the dying of
human beings to the slaughter of animals. Significantly, the soldiers die "as", and not "like",
cattle in this text; the war machinery has turned them into animals and robs them of burial
rites normally accorded to men:
Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passingbells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmer of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Similarly, Owen's "Dulce et decorum Est" is a bitter comment on Horace's phrase that to die
for one's country is sweet and fitting.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod []
Other poets deeply influenced by the war experience were Herbert Read (1893-1968), who
was also a critic and later defended Surrealism (see his Surrealism of 1936), and Robert
(von Ranke) Graves (1895-1985). Also a successful novelist with I Claudius and Claudius
the God (1934), Graves broadened his poetry in the 1940s and 1950s by including mythical
and magical elements.
In the early part of the new century, several American writers, disappointed with American
Puritanism and materialism, came to Europe in search of history and myth. Some of them,
like the novelist Henry James (1843-1916) and the poet, playwright, and critic T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965), eventually became British subjects; others, like Ezra Pound (1885-1972), re-
mained Americans in exile. Pound was born in Idaho and came to Europe in 1908. In 1914
he founded the so-called Imagist school of poets that included American, Irish and British
poets like Richard Aldington, "H. D." (i.e. Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell, James Joyce,
T. E. Hulme, and others. After studying Browning and medieval French and Italian poets
and translating Chinese poetry, Pound laid down the principles of Imagism in 1913. The
school of Imagists rejected Romanticism and advocated the use of free rhythms as well as
concreteness and conciseness of language and imagery. Precise images were to guarantee
the clarity of poetic expression. Some of the best poetry of this school is contained in the
anthology Some Imagist Poets edited by Amy Lowell in 1915. Here are two examples of
Imagist poetry.
Autumn (T. E. Hulme)
A touch of cold in the Autumn night
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.
In a Station of the Metro (Ezra Pound)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
The Imagists prepared the ground for modern poetry which, in the first half of the century,
was dominated by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) and T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
(1888-1965). It is significant that neither of these two great poets, critics and dramatists was
English. Yeats was an Irishman and the son of a Pre-Raphaelite painter. In his early poems
he dealt with Irish legend in the decorative manner of Rossetti and Morris. Ireland's history
and mythology fascinated him, and he became an ardent patriot and one of the leading
figures in the Irish literary Renaissance. Through the influence of Thomas Huxley6 and the
agnostics, Yeats lost his religious faith. As a consequence, he searched for a mythology that
was to combine his interests in literature, history and philosophy. Blake's mysticism, Irish
legend and landscape, and Indian philosophy provided the subjects and symbols for his
early works, such as The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and the collections Crossways (1889)
and The Rose (1893). His symbolism of the late 1890s, further strengthened by his reading
of Walter Pater and French poets, was merely a transitory phase. Deeply moved by the
political events in Ireland, he recorded his feelings and thoughts caused by the Easter
rebellion7 in "Easter 1916". The opening of this poem, quoted below, shows that Yeats had
found a new kind of rough, terse verse in which both romantic Ireland and his decorative
style are forgotten.
Easter 1916
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among gray
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
6 T(homas) H(enry) Huxley (1825-95) was a friend of Charles Darwin and an influential sup-
porter of his theories. A professor of natural history at the Royal Society of Mines, he was also
widely known as a lecturer to lay audiences and had a gift for explaining complicated scientific
points in intelligible language. His views on religion, education, philosophy, and evolution (ex-
pressed in Evolution and Ethics, 1893, and other essays) had a profound impact on nineteenth-
century intellectuals.
7 An Irish Nationalist uprising began on Easter Monday 1916. Key points were seized and the
Irish Republic was proclaimed. But the British took prompt military action and 300 insurgents
were killed. The seven signatories of the Proclamation were shot the following month.
Using both poetic diction and simple phrases while avoiding easy rhyme, Yeats now began
to forge his own philosophy of life, religion and love. For him, the image and art of ancient
Byzantium became symbols of the union of nature, art, and spirit, and thus of the eternal
quality of art. In "Sailing to Byzantium" (1926), and again in "Byzantium", Yeats discusses
the relation between art and life, heart and mind, and the inherent value of works of art that,
for the speaker (an old man), seem to serve as a kind of "ersatz" for love, religion, and faith:
Sailing to Byzantium
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
Those dying generations at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence; William Strang, Bank Holiday. 1912
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
His most interesting verse of the later period is collected in The Wild Swans at Coole
(1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), and The Winding Stair
(1933). Yeats's rhetorical power, his symbolism and rhythm, have had a considerable
influence on modern poets. To his verse must be added numerous prose works, such as
collections of Irish stories, essays, and autobiographical studies. Yeats was also one of the
influential playwrights in the renewal of Irish drama.
T. S. Eliot shared with Yeats an interest in drama, literary criticism, and poetry. Eliot
started a revolution in the poetic taste of his generation. An American by birth, he was
educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford, arriving in England in 1915. He entered the
Anglican Church and adopted British nationality in 1927. In 1948 he was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature. Rejecting the aesthetic theory of the later Romantics, Eliot
demanded that the poet be objective, taking as examples Dante and such metaphysical poets
as John Donne. His poetic career began with Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), in
which the principal poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", records the interior
monologue of an elderly neurotic bachelor. Irony and satirical descriptions dominate in this
poem which contrasts the trivial present with the meaningful past. There are also many
scenes from New England's society of Puritans and philistines, described with a new
poetical technique that combines colloquial language with metaphors and symbols taken
from the European cultural heritage. The poem opens rather casually with an invitation
addressed to the reader, or to Prufrock's friend, or, if the poem is read as a dramatic
monologue, to the speaker himself. The motto is from Dante's Inferno and provides a first
example of irony, for Eliot's Prufrock unlike the speaker in the Italian poem is not really
in a hell, though he compares his existence to that of the sufferer in the flames.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Sio credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question.
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The poem ends in a dream-like sequence as the neurotic bachelor Prufrock envisions an
underwater scene with sex-less (and hence harmless) sea girls:
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding searward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
It was with The Waste Land (1922) that Eliot established his reputation as the new century's
leading poet. In contemporary and historical images and scenes this "heap of broken images",
as the poem of some 400 lines has been called, presents a microcosm of the twentieth century
and the emptiness of life without faith. The Waste Land is a rather demanding poem. Even
with Eliot's explanatory footnotes it is difficult to understand, for he frequently quotes from
the literature of Europe and India and employs various points of view and personae, such as
the poet, a woman in a pub, a prostitute, and the Greek seer Tiresias. In addition, the changing
styles are reminiscent of many English poets of the past. The verse form Eliot developed for
this poem is a kind of free verse derived from the blank verse of the Elizabethan playwrights,
which means that it is highly dramatic and capable of much variety. The poem is divided into
four parts, "The Burial of the Dead", "A Game of Chess" (an intertextual allusion to two plays
by Thomas Middleton, both of which involve seduction), "The Fire Sermon" (an allusion to
the Buddha's Fire Sermon which corresponds to the Sermon on the Mount), and "Death by
Water". In the following passage (lines 215-48 from "The Fire Sermon"), the Greek seer
Tiresias, the most important personage in the poem who unites all the rest through his visions,
comments on a woman receiving her lover in the evening:
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit
The many allusions, implications, paradoxes, and symbols render this poem highly am-
biguous, almost mocking Eliot's own notes (which may, after all, be an ironic comment on
the rationalist approach to poetry that seeks to explain the poetic with sources and back-
ground). Eliot then wrote The Hollow Men (1925), which is closely related to The Waste
Land; and, after joining the Anglican Church he turned to the discussion of religious and
philosophical problems in his Ariel Poems (1927). This collection contains "Journey of the
Magi", a beautiful Christmas poem for the twentieth century, in which one of the magi
(kings from the East) provides a rather laconic view of the birth of Jesus Christ. The first
five lines of the poem are adapted from the sermon preached at Christmas, 1622, by Bishop
Lancelot Andrewes:
Journey of the Magi
"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
[]
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness.
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
[]
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
The poems assembled in Ash Wednesday (1927-30) are meditations on the themes of sin-
fulness and repentance, showing Eliot on his way to the more religiously oriented poetry of
his later period. After 1930 he wrote some plays, including verse drama, and published Four
Quartets in 1943. The four poems in this book take their titles from places in which Eliot
had lived. They reflect his reading of F. H. Bradley's philosophy8 and of the Catholic mystics
while concentrating on man's experience of time and the possibilities of redemption. Techni-
cally, it is interesting to note that the four "quartets" return to the form of The Waste Land in
that each poem consists of five parts which, like the movements of a sonata, introduce and
vary several themes. For his own generation, Eliot's poetic
revolution proved a major influence.
This is noticeable in the poetry of a group of writers (nick-
named the "McSpaundy" group) who began publishing in the
1930s: W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden (1907-73), Stephen Spender
(1909-95), Cecil Day Lewis (1904-72), who was appointed
poet laureate in 1968, and Louis MacNeice (1907-63). Of this
group Wystan Hugh Auden was the leader and the most
versatile poet. Recognizing Hopkins, Yeats and Eliot as great
examples to be followed, these poets tried to write verse on
social and political problems. Faced with the economic
depression of the 1930s, mass unemployment, and the rise of
Fascism, these young Oxford students became dedicated
Socialists and defended the cause of the Republicans in the
Spanish Civil War (1936-39). After World War II, most of
the members of the Auden group gave up their Socialist con- Photograph of W. H. Auden
victions and wrote more traditional verse.
Auden was a homosexual; he emigrated to America in 1939, together with his friend
Christopher Isherwood (1909-86), with whom he collaborated in writing verse drama.
Collected in Poems (1930), The Orators (1932), and Look Stranger (1936), Auden's early
poems reflect his belief in Marxism as well as Freud's influence. With his move to the
United States, a new phase began, as humanism gradually displaced his Marxist views. A
good example is his poem on human suffering, "Muse des Beaux Arts", written in 1938.
Partly based on a visit to the Muses Royaux des Beaux Arts in Brussels in 1938, the poem
can be considered as an "ekphrasis", a verbal representation of a visual representation,
which is something poets have always liked. In this case, Auden reacted to some paintings
by Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525-69), especially Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" and
8 F(rancis) H(erbert) Bradley (1846-1924), writer and philosopher. He drew attention in England
to Hegel's philosophy and is remembered for his Principles of Logic (1883), Appearance and
Reality (1893), and an Essay on Truth and Reality (1914).
"The Census at Bethlehem" in which the Netherlandish painter provides ironic views of
important events in mythology/history.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood.
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Bruegel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
As this poem indicates, Auden had adopted Christian ideas by 1940. But he was also
capable of writing love poems, as in "Lullaby" where the opening stanzas deal with what
love provokes joy and despair, pain and pleasure, childish innocence and adult cynicism:
Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Percy Horton, Unemployed Man. 1936 Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstasy.
[]
His main contribution to modern poetry was the introduction of slang and jargon into poetic
comments on religious, philosophical and psychological themes of a typically modern kind.
Christian themes and ideas of Kierkegaard and Reinhold Niebuhr9 recur in his American
verse, such as Another Time (1940), which includes poems on the deaths of Yeats and
Freud, New Year Letter (1941), published as The Double Man in the United States, The Age
of Anxiety (1948), and The Shield of Achilles (1955), containing symbolic poems on land-
scape. Auden also wrote some humorous poems in Homage to Clio (1960), returning to a
liberal humanitarianism in his last poems published in City without Walls (1967) and Thank
you Fog (1973).
While it is true that Eliot, Auden and their friends drew the main critical attention, it would be
unjust to ignore those poets who chose different ways of expressing themselves. Among them
were Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) and her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell, who wrote satires
and verse criticizing social customs and manners. Dame Edith's poems are distinguished by
their musical quality. William Empson (1906-84) is the best known of a group of Cambridge
poets. He wrote an important book of literary criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), and
produced poems that are extremely difficult, using analytical argument and imagery drawn
from modern physics and mathematics. Surrealism also found a few proponents. The best
known of the Surrealist poets, who emerged forcefully after the international exhibitions of
paintings in the 1930s, was David Gascoyne (1916-2001). He translated French poets and
published A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935). Indebted to Blake, Yeats, and Apollinaire, but
also to such artists as Max Ernst and Ren Magritte, his poetry explores myths and archetypes
from a post-Freudian viewpoint. Gascoyne's "The Cage", for instance, employs the same
technique and motifs one finds in the art of Dal, Magritte, and Ernst (dissolving clocks, birds
and bird-cages, and bizarre yet telling combinations such as "feathered hours"):
The Cage
In the waking night
The forests have stopped growing
The shells are listening
The shadows in the pools turn grey
The pearls dissolve in the shadow
And I return to you.
Your face is marked upon the clockface
My hands are beneath your hair
And if the time you mark sets free the birds
And if they fly away towards the forest
The hour will no longer be ours.
Ours is the orange birdcage
The brimming cup of water
The preface to the book
And all the clocks are ticking
9 Sren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-55), Danish theologian and philosopher. He wrote many books
on a wide variety of issues, and is chiefly remembered as an initiator of existentialist philoso-
phy. He argued that freedom is an inescapable condition of life and action and that it fascinates
and repels the individual.
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), American Protestant theologian. He advocated a Christian real-
ism that revolutionized American theological thinking.
All the dark rooms are moving

All the air's nerves are bare.
Once flown
The feathered hour will not return
And I shall have gone away.
The following piece is quite clearly an attempt to
write in the manner Magritte painted, i.e., to com-
bine things and ideas in ways that are not logical
but provide new insights into the fabric of the im-
agination and the subconscious. Dedicated to Ren
Magritte, one of the main representatives of Sur-
realist art, Gascoyne's "The Very Image" is an em-
bodiment in words of what the Surrealists called
"automatism", a condensation of thoughts in im-
ages, an idea they derived from Sigmund Freud.
Gascoyne creates five dream-like and totally illogi-
cal tableaux and then, in the last stanza, telescopes
them into six-inch-high bird-cages. Significantly,
Edward Burra, The Saturday Market.
these are model bird-cages, not the real thing
1932 which suggests Magritte's image of a smoker's pipe,
the words beneath it saying "This is not a pipe":
The Very Image
An image of my grandmother
her head appearing upside-down upon a cloud
the cloud transfixed on the steeple
of a deserted railway-station
far away
An image of an aqueduct
with a dead cow hanging from the first arch
a modern-style chair from the second
a fir-tree lodged in the third
and the whole scene sprinkled with snow
An image of the piano-tuner
with a basket of prawns on his shoulder
and a fire-screen under his arm
his moustache made of clay-clotted twigs
and his cheeks daubed with wine
An image of an aeroplane
the propellor is rashers of bacon
the wings are reinforced lard
the tail is made of paper-clips
the pilot is a wasp
An image of the painter
with his left hand in a bucket
and his right hand stroking a cat
as he lies in bed
with a stone beneath his head
And all these images

and many others
are arranged like waxworks
in model bird-cages
about six inches high
Most remarkable are Gascoyne's Man's Life is This Meat (1936), Hlderlin's Madness
(1938) and the long poem Night Thoughts (1956). His Collected Poems appeared in 1965.
The English Surrealists continued a formal existence until the late 1940s. One of the later
poets they influenced was Dylan Thomas.
Sir John Betjeman (1906-84), who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1972, saw himself as a
defender of Victorian architecture on which he wrote several books. He was one of the last
popular poets, and his verse, published in Collected Poems (1958), the poetic autobiography
Summoned by Bells (1960), and High and Low (1966), found an unusually large audience
by twentieth-century standards. Admittedly, Betjeman was not an outstanding poet and def-
initely inferior to Auden or contemporary poets like Larkin, but he was a good observer, and
his simple and traditional forms evoke the beauty of times past. Betjeman could be satirical
and compassionate when dealing with human loneliness and death, as in the ballad-like
"Death in Leamington". Here are the first two stanzas of this unpretentious poem:
She died in the upstairs bedroom
By the light of the evening star
That shone through the plate glass window
From over Leamington Spa.
Beside her the lonely crochet
Lay patiently and unstirred,
But the fingers that would have worked it
Were dead as the spoken word.
The dominant voice of the 1940s and early 1950s was that of the Welshman Dylan Thomas
(1914-53). Thomas read his poems and essays to radio audiences and, just before his death,
wrote a play for radio, Under Milk Wood (1954), which has often been performed as a "play
for voices". At a time when, under Eliot's influence, poetry was in danger of becoming too
intellectual, Thomas injected new vigour into English verse. Borrowing from Hopkins, Joyce,
Freud, and the Bible, he tried to affirm the unity of life and became a legend in his own day.
Thomas's curious images are a mixture of the erotic, procreation, birth, death and religious
faith, suggesting a Surrealist influence. Though Thomas did not speak Welsh, his romantic
style and his impressive rhythms seem to suggest an influence of Welsh poetic traditions with
their metrical complexities. Thomas was deeply aware of his cultural heritage. In "Fern Hill",
published in 1946, he celebrates innocent childhood and his own youth as paradise regained.
The first stanza of the poem provides an impression of his particular style:
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light. []
The final illness of his father in 1951 led him to write a poem in the form of a villanelle,
"Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night", furiously rejecting the idea of death while
dealing with the transcience of human life. Here are the first and the last stanzas:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
[]
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
English poetry after Thomas reacted against his romantic and emotionally direct verse.
Younger poets called for a rejection of the heroic and the extraordinary, of Socialist utopias
and rhetorical flourishes. Instead, they offered poised, intelligent comments in a verse that is
formally strict and both rationally and morally coherent. William Empson's intellectually
demanding poetry had a brief vogue in the early 1950s.
New movements in post-war poetry came to the fore with the publications of important
anthologies that also contained programmatic introductions. They include two collections
edited by Robert Conquest; the first, entitled New Lines, was published in 1956 (echoing
New Country, the anthology published by the Auden group in 1933); the second bore the
title New Lines II (1963). They contained verse by poets who came to be known as "The
Movement", among them the novelists Kingsley Amis and John Wain as well as Donald
Davie (1922-1995), D. J. Enright (1920-2002), Thom Gunn (1929-2004), Geoffrey Hill
(born 1932), Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001), Philip Larkin (1922-85), and Charles
Tomlinson (born 1927). There is not enough space here to discuss the work of each of these
fine poets who are more different in their approaches and styles than the group name "The
Movement" suggests. They have a few points in common: they are almost all agnostics from
the lower middle class, and most of them were or are uni-
versity lecturers.
Philip Larkin worked as a librarian in Hull and brought to
his work an admirable touch of provincial settings. Before
1950, he published two novels and then abandoned prose
fiction for poetry. His volumes of verse, The North Ship
(1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings
(1964), and High Windows (1974), lack large romantic
gestures or defiant modernist assertions. Attracted at first
by Yeats, Larkin came to admire Hardy as a poet. His main
themes, recorded in mostly melancholy tones, were small
human defeats and triumphs, loneliness, and the inexorable
passing of time. "Sad Steps" from 1974 is an example of
his occasional mood of laconic melancholy and regret.
Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
Photograph of the occasionally The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.
caustic Philip Larkin Four o'clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There's something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)
High and preposterous and separate
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
His verse is distinguished by the use of vernacular and slangy obscenities that counterpoint
elevated diction and yet delivers uneasy truths in frequently epigrammatic ways. Here is one
of his most famous pieces. Innocently entitled "This Be the Verse", it addresses potential
"mums and dads":
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
Never a prolific poet, Larkin published little after 1974. Apart from two poems "Aubade"
(which deals with the fear of death) and "Love Again" (a haunting poem of sexual jealousy)
he wrote very little that is worth preserving in his last ten years. In the autumn of 1984,
one year before his death, Larkin was offered the Poet Laureateship but turned it down.
Thom Gunn, who published his first book of verse, Fighting Terms, in 1954, initially treated
tough and potentially violent subjects like urban crime. After the mid-1950s, Gunn lived in
California. Teaching half of each year at Berkeley, he did most of his writing in San Fran-
cisco. As a consequence, he became more assimilated to American poetry. The poems in
The Sense of Movement (1957) explore the question of human existence. "On the Move"
focuses on the behaviour and the ideas of the motorcycle "boys":
On motorcycles, up the road, they come:
Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys,
Until the distance throws them forth, their hum
Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.
In goggles, donned impersonality,
In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,
They strap in doubt by hiding it, robust

And almost hear a meaning in their noise.
In Gunn's later verse My Sad Captains (1961), Touch (1967), Moly (1971), and Jack
Straw's Castle (1976) his Hemingway-myth of toughness has undergone a change. In-
fluenced by the American examples of Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams,
Gunn tried new metrical possibilities, such as syllabic verse, and experimented with myth.
In the 1980s, Gunn began to speak and write openly about his homosexuality (see The
Passages of Joy, 1982). He wrote a number of powerful poems about the AIDS epidemic,
collected in The Man with Night Sweats (1992). Here is an example:
The Man with Night Sweats
I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.
My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.
I grew as I explored
The body I could trust
Even while I adored
The risk that made robust,
A world of wonders in
Each challenge to the skin.
I cannot but be sorry
The given shield was cracked,
My mind reduced to hurry,
My flesh reduced and wrecked.
I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead
Stopped upright where I am
Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,
As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.
In one of his last books of poetry, Boss Cupid (2000), Gunn returns to the post-AIDS land-
scape; it contains verse in Gunn's familiar and favourite poetic forms and is about survivals
in a tone that is still elegiac but lighter than in The Man with Night Sweats.
Geoffrey Hill has published eight books of poetry. In his early work For the Unfallen
(1959), King Log (1968), Mercian Hymns (1971), and Tenebrae (1978) he was concerned
with English medieval history and Anglo-Saxon history respectively. He read English at
Oxford and taught at Leeds University, then at Cambridge. In 1988 he accepted a professor-
ship at Boston University, Massachusetts. In 2006 he moved back to Cambridge, England.
Fascinated by the metaphysical poets, Hill has used a considerable variety of forms. In his
Mercian Hymns, he wrote a sequence of short poems about the past and present of that area
of the English Midlands which was once the kingdom of Mercia. In his more recent works,
Hill has considered English public life and its relations with the larger European context. In
the collection entitled Canaan (1996) one notices how much he is indebted in subjects,
vision, and style to William Blake. Several poems in this book bear the title "Dark-Land";
in the following piece he addresses the past, present, and future of several English cities
and, through an allusion to John Bunyan, England's Christian heritage and condition that
connect her with Canaan, the land God promised to give Abraham:
Dark-Land
Aspiring Grantham
rises above itself.
Tall churches wade the fen
on their stilts of glass.
Crowned Ely stands beset
by winds of straw-burning,
by the crouched run of flame.
Cambridge lies dark and dead
predestined Elstow
where Bunyan struck his fear
flint creed, tinder of wrath
to flagrant mercies.
Hill's book-length poem, The Triumph of Love (1998), probes the violence man inflicts on
man as, again inspired by Blake but also by D. H. Lawrence, he focuses in the manner of a
poet-prophet on such themes as the corruption of the Church, the horrors of the Holocaust,
the atrocities of war, and the interweaving of public and private lives.
The ideas of the members of "The Movement" did not last beyond the 1960s, and it would
be wrong to assume that they ruled the field. Other groups, loosely formed, reacted against
the sober and empirical attitudes of "The Movement". Thus the so-called "Liverpool Poets",
Roger McGough (born 1937), Brian Patten, and Adrian Henri, produced a great deal of
light verse in the aftermath of the success of The Beatles. Others again published their verse
in Mavericks (1957) and A Group Anthology (1963). The ideas of Imagism were revived in
the poetry magazine Review, edited by Ian Hamilton from 1962-74, with contributions by
Colin Falck, Michael Fried, and others. Imagism also proved important for what has been
termed "Concrete Poetry", originally an international movement that started in Brazil in the
late 1950s. This experimental verse flourished in the 1960s and dwells primarily on the
visual aspects of the poem, although kinetic and phonetic forms of concrete poetry were
also produced. Working under the influence of Imagism, Dada, and the punning of James
Joyce's prose, concrete poets experimented with graphics, typography, collage, and com-
puter-generated verse in an attempt to strip away the formal conventions which, they be-
lieved, threatened to overwhelm the immediacy of poetic expression. Looking at the work
of Concrete Poets such as Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), one of the leading Scottish
representatives of the movement (see also the concrete poems of Edwin G. Morgan, born
1920), one notices his affinity with seventeenth-century emblems and pattern poems, such
as Herbert's "Easter Wings". In 1966, Finlay settled at Stonypath, Lanarkshire, in a small
shepherd's cottage with four acres of land where, with the help of his wife, he created a
garden, later renamed Little Sparta, in which he installed poems and texts carved in stone
and wood. Here is Finlay's concrete poem "Acrobats":
Ted Hughes (1930-98) was initially admired by the poets who contributed to A Group
Anthology. Born in Yorkshire, Hughes has dwelt in his poetry on the qualities and powers
of birds and animals, stressing the strangeness and alien features of their almost human
characters. The following poem, from The Hawk in the Rain (1957), introduces "The
Jaguar".
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion
Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor's coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.
But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes
On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear
He spins from the bars, but there's no cage to him
More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.
Hughes continued his exploration of the life force in animals and plants in Lupercal (1960)
and Crow (1970). Containing Surrealist elements, this last book presents a violent mythical
bird, both human and animal, who seems to be the personified principle of evil. Cruel and
cynical, Crow resembles a caricature and knows about an imminent destruction of the
world, but like Prometheus on the Crag (1973) it accepts human pain and suffering. In his
work of the 1980s, Hughes moved away from the brutal and mythological elements and
returned to the study of rural life and nature in his native Yorkshire (see his Selected Poems,
1982; and New Selected Poems 1957-1994, 1994). Before his death in 1998, Hughes took a
deep interest in the work of Ovid, responding to the Roman poet's special gift of psycho-
logical realism in a mythopoetic venture of his own entitled Tales from Ovid (1997). A re-
writing of twenty-four passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses, this charming collection is
both poetry and commentary. Just as remarkable is the collection of poems celebrating his
relationship with his first wife, Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963. Partly auto-
biographical and confessional, Birthday Letters (1998) commemorates their love and is
daringly honest in the portrayal of a restless wife and a competitive fellow poet.
Peter Reading's (born 1946) strongly anti-romantic and satirical verse also became known
in the 1970s and 1980s. He is one of the more original and, frequently, politically concerned
poets now at work. His general strategy is to use a text (found in public as slogan, graffiti
etc.) that he then turns into verse. His best verse is contained in the collections entitled For
the Municipality's Elderly (1974), Ukulele Music (1985), and Work in Regress (1997), in
which he also attacks, among other issues, the Prime Minister Tony Blair's attitude towards
beggars.
In 1984 Hughes was appointed Poet Laureate. This event and the equally publicized and
unprecedented nomination of a "Professor of Poetry" at Oxford saw poetry in the news. In
fact, since the late 1970s there has been a remarkable revival of public interest in poetry.
Kingsley Amis launched a poetry column in the Daily Mirror, and in the 1990s short poems
were publicly displayed on the walls of the London Underground carriages while the maga-
zine of the Independent on Sunday regularly featured a Sunday poem with commentaries by
Ruth Padel. At the same time, publishers started printing more verse and promoting their
authors. In the 1980s a few poets commanded the kind of attention once given to Tennyson:
Station Island (1984), a collection of poems from the pen of the internationally known
Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney (born 1939), sold more than 30,000 copies within a
very short time.
Looking at the poetry of the last quarter of the twentieth century, it seems inadequate to talk
of schools. Yet when Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion edited an anthology of Con-
temporary British Poetry in 1982, they recognized a "new poetry". Marked by a "degree of
ludic and literary self-consciousness reminiscent of the modernists", by "poetic bizarrerie"
and an antipathy to personal confession, this verse came from poets sharing common themes
in their approaches to twentieth-century reality especially the "Martians" and the younger
poets from Northern Ireland and Ireland. Craig Raine (born 1944) is often said to have
started "The Martian School" with his book A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979). The
poem which gives this collection its title is a classic example of the way poets like Raine,
Andrew Motion (born 1952; see Love in a Life, 1991, and Salt Water, 1997), appointed
Poet Laureate after the death of Ted Hughes in 1999, James Fenton (born 1949; see Manila
Envelope, 1989, and Out of Danger, 1994), elected Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1994,
Tony Harrison (born 1937; see A Cold Coming: Gulf War Poems, and The Gaze of the
Gorgon, 1992), John Fuller (born 1937; see his The Grey Among the Green, 1988, and
Collected Poems, 1997), and John Ash (born 1948; see The Burnt Pages, 1992) are en-
amoured of the ordinary and how they revitalize our view of everyday life.
A Martian Sends A Postcard Home

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings
they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:
then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.
Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.
Model T is a room with the lock inside
a key is turned to free the world
for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.
But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.
If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep
with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.
Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room
with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises
alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.
At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
Raine has also brought this vision to his more recent poetic attempts to transform our view
of the everyday in the book-length poem-novel History: The Home Movie (1994) and the
poetry collection Clay. Whereabouts Unknown (1996). The verse of the "fetishistic poets of
domestic life" as they have been called shows a distrust of ideas, of social and political con-
ceptions, and it celebrates the world of inanimate objects with a great love of detail.
In addition to these English poets, a number of writers in Scotland and Wales, and es-
pecially in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, have produced some remarkable
verse. Northern Ireland has seen the rise of Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon (born 1941; see
Yaddo Letter, 1990; and Selected Poems, 1992), Michael Longley (born 1939; see Poems
1963-1983, 1985; Gorse Fires, 1991; and The Ghost

Orchid, 1995), Tom Paulin (born 1949; see Liberty
Tree, 1983, and Walking a Line, 1994), who was
born in Leeds but brought up in Belfast, and Paul
Muldoon (born 1951). Muldoon, who moved to the
United States in 1986 and is a professor at Princeton
University, edited The Faber Book of Contemporary
Irish Verse (1988); his best work is contained in
New Selected Poems 1968-1994 (1994), including
The Annals of Chile which received the 1994 T. S.
Eliot Prize. Ciaran Carson (born 1948) emerged as
yet another imporant Ulster poet when he won the
T. S. Eliot Prize in 1993. In his Opera Et Cetera
(1996) he employs long-lined rhyming couplets to
echo Irish ballads, and his linguistic and intellectual
engagements are quite obvious in The Ballad of
HMS Belfast (1999) and Shamrock Tea (2001).
Seamus Heaney is beyond doubt the outstanding
and the most gifted writer in what could be termed a
new Irish poetic Renaissance. Born in County Derry, Seamus Heaney as a young man
Ireland, in 1939, he was the eldest of nine children
and the son of a Catholic farmer and cattle-dealer. Heaney was educated at Queen's Uni-
versity, Belfast, and later moved to the Republic of Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first
book, appeared in 1966 and since then he has published poetry, criticism, and translations
which have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. He was Professor
of Poetry at Oxford University from 1989 to 1994 (his Oxford lectures were published as
The Redress of Poetry in 1995) and still teaches at Harvard University, where he is the
Boylston Professor of Rhetoric. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. As a
poet, he has written beautiful verse about the Irish landscape and he has shown his supreme
skill as a poetic explorer of the pains and the glories of human love. Richly physical in its
descriptions of rural life (churning, digging, thatching etc.), Heaney's early verse shows the
influence of Ted Hughes and the popular Irish, rural poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67). In
the following poem (from Death of a Naturalist, 1966), he compares his own craft writing
with a pen to the craft of his ancestors who were digging turf in the bog. The poem
implies that one "craft" is as good as the other:
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
In the collection entitled Wintering Out (1972), quite a few poems deal with the Irish land-
scape he saw and experienced as a child on his parents' farm. In the poem "Anahorish" from
this collection Heaney seems to celebrate a hill near this farm. "Anahorish" is derived from
the Gaelic "Anach fhior uisce" (place of clear water), a name which for the speaker seems to
embody paradise. But it is also a sort of digging into Irish culture and the Irish past at a time
when Northern Ireland witnessed civil-rights marches, bombings, and terrorism. Heaney
never wanted to become a propagandist, yet he takes sides as it were for a threatened culture
and its language:
Anahorish
My "place of clear water",
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass
and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,
after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.
With pails and barrows
those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills
In his collection entitled North (1975), he found beautiful and moving ways of addressing
the hostilities in Ulster by uncovering a history of linguistic and territorial dispossession. A
recurrent image in this book is that of the peat-bog which, with its unique preservation
properties, the poet sees as a kind of archeological memory bank, especially in the case of
the "bog people" of northern Europe, about whose corpses Heaney composed a series of his
finest poems. Thus in "Punishment" he seems to address the problem of tribal warfare in the
Iron Age but any reader will quickly realize the similarities with what the Irish call "the
Troubles in the North":
Punishment
I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you
you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and your numbered bones:
I who have stood dumb

when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
If North is Heaney's most politically overt book, his next collection, Field Work (1979), was
a self-conscious retreat with its core group of sonnets about the Wicklow countryside,
though Field Work also contains his finest political poem, "Casualty". The following poem
is no. X from his "Glanmore Sonnets", named after Glanmore, in County Wicklow, where
he lived for several years. It celebrates erotic love in apposite comparisons, and in allusions
to the literary and mythical past (lovers from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and
lovers from Irish legends are recalled) as well as to the lasting natural beauty of Ireland. In
addition, Heaney provides several hints at Eros' cruel companion, Thanatos, and at the
religious-mythical dimension of erotic love.
I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
On turf banks under blankets, with our faces
Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,
Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.
Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.
Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.
Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out
Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.
And in that dream I dreamt how like you this?
Our first night years ago in that hotel
When you came with your deliberate kiss
To raise us towards the lovely and painful
Covenants of flesh; our separateness;
The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.
Heaney's more recent work has moved into more allegorical and mythical terrain, with a
noticeable influence of Homer, Dante, and the Russian-born Jewish poet Joseph Brodsky
(born 1940), who emigrated to the United States and lives in New York City. Thus the
central sequence of Heaney's Station Island (1984) is about Lough Derg, an ancient Irish
place of pilgrimage; it includes a series of eery encounters, one of them with James Joyce
who urges Heaney to pursue his own way. Sweeney Astray (1984) is Heaney's version of the
medieval Irish Buile Suibhne. The Haw Lantern (1987) contains a moving series of sonnets
about his mother's death, and in Seeing Things (1991) he honours his dead father with a
number of poems. In his collections of verse published since then (see The Spirit Level,
1996; and Electric Light, 2001), Heaney has continued his special way of "digging" for
beauty and truth in the physical and cultural surroundings of his beloved Ireland. Here is
"Postscript" (from The Spirit Level), a celebration of the land and sea in Co. Clare in the
magic west of Eire:
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthened lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through whichknown and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
There are, at present, so many Irish poets at work that one could easily write a history of late
twentieth-century poetry from Ulster and Eire. The economic energy of what has been
termed the "Irish Tiger" seems to have found a counterpart in literature. To the names of
Heaney's contemporaries men-
tioned above (Michael Longley,
Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon,
and Tom Paulin) should be
added those of the older gener-
ation, Thomas Kinsella (born
1928), who edited The New Ox-
ford Book of Irish Verse (1986;
see also his Poems, 1980), and
Brendan Kennelly (born 1936),
winner of the 1995 Whitbread
Award for Poetry with his col-
lection Gunpowder. Kennelly
is best known for the political
stance he took in Cromwell Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death
(1983), a series of 160 poems in the Mind of Someone Living. 1991
on the themes and obsessions of
Irish history. In addition, there are the Irish "New Generation Poets", such as Paul Durcan
(born 1944; see his book of poems from paintings, Crazy About Women, 1991), John Ennis
(born 1944; see In a Green Shade, 1991), and Bernard O'Donoghue (born 1945).10 Some
Irish poets continue writing at least part of their verse in Gaelic. Among them are Nuala N
Dhomhnaill (born 1952; see The Astrakhan Cloak, translated by Paul Muldoon in 1992),
who grew up in West Kerry and lives in Dublin, and Cathal O Searcaigh, who lives in Co.
Donegal and has made his own homoeroticism, his Irishness, and the landscape of Donegal
the subjects of his bilingual collections (see Homecoming, 1993; and Out in the Open,
10 For information about, and poems by, other Irish writers (e.g., Dermot Bolger, Sebastian
Barry), see Michael Hulse's anthology The New Poetry (1993). See also the more recent col-
lections edited by Michael Longley, Twentieth-Century Irish Poems (London: Faber & Faber,
2002), and Selina Guinness, The New Irish Poets (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2004).
1997).11 There are also some women poets who have received international attention,
among them Paula Meehan (born 1955; see The Man Who was Marked by Winter, 1991),
Eavan Boland (born 1944), and Medbh McGuckian (born 1950). Boland, though born in
Dublin, spent her school-days in London and New York. In 1966, she graduated in English
from Trinity College, Dublin, and lectured there for a while. During the 1970s she wrote
about themes of Irish identity, engaging with history and the marginalization of women. She
used her lyric forms to give voice to oppression and insult alongside protest against in-
dignity. In the 1980s, her poetry retreated from these social concerns, focusing instead on
aesthetic and philosophical issues (see her Collected Poems, 1995).
Medbh McGuckian was born in Belfast and studied at Queen's University. She was the first
woman to be writer-in-residence at Queen's. Her subjects are the feminine subconscious,
and her favourite archetypes are rivers, clouds, clothes, flowers, ferns, and shadows. Often
inventive and witty, her works (see On Ballycastle Beach, 1988; Marconi's Cottage, 1992;
and Captain Lavender, 1994) seem closer to the concerns of the American language poets
and, in their occasional obscurity, to the verse of John Ashbery. Here is "Slips", from The
Flowermaster and Other Poems (1993). Typically, what counts in this poem is the speaker's
idiosyncratic and almost surrealist vision of things and events; the listener is first addressed
with a "your" in the last line of the fourth stanza, while the "you" in the final stanza could
also be an impersonal "one", but that listener or addressee seems to be far less important
than the images called up by the speaker.
Slips
The studied poverty of a moon roof,
The earthenware of dairies cooled by apple trees,
The apple tree that makes the whitest wash.
But I forget names, remembering them wrongly
Where they touch upon another name,
A town in France like a woman's Christian name.
My childhood is preserved as a nation's history,
My favourite fairytales the shells
Leased by the hermit crab.
I see my grandmother's death as a piece of ice,
My mother's slimness restored to her,
My own key slotted in your door
Tricks you might guess from this unfastened button,
A pen mislaid, a word misread,
My hair coming down in the middle of a conversation.
In the first half of the twentieth century and into the 1960s, Scotland had at least three im-
portant poets in Edwin Muir (1887-1959; see his Collected Poems, 1960, new ed. 1984),
who was also a novelist and critic, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978), and Somhairle
MacGill-Eain/Sorley MacLean (1911-1996). Muir was indebted to T. S. Eliot, and his
contemplative poems are better understood in an international tradition, whereas MacDiarmid
(pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve) made impressive use of Lowland Scots, one of
Scotland's major dialects (see The Complete Poems, 1985). MacLean was born on the
11 See Frank Sewall, Modern Irish Poetry: A New Alhambra. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001.
Scottish island of Raasay into a Gaelic-speaking family. His first book of poems was pub-
lished in Gaelic in 1943, and he is recognized as an important figure in the renaissance of
the Gaelic language through his work. In his later years, he lived on the Isle of Skye. His
Collected Poems in Gaelic and English was published in 1989. The Scottish poets of the
second half of the twentieth century were almost as productive as the Irish. Sidney Goodsir
Smith (1915-75), Robert Garioch (1909-87) and Tom Scott (1918-95) obviously profited
from the dialect lyrics of the Romantic poet Robert Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid's verse of
the 1920s and 1930s. Smith wrote in vigorous Scots (or Lallans), which was a remarkable
achievement in view of the fact that he was born in New Zealand and settled in Edinburgh
only in his late teens. Garioch's verse is distinguished by its humour, as he mocks affecta-
tion, hypocrisy, and unearned honours (see his Complete Poetical Works, 1983). Tom Scott,
also a remarkle poet in Scots, edited The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (1970). He pre-
ferred longer poems, often written in blank verse. Among the younger Scottish poets, men-
tion should be made of Douglas Dunn (born 1942), who grew up in Renfrewshire and has
won numerous awards for his work (see his Elegies, 1985; and his edition of The Faber
Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry, 1992), Tom Leonard (born 1944; see Intimate
Voices, 1984), and Don Paterson (born 1963; see Nil, Nil, 1993; and God's Gift to Women,
1997). As in Ireland, there are also some remarkable women poets at work in Scotland,
among them Meg Bateman (born 1959), who writes in Gaelic; Kate Clanchy (born 1965);
Kathleen Jamie (born 1962); and the much anthologized Liz Lochhead (born 1947) and
Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955). Liz Lochhead was born and brought up in industrial Lanark-
shire. She is also the author of several plays and has been concerned in a feminine self-
awareness with the male-centered world and women's attempt to cope with it. Lochhead has
had great success as a public performer of her work. In the following poem (from Dreaming
Frankenstein and Collected Poems, 1984), Lochhead puts herself in the place of Mary
Shelley, who was 19 when, after a miscarriage, she "conceived" her novel Frankenstein
(and the monster in it). A nameless speaker reports about what she has heard from Shelley,
and the conception (in the double sense of the term) of the novel is described as an inspira-
tion and unwanted impregnation, an experience which is then sublimated in the birth of
writing:
Dreaming Frankenstein
She said she
woke up with him in
her head, in her bed.
Her mother-tongue clung to her mouth's roof
in terror, dumbing her, and he came with a name
that was none her making.
No maidservant ever
in her narrow attic, combing
out her hair in the midnight mirror
on Hallowe'en (having eaten
with its yolk hollowed out
then filled with salt)
oh never one had such success as this
she had not courted.
The amazed flesh of her
neck and shoulders nettled
at his apparition.
Later, stark staring awake to everything

(the room, the dark parquet, the white Alps beyond)
all normal in the moonlight
and him gone, save a ton-weight sensation,
the marks fading visibly where
his buttons had bit into her and
the rough serge of his suiting had chafed her sex,
she knew oh that was not how
but he'd entered her utterly.
This was the penetration
of seven swallowed apple pips.
Or else he's slipped like a silver dagger
between her ribs and healed her up secretly
again. Anyway
he was inside her
and getting him out again
would be agony fit to quarter her,
unstitching everything.
Eyes on those high peaks
in the reasonable sun of the morning,
she dressed in damped muslin
and sat down to quill and ink
and icy paper.
In her Bagpipe Muzak (1991) Lochhead has collected pieces for performance (Lochhead
calls them "recitations") and some poems. Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow, grew up
in Staffordshire, has lived in Liverpool and London and now lives in Manchester. She has
published several collections of poems, including Mean Time (1993), which won the Whit-
bread Award for Poetry, and Selected Poems (1994). The social criticism of her verse is al-
ways channeled through the sensibilities of various characters (housewives, husbands,
delinquents). In the poem reprinted here, she has chosen the consciousness of a maid
reporting about the behaviour of, and her feelings for, her mistress:
Warming Her Pearls
Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress
bids me wear them, warm them, until evening
when I'll brush her hair. At six, I place them
Round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,
resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk
or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself
whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering
each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.
She's beautiful. I dream about her
in my attic bed; picture her dancing
with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent
beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.
I dust her shoulders with a rabbit's foot,
watch the soft blush seep through her skin
like an indoor sigh. In her looking-glass
my red lips part as though I want to speak.
Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see

her every movement in my head Undressing,
taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching
for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way
she always does And I lie here awake,
knowing the pearls are cooling even now
in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night
I feel their absence and I burn.
While Jackie Kay (born 1961) shares most of her concerns with Carol Ann Duffy, she ex-
tends the monologue to dramatic forms. Putting at least a question mark behind the notion
of a "truly" Scottish poetry, she is also an interesting example among the "New Generation
Poets". As a black Briton she was adopted and brought up by a white Scottish family and
provides a typical example of the marginal becoming central in Britain's multicultural so-
ciety (see The Adoption Papers, 1991, and Other Lovers, 1993).
Responding to the socio-economic and political environment over recent decades (e.g., the
growing national pride and the restoration of a Scottish parliament in 1999), contemporary
Scottish poets in the new millennium have produced verse in English, Scots, and Gaelic,
and they figure prominently on the prize circuit: Kathleen Jamie (see her collections Jizzen,
1999, and The Tree House, 2004) won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of
the Year) in 2004; Don Paterson (see his Landing Light, 2003, and Orpheus, 2007) the
T. S. Eliot Prize in 2003; Robin Robertson (born 1955; see his Slow Air, 2002) was
awarded the Forward Prize in 2006 only to be followed in 2008 by Mick Imlah (1956-
2009; see The Lost Leader, 2008). Younger Scots poets writing in Gaelic in the wake of
Aonghas MacNeacail (born 1942; see Hymn to a Young Demon, 2007) include Meg
Bateman (see her Fair Wind, 2007) and Martin MacIntyre (or Mrtainn Mac an t-Saor,
born 1965). Distinguished contemporary poets writing in Scots (the Scottish variety of
English) are the Glasgow poet David Kinloch (born 1959; see Un Tour d'Ecosse, 2001),
and Robert Crawford (born 1959), who moved from Glasgow to Oxford, and Rab Wilson
(born 1960; see his collection Accent o the Mind, 2006), who comes from south-west
Scotland. Among Scottish women poets, spearheaded by Liz Lochhead, Carol Ann Duffy
and Jackie Kay (see her Off Colour, 1998), who have published important collections after
2000 mention must be made of Dilys Rose (born 1954; see her Bodywork, 2007), and
Angela McSeveney. Born in Edinburgh in 1964, McSeveney was brought up in Ross-shire
and the Scottish borders. From her early collections on, she has been concerned with the
question of what it means to be a woman biologically and socially and the female body
has indeed been at the focus of her attention as in the following poem from her Slaughtering
Beetroot (2008):
Grey Hairs
As I sleep my scalp labours on
weaving glittering strands
from the dead fibres of my hair.
Never so noticeable when I was a brunette,
now they drift everywhere
like frost-rimed leaves.
Pinned to my cardigans by static
they are wrought metal jewellery,
a filigree of fancy embroidery.
They cling to the bristles of brooms,

the insides of vacuum cleaners,
clog the shower stinking of marsh gas.
I have heard of birds' nests being found
lined by hanks of it: our council guidelines suggest
mulching it down on the compost.
Then there's the pounds of skin flakes
sinking annually into the mattress
to keep the dust mites going.
It's not at the very end that we return
to the earth we came from.
It takes us back in instalments.
Wales found in a clergyman, R(onald) S(tuart) Thomas (1913-2000; see Collected Poems,
1993), a gifted poet who wrote moving verse about the remote parts of his homeland. The
younger Welsh poets are more cosmopolitan in their views, partly because they were edu-
cated in or moved to England or to the United States. Thus Stephen Knight (born 1960),
though he grew up in Swansea, works in London as a theatre director. He won the 1992
National Poetry Competition, his collections including Flowering Limbs (1993) and Dream
City Cinema (1996). But some poets prefer their native Welsh language for the first versions
of their verse. These truly Welsh poets include Menna Elfyn (born 1951; see her bilingual
collections entitled Eucalyptus, 1995; and Cell Angel, 1996), and Gwyneth Lewis (born
1959). Born in Cardiff, Lewis works as a television producer. She writes in Welsh, her first
language, and in English. Her first volume of poetry in English, Parables & Faxes,
appeared in 1995.
In 1993, Michael Hulse (born 1955), together with David Kennedy and David Morley,
edited an anthology, The New Poetry, which introduced yet another, younger, generation of
poets, among them the "New Generation Poets", i.e., British and Irish authors who began
writing or came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Simon Armitage, John
Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, Lavinia Greenlaw, Michael Hofmann, Kathleen Jamie and
Glyn Maxwell). If anything new can be detected in the voices of those who came to the fore
in the two decades before the millennium, it is a stronger cosmopolitan spirit and themes
such as gender and race in the context of travel, immigration or emigration which are not
new but have gained increasing importance in Britain's multi-racial society. In addition, the
younger poets also react to and even integrate the new media. Whether in Ireland or in
Britain, issues of gender have been treated in poetry by such different, yet equally strong,
voices as those of Eavan Boland and Liz Lochhead discussed above. They write in the wake
of senior women poets, such as Anne Stevenson (born in 1933, of American parents in
England), Fleur Adcock (born 1934; see Selected Poems, 1991), who moved to London
from New Zealand, Stevie Smith (1902-71; see Collected Poems, 1975), Kathleen Raine
(1908-2003; see Selected Poems, 1988), and Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001; see Collected
Poems, 1987), a member of the "The Movement". Like Boland and Lochhead, the younger
English women poets (born after 1945) incorporate into their work a strategic and
imaginative awareness of issues of gender. Selima Hill (born 1945), a "new Generation
Poet", gives us a wry view of "The Unsuccessful Wedding Night" and of love ("Don't Let's
Talk About Being in Love") see her collections Trembling Hearts in the Bodies of Dogs,
1994, and Violet, 1997. And Sarah Maguire (born 1957; see Spilt Milk, 1991, and The
Invisible Mender, 1997), who was trained as a gardener before reading English at the Uni-
versity of East Anglia, is capable of turning the tables on men and male poets on the issue of
sex. At least from the Renaissance onward, wooeing the other sex and describing physical
features and the sexual act had been a prerogative of men who wrote about mostly silent or
absent women (cf., for example, Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress", 1681). Maguire's
"Spilt Milk" (1999) features a speaking woman and a silent, absent, man: It is the woman
who longs for the male body and his sex, but history also intervenes (the gender issue) as
the speaker is reminded of the uneven and unjust roles women were allotted in love rela-
tions over the centuries:
Spilt Milk
Two soluble aspirins in this glass, their mycilia
fruiting the water, which I twist into milkiness.
The whole world seems to slide into the drain by my window.
It has rained and rained since you left, the streets black
and muscled with water. Out of pain and exhaustion you came
into my mouth, covering my tongue with your good and bitter milk.
Now I find you have cashed that cheque. I imagine you
slipping the paper under the steel and glass. I sit here in a circle
of lamplight, studying women of nine hundred years past.
My hand moves into darkness as I write. The adulterous woman
lost her nose and ears; the man was fined. I drain the glass.
I still want to return to that hotel room by the station
to hear all night the goods trains coming and leaving.
It is true that the cosmopolitan outlook already existed before the arrival on the scene of
such poets as Hulse. We find it, for example, in the verse of Peter Porter (born 1929), an
expatriate Australian and one of the most intelligent and lively poets now working in
England. His witty and allusive lyrics are far from being regional or English in their tone
and message (see Fast Forward, and Collected Poems, both published in 1984; and A
Porter Selected, 1989, and Millennial Fables, 1994). Porter shares this approach with such
"New Generaton Poets" as Michael Hofmann (born in Germany in 1957, the son of the
novelist Gert Hofmann; see Corona, Corona, 1993) and Michael Hulse, the son of an
English father and a German mother. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hulse taught English at
German universites and received several literary awards. Also a translator and literary critic,
he is editor of the literary magazine Leviathan Quarterly. His poems, collected in Knowing
and Forgetting (1981) and Propaganda (1985), reveal a vision that is emphatically
European rather than national. The poem "On Location" (from Propaganda), for instance,
was occasioned by his witnessing of Fassbinder's filming of a scene for the movie Lola
(1981) in Eichsttt, Bavaria, where Hulse was teaching at the time. Also alluding to
Fassbinder's film, which is centrally concerned with corruption in the new German post-war
state, the poem confronts the seeming bucolic innocence of a small baroque town with the
terrible history of its Nazi past. The syllabic lines (alternating between 10 and 12 syllables)
and the rhyme provide an ironic contrast to the sad subject that emerges toward the end of
the piece:
On Location
This superannuated Bavarian town
of crumbling baroque and flaking faades
is the perfect backdrop for these shameful charades.
It is a dull place which neither renown

nor notoriety has ever disgraced, so
it is only fitting that this film crew
should choose to engender their legend of a Jew,
his Aryan wife, and the Gestapo
here on this unhistoric square (for, after all,
the innocent presence is the fittest
set on which to play actions of the guilty past,
since there we see the full ironical
force of historical fact). Thus the director
sits in his canvas chair smoking cigars,
snapping Hollywood commandments at timid stars,
his belly in his lap, his green visor
pushed back into his straight black hair. Incessantly
the make-up girl paints, the clapperboard snaps,
and cameras capture the frail, final (perhaps)
fitness of inevitability,
filming reality into fiction, fiction
into reality: who can tell which?
With luck this movie will make its producer rich,
Will even be seen on television
in Israel and the States, Japan and Germany.
Tourists who visit this town in future
will tell each other that was Aaron's house, and there
Was where he said goodbye to Rosemary.
Hulse's long poem Mother of Battles (1991) interprets the Gulf War through Sumerian myth
and shows his political concerns. Like his previous collections, Hulse's Eating Strawberries
in the Metropolis (1991) is alert to the ironies of history; it is humorous and serious in equal
measure as he interweaves poems of love and adultery with others on politics, faith and art.
One of the most interesting sections in this book is the series of five poems on paintings by
Winslow Homer; they constitute a marvellous ekphrastic response in words to images even
while showing that the paintings themselves are best read in this way that is as a provo-
cation to speak about (and around) them, but not to explain them. One also finds such poli-
tical and philosophical concerns in the verse of some of Hulse's contemporaries. Among
them are Sean O'Brien, Glyn Maxwell, Helen Dunmore, and Jamie McKendrick. Sean
O'Brien (born 1952) is one of the poets centred in and around Hull. O'Brien's Ghost Train,
1995, won the Forward Poetry Prize. Glyn Maxwell (born 1962; see Rest for the Wicked,
1995) grew up in Wales and lives in Massachusetts and in London. Helen Dunmore (born
1952; see Short Days, Long Nights, 1991) spent some time teaching in Finland, and Jamie
McKendrick (born 1955) teaches in Oxford (see The Kiosk, 1993). His The Marble Fly,
1997, was awarded the Forward Poetry Prize.
If the Irish and Scottish poets and the Anglo-German Hulse have a special relation with
language, precisely because they often shuttle, in language and in life, between two lan-
guages and two cultures, this is also true for some other younger poets who live in England
but cannot really be said to represent "Englishness" in the old sense of the term. In their
introduction to The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945 (1998), the
"New Generation Poets" Simon Armitage (born 1963) and Robert Crawford (born 1959)
one English, the other Scottish argued convincingly that when one deals with the poetic
productions of Britain and Ireland, one is in fact faced with "several nations and two states
that share a common language (though they also contain other minority languages with a
long literary history)" and that "one of the striking things about the poetry of this era is []
poetic emigration and immigration" (pp. xix, xxvi). By this they mean the large community
of British writers who were born of parents who came from Commonwealth countries or
who themselves came from or went to India, Pakistan, Africa, Canada, and the Caribbean.
These poets bring a richness to cultural and linguistic perception which is unprecedented in
British literature. Linton Kwesi Johnson (born 1952), who was born in Jamaica and came
to London in 1963, may partly voice the anger of the disadvantaged immigrant when he
argues, in "Inglan Is a Bitch",
Inglan is a bitch
Dere's no escapin' it
Inglan is a bitch
Dere's no runnin' whey fram it.
But the rage and deliberate overstatements are not the only keynotes of his poetry (see
Inglan is a Bitch, 1980, and Tings and Times, 1991) there is an equal measure of op-
timistic vitality, energy and exuberance. Johnson has performed his poetry with a group of
musicians called Rasta Love; as a consequence, reggae rhythms often dominate what is
called "dub poetry". This is based on "dub", an instrumental version of a reggae musical
recording in which the music is driven by a mix of drum and bass sounds, and the lyrics that
come with it are performed to a sound track of dub music. Sometimes delivered without
music, the verse is still based on the musical rhythms of reggae music. He shares this variety
of poetry with John Agard (born 1949; see Laughter is an Egg, 1990), who was born in
British Guyana and came to England in 1977, and Benjamin Zephaniah (born 1958), an
"emigrant" who was born in Birmingham and grew up in Jamaica and in the UK. Typically,
Zephaniah, who now lives in the East End of London, is both a musician and a poet (see his
Propa Propaganda, 1996). Zephaniah was nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at
Oxford (formerly held by Seamus Heaney), and his recent works Talking Turkeys (1995)
and Funky Chickens (1996) try to catch a young adult audience. The dub poets share both
their socio-political engagement (Johnson, for instance, was an activist in the Black Panther
Movement) and the musical, performative, aspect of their verse with such younger Blacks
as Fred D'Aguiar (born 1960), who edited the Black British section of The New British
Poetry (1988; see also his Mama Dot, 1985, and British Subjects, 1993), and Patience
Agbabi (born 1965), whose Transformatrix (2000) is inspired by '80s rap and '70s disco but
also draws on the poetry of the 1990s in her explorations of the realities of postmodern
Britain, including race (see, for instance, her "Mnage Trois"). If, to some extent, the
lyrics of the composers of dub poetry are remarkable for the exotic quality of their language
(Jamaican English), some of their contemporaries try to express their particular "non-
English" vision in verse that is formally very English. This is the case with Sujata Bhatt
(born 1956), who was born in India (see The Stinking Rose, 1994), Moniza Alvi (born
1954; see A Bowl of Warm Air, 1996), who was born in Lahore and moved to England at an
early age, and Grace Nichols (born 1950), who came to England from British Columbia in
1977. Her i is a long memoried woman won the 1983 Commonwealth Poetry Prize (see also
her recent Sunris, 1996). One of the most interesting examples in the context of this
"exoticism" brought to British poetry is the winner of the 1998 British National Poetry
Competition. This is the poem the jury selected, no doubt because they thought it was from
the pen of a younger Caribbean poet:
horse under water

Jigharzi an me stand in de water
warm an friendly
for the world smell like snails
oozing on hot charcoal
an jigharzi step wary
as tiger fish skip between his legs
as he make like he hate de coral forever
an i slip from his back de knife in my hand
forget de electric blue and glitter of de rainbow
an wait for shark to come over de reef
as tide liffff de water over
an soon de fin come
quiver when it see me but it come
shark he thick between de ears if he had them i say
an jigharzi he snorting and heading for land
coz dis fellow mean business
an he say why you wan kill him anyway
an i say is sport man as well as supper
an impress the tourists good an good mean money
an i say trus me jigharzi
an de fin go out like a light as de brute turn over
an jigharzi say man dis fellow bes swimmer in de sea
an de rush of water push me sideways
an de teeth glitter in sunshine that come through de water
hundreds of teeth iiiiiichin to bite me dead
an i liff de knife but it move slow
for everything cep dis killer move slow in de water
but fear drive my hand
an i slash him in de stomach
an de monster done falter fffffalter in de water
but he turn roun anyways
an come again kinda slow now
an i slash him in de stomach in de same place de
same place de same place de same place
till his womb come out an his gut
for it not a he but a lady
with babies in a bag all ready to do business
but jigharzi he long gone for shore
for de water full of blood clouds of blood
clouds of froth clouds of gore
but not clouds of joy cos it a lady
When the winner, Caroline Carver (born 1936), appeared to pick up her prize, it turned out
that she was white and had grown up in the Caribbean. Held in a Creole English that pro-
vides a perspective which is both humorous and critical, the poem impresses one with its
sensitive description of Caribbean scenery and customs and a feminist vision of local
"blood" sports. With such voices from outside the traditional cultural centre (from the "bar-
barians", as Seamus Heaney used to call himself and other non-English poets in the British
Isles or in Ireland), and with the confident younger women poets, British poetry today is
more alive and more interesting than ever before.
This was confirmed in 2004 when the Poetry Book Society followed up the venture of the
promotional campaign in 1994 of the New Generation Poets (including, at that time, Simon
Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamie and Glyn Maxwell), presenting twenty more
hopefuls, known as the Next Generation Poets. Curiously, several of the latter are older than
the New Generation predecessors since the criterion for inclusion was that the poets had to
be "first published between 1994 and 2004" some of the New Generation are in their fifties
(e.g., Amanda Dalton, born 1957; Pascale Petit, born 1953; Jane Draycott, born 1954,
Matthew Francis, born 1956; and the Irish poet Maurice Riordan, born 1953). While eleven
of the poets are women, the "Celtic fringe" is represented by only six writers. Focusing on
the younger poets, one notices that instead of breaking with traditions they are quite capable
of using both traditional forms and themes. Thus Sophie Hannah (born 1971) in "To a
Certain Person" (from her fourth collection, First of the Last Chances, 2003) and Alice
Oswald (born 1966), who won the T. S. Eliot prize for poetry in 2002 for her Dart (a
collection of poems and prose texts), express their lovers' complaints in the Shakespearean
sonnet form.
Traditional romantic themes (the beauty of nature, the seasons) are treated by the Liverpool
poet Deryn Rees-Jones (born 1968) in "Summer" (from her collection The Memory Tray,
1995) and by the Cumbrean poet Jacob Polley (born 1975) in "A Jar of Honey" (from The
Brink, 2004):
A Jar of Honey
You hold it like a lit bulb,
a pound of light,
and swivel the stunned glow
around the fat glass sides:
it's the sun, all flesh and no bones
but for the floating knuckle
of honeycomb
attesting to the nature of the struggle
One of the unique voices among the Next Generation is that of Gwyneth Lewis. Born into a
Welsh speaking family in Cardiff in 1959, she acquired English as a second language,
graduated from Gerton College, Cambridge University, and went through various phases of
depression with her husband, a former sailor. Publishing in both Welsh and English, she
wrote about these personal nightmares and has also been concerned with the sad, gradual,
disappearance of the Welsh language. In "What's in a Name?" (from her 2003 collection
Keeping Mum) she likens the slow death of Welsh to the extinction of species of birds:
What's in a Name?
Today the wagtail finally forgot
that I once called it sigl-di-gwt.
It didn't give a tinker's toss,
kept right on rooting in river moss,
(no longer mwswgl) relieved, perhaps,
that someone would be noticing less
about its habits. Magpies' fear of men
lessened, as we'd lost one means

(the word pioden) of keeping track
of terrorist birds out in the back.
Lleian wen is not the same as 'smew'
because it's another point of view,
another bird. There's been a cull:
gwylan's gone and we 're left with 'gull'
and blunter senses till that day
when 'swallows', like gwennol, might stay away.
If British poetry after 2000 has shown signs of revival and new beginnings, albeit in partly
traditional forms, so has the poetry of Ireland. This is attested by Michael Longley's 20th-
century Irish Poems (2002) and especially by Selina Guinness's collection of 2004. Entitled
The New Irish Poets, it brought together thirty-three poets of different ages: the youngest,
Leanne O'Sullivan, was 21, and Fergus Allen, the oldest, 83. Gearid Mac Lochlainn
(born in Belfast) is one of the three poets in the anthology writing in Gaelic. Feeling that
women had been notoriously badly served by anthologies in the past, Selina Guinness in-
cluded 15 women poets, among them Dorothy Molloy (1942-2004; see Hair Soup, 2004),
Paula Cunningham (born 1963), Caitrona O'Reilly (born 1973; see The Sea Cabinet,
2006) and Sinad Morrissey (born 1972). In 2007, Morrissey's title poem from her col-
lection Through the Square Window (2009) won the British National Poetry competition.
Together with the Dublin-born David Wheatley (born 1970; see his Mocker, 2006, and
Lament for Ali Farka Tour, 2008), they are remarkable successors to Derek Mahon, Paul
Muldoon and Seamus Heaney.
Finally, the emergence of both women and the "Celtic fringe" (Wales, Ireland, Scotland) in
English-language poetry published in the United Kingdom received an impetus with inter-
national echoes in 2009, when the Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy was elected poet laureate
(after Andrew Motion relinquished the honorary post) and thus the first woman to take a
341-year-old job. Duffy strongly spoke out against attempts in the press and in literary criti-
cism to discuss her as a bisexual or lesbian poet (she is the mother of a daughter and had a
relationship with the Scottish poet Jackie Kay), and one notices indeed that her poetry is
marked by her experience in Britain of class differences (she grew up in a working-class
neighbourhood in Glasgow) and the difficulties women encounter in their daily lives and
careers. In her The World's Wife (1999) and again in Feminine Gospels (2002), she gave
voice to alienated and dispossessed female speakers in dramatic monologues that are among
her favourite poetic forms. In her recent collection entitled Rapture (2005) she also engages
with the (emotional and sexual) passion expressed throughout the history of poetry, from
Shakespeare to Robert Browning, in highly intertextual poems probing different facets of
love.
3. Drama
Early twentieth-century drama pursued the realistic tradition established by Pinero and Jones
and by William Archer's translations of Henrik Ibsen's (1828-1900) plays. A number of
playwrights had the courage to shock their audience by introducing themes like hypocrisy,
notably hypocrisy about sex and the sexual double standard (which allowed men, but not
women, to have sexual relations before marriage), and the rights of women and their role in
society. Such social and moral criticism occurs in the plays of St John Ervine (1883-1971),
an Irish dramatist and critic, St John Hankin (1860-1909), William Stanley Houghton
(1881-1913), Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946), John E. Vedrenne (1867-1930), and
the novelists and poets John Masefield (1878-1967), John Galsworthy (1867-1933), and
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). The kind of realistic drama they wrote was initially
faced with both public and political hostility. Thus Granville-Barker's Waste (1907), which
deals with the death through an illegal operation of the mistress of a promising politician,
and Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), which focuses on prostitution as well as other
seemingly shocking subjects, were banned by the Lord Chamberlain, the English censor.
The censor's office was not abolished until 1968, by which time important plays by Arthur
Miller (A View From the Bridge), Tennessee Williams (Cat On a Hot Tin Roof), Osborne (A
Patriot For Me), and Bond (Saved, Early Morning) had been banned from the English stage.
If problem plays were eventually accepted, it is largely through the achievement of Gals-
worthy and Shaw. Galsworthy, who was a better artist as a novelist, tackled contemporary
social problems in his plays. The Silver Box (1906) and Justice (1910) are on the inhumanity
of legal practices and injustice before the law, while Strife (1909) is concerned with strikes
and capitalism. Galsworthy's later dramas The Skin Game (1920) and Loyalties (1922) often
degenerate into sentimentalism and melodrama. Despite convincing plots, his plays suffer
from simple characterization and a didactic tendency
that presses home the messages with a heavy em-
phasis.
The playwright who eclipsed all other dramatists at
this time was George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).
An Irishman, he came from Dublin to London in
1876 and began his literary career with five unsuc-
cessful novels as well as essays, theatre criticism and
reviews. Shaw defended Ibsen against the attacks of
the critics in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891)
and decided that his own plays should also be ve-
hicles for ideas. It was with Widowers' Houses (1892)
and Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893) that he began
to dominate European theatre. Mrs. Warren's Profes-
sion is concerned with two important issues that oc-
cupied the early women's movement as well as
proto-feminists like Shaw, i.e., the professional pos-
sibilities for educated women and the oldest profes-
sion in the world, prostitution. The play suggests
that both vocations are acceptable as Shaw juxta-
poses a liberated daughter, Vivie Warren, and her un- Poster for a play by G. B. Shaw
ashamed and more traditional mother who keeps a
brothel (hence the title of the play). Shaw's play does not make any empty gestures of
feminine solidarity nor does it propose a compromise or reconciliation. Instead, we witness
how a door is slammed and the isolated Vivie continues contentedly in her work. However,
the social criticism of what he termed his "plays unpleasant" was not too well received. In
Widowers' Houses, for instance, he exposed the rich landlords who exploited the inhabitants
of London's slums. So Shaw added some comedy and wit to the following dramas, the
"plays pleasant," ridiculing the idealization of war in Arms and the Man (1894) and showing
the true position of modern married women in Candida (1895). In 1901 he published his
three "plays for Puritans": The Devil's Disciple (1897) figures a hero despite himself in the
American War of Independence; Caesar and Cleopatra (1898; performed in 1906) reduces
Caesar to human size while still leaving him his greatness; and Captain Brassbound's
Conversion (1899), a true comedy, is about a pirate who ends up as a henpecked husband.
Shaw wrote a great many other plays that exposed illusions and false values. Thus Major
Barbara (1905) shows that even the Salvation Army depends on dirty money. With Pyg-
malion (1913), a play that has seen numerous film and opera versions as My Fair Lady
(New York, 1956), Shaw wrote a satire on snobbishness in which Professor Henry Higgins
turns a cockney12 girl into a lady without considering her feelings. G. B. Shaw's philosophy
of a "life force", a power that seeks to raise mankind to a higher and better existence, is
derived from Schopenhauer, Samuel Butler and Friedrich Nietzsche's Creative Evolution13.
Shaw demonstrated it in Man and Superman (1905), sub-titled "a comedy and a philoso-
phy", where a woman not a man is chasing for the father of her child, a future "super-
man". This play also demonstrates another influence on Shaw the tradition of musical
theatre and the Mozartian and Wagnerian opera. The dwarfs, giants, and gods we find in
their plays can be understood, according to Shaw, as "the three main orders of men" (i.e.,
the lustful and greedy people, the patient and money-worshipping sort, and the intellectual
and talented men and women). This Wagnerian scheme, with a shot of Marxist theory and
Shaw's own vision, finally emerged in his criticism of social conditions. Heartbreak House
(1919) and Back to Methuselah (1921) are both very much concerned with the development
of culture and the failure of our civilization as demonstrated by World War I. Saint Joan
(1923) is an attempt to show the functioning of the "life force" at a particular historical
moment: Shaw's Joan of Arc appears as the first "Protestant" martyr who prefers private
judgment to ecclesiastical dogma and opinion.
Shaw used his dramatic skill to publicize all sorts of ideas, so much so that many of his plays
seem to be debating platforms. But there can be no doubt that the mixture of nineteenth-cen-
tury notions of evolution, scientific progress, and Socialism in Shaw's plays is entertaining.
Shaw was a rationalist whose literary gift prevented him from ever writing a boring scene.
What his dramas lack, however, is a human and emotional dimension that would be able to
move deeply.
Shaw published his critical views of drama in the prefaces to his plays. To some extent,
these critical introductions are the consequences of censorship, for only the performance
not the publication of some of his plays was initially banned by the Lord Chamberlain.
But Shaw's critical views in print impressed a number of playwrights. Thus the Shavian in-
fluence is to be found in the plays of the two Scotsmen J. M. Barrie and James Bridie as
well as in those of J. B. Priestley and Somerset Maugham, who were both also novelists.
A Scottish writer resident in London, J(ames) M(atthew) Barrie (1860-1937) introduced
fantasy with his Peter Pan (1904), today mainly read and watched by children, and wrote a
12 A native of the East End of London, or a Londoner with a working-class accent and/or back-
ground.
13 The term Creative Evolution covers some of Nietzsche's ideas, such as the need of a Superman,
the will to power, and the superiority of life over consciousness.
number of more sentimental comedies before producing in The Admirable Crichton (1902)
and Dear Brutus (1917) two plays that contain both pathos and irony and are distinguished
by their craftsmanship. Barrie provided escapism in a society that would not have tolerated
straightforward attacks on its rigid class system. So the issue is mentioned, discussed but
never put into question, as in The Admirable Crichton we move from the expensively fur-
nished Mayfair drawing-room of Lord Loam to a desert island. Significantly, it is in this
island, not in England, that Lord Loam's butler Crichton can show his superior qualities.
Similarly, Peter Pan takes us from a nursery in London's Bloomsbury to Neverland where
the displaced Peter is allowed to spend his mother-loving, sexless boyhood. James Bridie
(1888-1951) experimented in Shaw's manner with dialogue, staging, and plot. In such plays
as A Sleeping Clergyman (1933), Mr Bolfry (1943), and Daphne Laureola (1949), he com-
mented on moral questions of his day while incorporating elements of myth and fantasy.
Bridie's plays may lack philosophical depth, but their irony and cleverly constructed plots
make them as entertaining as the comedies of Priestley and Maugham.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) began with light comedies in the style of Sheridan
and Wilde Caesar's Wife and Home and Beauty (1919) and advanced to more so-
phisticated comedy in The Circle (1921) and Our Betters (1923), which are concerned with
marriage and adultery. In For Services Rendered (1932) and Sheppey (1933) Maugham
examined the place of human charity in a cynical and non-religious age. Somerset
Maugham was a homosexual, like Nol Coward (1899-1973), who wrote very successful
but superficial comedies (see Hay Fever, 1925, and Blithe Spirit, 1941), and Terence
Rattigan (1911-1977; see The Winslow Boy, 1946), a representative of the social comedy.
The shallowness of their plays may in part derive from the fact that they had to translate
their personal experience and viewpoints into heterosexual terms.
J(ohn) B(oynton) Priestley (1894-1985) began with social dramas that appear more pro-
found than they really are. Continuing with traditional comedies with a touch of his native
Yorkshire humour Eden End (1934); When We Are Married (1938) Priestley then ex-
perimented in his plays after reading and studying the modern philosophical time theories of
J. W. Dunne and Ouspensky14. Hence the focus on destiny, predestination and notions of
time in his Dangerous Corner (1932), Time And the Conways (1937), and I Have Been Here
Before (1937). After the war Priestley returned to more traditional ways of constructing his
plays with The Linden Tree (1947), in which an academic and his wife are confronted at a
family reunion with the contrasting philosophies of their adult children, and the successful
An Inspector Calls (1946), which stresses the need of mutual responsibility. Take the Fool
Away (1956) is set in an Orwellian world of terror and technology, from which the central
character, a clown, finally manages to escape. Though Priestley has failed in several in-
stances to write convincing dialogue, it is evident that he possesses dramatic skill and a
lively method of conveying his themes.
The strongest impulses in early modern drama came from Ireland as part of what has been
called the Irish Literary Renaissance. This movement was best expressed in poetry and
14 John William Dunne (1875-1949), author of the popular An Experiment with Time (1927) and
The Serial Universe (1934), in which he developed a theory of time that was to explain precog-
nition and dreaming about future events. Ouspensky (1878-1947) was an unorthodox philos-
opher and a journalist of Russian origin who disseminated the theosophical teaching of G. I.
Gurdjieff.
drama and in the marriage of both in poetic drama. The Irish Literary Theatre was estab-
lished in 1899, mainly through the efforts of Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory (1852-1932),
who wrote a few one-act comedies, and William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). This theatre
soon developed into the Irish National Theatre Society, housed in the Abbey Theatre,
Dublin, founded in 1904. Yeats brought his poetical gift to the movement, and the new Irish
theatre began with his The Countess Cathleen (1892), which is the story in blank verse of a
woman (the symbol of Ireland) who sells her soul to
the devil to save her countrymen. The countess is
eventually rewarded for her sacrifice by angels chas-
ing the devil away. Yeats again used blank verse in
The Land of Heart's Desire (1894) while also draw-
ing on Irish folklore and superstitions. Objecting to
realistic drama, Yeats employed his characters as sym-
bols, most obviously in The Shadowy Waters (1900)
of which there are several versions. This play figures
King Forgael who, driven by his longing for love,
follows the seabirds until he finds Dectora and his
dreams come true. Deirdre15 (1907) and On Baile's
Strand (1904) also focus on characters from Irish
legend and explore tragic dimensions. With the latter
Yeats began a series of plays concerned with the an-
cient Irish hero Cuchulain (pronounced Coohoolin).
He explored the possibilities of innovatory stage
techniques, making his characters express abstract
ideas and breaking down psychological realism into
shadows, oppositions, and reflections. Under the
influence of Ezra Pound, who introduced him to the
Actor wearing a mask for Japanese N-theatre, Yeats changed his style during
Yeats's At the Hawk's Well. 1916 World War I. His Four Plays For Dancers (1921)
elaborate the tension between the natural world and
the metaphysical. As in N-drama, there is little plot and scenery, the actors wear masks,
and dialogue is limited and abstract. At the Hawk's Well (1916) finally moved away from
direct references to legend; Cuchulain is suggested by a series of patterned words and sym-
bols as Yeats emphasizes light effects, the use of masks, dance, and music, the whole piece
climaxing in a ritualistic dance. The larger audience failed to respond to such plays, but
Yeats was content with his coterie. He refined his symbolical poetic drama in Purgatory
(1938), which shows the dead doing penance by returning to the places of their misdeeds. In
The Death of Cuchulain (1939), a sort of ritual report on the death of the Irish mythical
figure, Yeats moved beyond N-drama while introducing bare stages and shifts of time-per-
spective. Though Yeats found much opposition from conservative Irish audiences who
resented his esoteric philosophy, magic ritual, and symbolism, he did much for drama by
15 An Irish mythical figure reported to have been of extraordinary beauty. The daughter of a
harper, Deirdre became the victim of King Conchubar's revenge, when she fell in love with
Naoise and ignored the king. Conchubar lured the lovers back to Ulster, when they fled to Scot-
land; Naoise was slain and Deirdre took her own life.
rediscovering myth and verse. His pioneering work, not always convincing, proved vitally
important for playwrights in the area of poetic drama.
Apart from Yeats, the Irish Theatre profited from the works of Synge and O'Casey. John
Millington Synge (1871-1909) died prematurely, yet his six completed plays established
him as the greatest of modern Irish dramatists. Synge was discovered by Yeats. After trav-
elling on the Continent, he found in the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland the
rhythm of a simple, rich, and poetic language for drama based on the speech of Irish peasants.
With his Gaelicized English Synge created a new idiom that worked exceptionally well in
his plays. Two of these are tragedies: Riders to the Sea (1904) has a Greek quality in its
story of a mother acknowledging the power of fate that will destroy her last son. In Deirdre
of the Sorrows (1910), which was almost finished when Synge died, the Irish mythological
figure has found one of its most convincing dramatic interpretations. In his comedies, Synge
dealt with the theme of appearance and reality, but also with such traditional topics as
cuckolds and henpecked husbands. In the Shadow of the Glen (1903) and The Tinker's
Wedding (1908) comment on the conflict between the boring security of an honourable life
and the passion and joviality in the life of the Irish vagabonds. Finally, Synge's The Playboy
of the Western World (1907) is a comedy of bitter and ironic realism, the climax of his
achievement. The play caused riots in the Abbey Theatre on its first production.
Christy Mahon, a weak and frightened young man, arrives at a town on the remote coastline of
Co. Mayo and announces that, having killed his bullying father in a quarrel, he is now a fugitive
from justice. Christy is well received and hospitably treated, and his dare-devil image gives him
great advantage with the women, especially with the publican's daughter Pegeen who eventually
becomes his fiance. But the admiration of the villagers and several women gives way to angry
contempt when Christy's father arrives and it is revealed that he has merely received a crack on
the head. Exposed as a liar at the very moment of his triumph, Christy now really tries to batter
his father to death with a spade, only to be seized by the villagers who are afraid of being
accused of the murder. Finally, Pegeen turns against Christy, the indestructible older Mahon
crawls onto the stage, and the father and son leave for home.
Although he wrote only for about 10 years, Synge brought new life to drama with his under-
standing of human nature, his realistic characters and language, and a pervasive humour
governed by an extraordinary poetic imagery.
Sean O'Casey (1880-1964) was the last important representative of the Irish Literary Re-
naissance. Born John Casey, and, at the height of his identification with the Irish Gaelic
League, called "Sean O Cathasaigh", he was a poor Protestant by birth. As a child, O'Casey
experienced the sordidness of the Dublin slums. Later, he became involved with the Irish
Citizen Army16. If Yeats wrote from a kind of aristocratic viewpoint, O'Casey's early plays
touch the rockbottom of reality. The Shadow of a Gunman was produced in the Abbey
Theatre at Dublin in 1923 and is concerned with the suffering of the Irish Republicans in
their fight for freedom. Though basically tragic, the play is laced with uproarious laughter
and elements of the grotesque. Realistic detail and a peculiar mixture of tragic and comic
aspects also distinguish O'Casey's masterpiece, Juno and the Paycock (1924).
16 The Irish Citizen Army was a paramilitary organization formed to protect the workers in the
general strike of 1913. They joined forces with the Irish Republican Brotherhood (later Irish
Republican Army) in the Easter Rebellion of 1916.
The play treats of the destiny of a family in the slums of Dublin. Jack Boyle, a drunk and a
spendthrift, and his wife, Juno, are told that they have inherited a large sum of money. On this
expectation, the family gets heavily into debt, discovering too late that a fault in the will means
they will receive nothing. The Boyle's daughter, Mary, is abandoned by her lover, by whom she
is pregnant, and the son, Johnny, is shot by the revolutionaries because he has betrayed a friend
to the Irish Free-Staters. Juno then leaves her husband Jack and joins Mary to help her.
Juno and the Paycock thus presents a grim story of destruction inflicted both by the outside
world and by the inner failings of the characters. Technically, it may be rather a conven-
tional drama, but it offers moving moments of tragedy, melodrama, irony, and a colourful
language.
The Plough and the Stars (1926), concerned with the Irish Easter Rebellion of 1916, led to a
riot at the Abbey Theatre because the public believed that O'Casey had ridiculed the Irish
rebels and their cause. Two years later, the Abbey rejected his pacifist war drama The Silver
Tassie. O'Casey went to England and began experimenting with the techniques of expres-
sionism. He found a theatre for the premire of The Silver Tassie, a tragi-comic dramatic
comment on the First World War, and was thus able to put into practice his innovatory
ideas. Thus he had the painter Augustus John design the scenery for the stylized expres-
sionism of Act II, and the contrast between the naturalism of the first and fourth acts and the
alienation of the second and third acts announced a new style. Non-realistic effects, such as
symbolism, song, and poetry, can be found in such later plays as Within The Gates (1934)
and Red Roses For Me (1942). O'Casey's last dramas again find their motifs in Ireland. Set
in imaginary Irish villages, Cock-A-Doodle Dandy (1949), The Bishop's Bonfire (1955) and
The Drums of Father Ned (1958) mock Irish bourgeois hypocrisy and criticize the dom-
inance of the Catholic Church and its clergy.
With the exception of Brian Friel (born 1929) in the 1970s and '80s, discussed below, no
Irish dramatist after O'Casey has been able to surpass his dramatic mixture of realism,
romance, and symbolism in a prose that is always highly poetic. Samuel Beckett (1906-89)
must be seen as an international playwright rather than as an Anglo-Irish writer as he has
written most of his plays in French and in France. Brendan Behan (1923-1964), like
O'Casey of lower-class origin, and Padraic Colum (1881-1972) are minor dramatists who
have written in O'Casey's shadow.
In the 1930s, a few attempts were made in English drama to return to the use of verse. Yeats
had broken new ground, and T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and W. H. Auden developed verse
drama in different directions and with special targets. What they had in common was a
small audience, almost a coterie, and today one can say that, apart from Eliot's earlier work,
the achievement of poetic drama hardly matched the hopes that were initially expressed.
W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden, in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, used the stage for
left-wing propaganda in works like The Dance of Death (1935), The Dog Beneath the Skin
(1935), The Ascent of F6 (1937), and On the Frontier (1936). Employing verse of a racy
and colloquial kind, songs, and Expressionist devices, Auden basically repeated the political
ideas of his non-dramatic verse. The Ascent of F6 is the most remarkable of these plays.
With music by Benjamin Britten (1913-76)17, its central theme is the problem of power
17 Also a pianist and a conductor, Benjamin Britten was Britain's best known composer in the
twentieth century. He produced operas (see Peter Grimes, 1945; The Beggar's Opera, 1948;
examined in the description of an expedition to the highest mountain in the world (F6) and
the conflicts in the mind of the leader of the group. Auden and Isherwood packed into this
drama not only Wordsworthian blank verse but also colloquial comments by "ordinary"
people and by a radio-studio, popular songs, a chorus, and mime.
T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (1888-1965) aimed at making drama a form of art. His verse
from Prufrock to The Waste Land has undeniable dramatic qualities. In his Dialogue on
Dramatic Poetry published in 1928, he argued that realistic prose drama ignores the fun-
damental and merely deals with appear-
ances, and that "the human soul, in intense
emotions, strives to express itself in verse".
With his fragmentary Sweeney Agonistes
(1932), Eliot first ventured into poetic
drama. The world of this play is still very
much that of The Waste Land. What makes
it interesting is the use of chorus, jazz
rhythms, and its sense of dread. Sweeney
is a symbolic character who also occurs in
Eliot's poetry and represents the vulgar but
vital force of life. Eliot's first complete
play was The Rock (1934), a pageant large-
ly written in prose, with one scene and
choruses, involving historical and biblical Clive Branson, Selling the Daily Worker
figures as well as political groups of the Outside the Projectile Engineering Works. 1936
1930s. The Rock ends with a triumphant
affirmation of faith and hope.
Murder in the Cathedral brought Eliot success. It was written in 1934 for the Canterbury
Festival of 1935. The character and the fate of Thomas Becket (1118-1170) had been used
in drama before Eliot as in Tennyson's Becket of 1884 and were again selected, after
Eliot, by Jean Anouilh18 in 1959 and Christopher Fry in 1961 (see Curtmantle). Eliot's
drama consists of two parts and focuses on the last days of the Archbishop, his temptation,
and his final martyrdom. An interlude Becket's Christmas sermon unites the two parts.
Essentially, Murder in the Cathedral is a modern mystery play involving the audience. First
performed in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral, it remains the most popular of
Eliot's plays. With Murder in the Cathedral Eliot proved that verse might be suitable for a
historical play on a religious subject.
But what he really wanted was a poetic drama in the spirit of our time. This he tried to
achieve with The Family Reunion (1939), which owes something to the Greek story of
Orestes pursued by the Furies. The modern Orestes, Harry, Lord Monchensey, has allegedly
killed his wife. His misdeed eventually affects his whole family. The Furies materialize on
and Death in Venice, 1951), music for ballet as well as pieces for orchestra and choirs (e.g.,
Simple Symphony, 1934; and War Requiem, 1962).
18 Jean Anouilh (1910-87), one of the most popular French dramatists in the first half of the 20th
century. Notable are his Le Bal des voleurs (1938), L'Invitation au chateau (1947), and his
plays dealing with historical figures, such as L'Alouette (1953), on Joan of Arc, and Becket ou
l'honneur de dieu (1959), on Thomas Becket.
two occasions, and his aunts and uncles intermittently abandon dialogue to become a chorus.
Harry's crime is finally expiated by his son. Though still not a very convincing drama, The
Family Reunion is a step forward, technically speaking. In this play Eliot found a form of
verse so close to prose (he rejected blank verse as being too reminiscent of Shakespeare)
that the average listener cannot tell the difference. Eliot used the same verse in The Cocktail
Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959), which he
wrote to capture a larger audience. The Cocktail Party suffers from a long and tedious expo-
sition. It transposes into the twentieth century Euripides'19 Alcestis, a tale of guilt and atone-
ment. Superficially, it is a comedy of manners, like The Confidential Clerk which treats of
the old theme of mistaken identity in the story of a young man resisting others' plans for him
and seeking fulfilment in church music. Again inspired by Greek mythology, The Elder
Statesman is a better play. Lord Calverton, a politician and modern Oedipus, faces the in-
adequacies and evils of his misspent life. Haunted by ghosts, he repents and, reconciled with
his victims and himself, goes out to die under a beech tree. There is no doubt that Eliot's po-
etic plays are less convincing than his verse and criticism. Nevertheless, his attempts in
drama stimulated a few younger playwrights.
Christopher Fry (1907-2005) is the most remarkable representative of verse drama, apart
from Eliot. Fry began with religious plays, such as The Firstborn (1948), in which Moses
liberates the captive Israelites, and Thor, With Angels (1948), where a Jute warrior is con-
verted to Christianity. Fry's best religious drama is A Sleep of Prisoners (1951). This play
presents in dramatic scenes the dreams of four English soldiers locked up in a church as
prisoners of war. But Fry has shown that he is also able to handle human paradoxes and
conflicts more playfully. This he achieved in his comedies. Thus A Phoenix Too Frequent
(1946) praises the power of love and life in a modern version of Petronius'20 tale of the
widow of Ephesus who wanted to entomb herself with her dead husband but fell in love
with a soldier at the grave. The theme of life-preserving love also dominates The Lady's Not
For Burning (1948). Set in the Middle Ages, it features a desperate soldier bent on suicide
and a girl accused of sorcery. Both characters are saved by their love for each other. With
this comedy, Fry began his tetralogy of the seasons or "comedies of mood": the first was the
"spring" play; Venus Observed, the "autumn" drama, followed in 1950; and the "winter com-
edy", The Dark Is Light Enough, in 1954. The series was completed with the "summer" play
A Yard of Sun (1970), which is set in Italy. Fry was praised for the brilliancy of his imagery
and the felicity of his language in free but regularly stressed verse with richly imaginative
word-play. And though his plays sometimes lack dramatic depth, they emerge as delightful
defenses of faith, hope, and charity, especially when compared to the thinness of the prod-
ucts of the commercial theatre.
Post-war British drama saw attempts by some innovators to break away from prevailing
modes. But initially they were not well received by the public. Thus some of John Whiting's
19 Euripides (480-406 BC), Greek tragedian who exerted influence on Milton, Dryden, Shelley,
Browning, and T. S. Eliot. His best known plays (19 have survived) are Medea, Helena, and
Alcestis.
20 Petronius (Petronius Arbiter, died AD 66), Roman writer and the author of the Satyricon, a
realistic proto-novel about the low life and vices of Nero's time. Only excerpts of the work have
been preserved, but modern writers have repeatedly made use of scenes from the book. There is
also an excellent film by Fellini, based on the novel.
(1917-63) plays tried to marry Fry's poetic drama with surrealist and naturalistic elements
(Saint's Day, 1951). Under the influence of Brecht, Whiting finally found a successful recipe
in The Devils (1961) which, in a broad historical sweep, deals with the theme of religious
obsession (it is based on Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudon, 1952, a study in sexual
hysteria) in a French nunnery. And David Rudkin's (born 1936) first play, Afore Night
Come (1962) operated with representations of atavistic violence and other ideas of the
French surrealist theorist Antonin Artaud; but Artaud's "theatre of cruelty" did not become
popular until the mid-1960s.21 The "Renaissance" of British drama in the second half of the
century came with the establishment in 1956 of the English Stage Company, dedicated to
promoting new work, and its presentation in the same year of John Osborne's Look Back in
Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea, London. In East London, Joan Littlewood's
"Theatre Workshop" gave help to younger playwrights, such as Brendan Behan (1923-64)
and Shelagh Delaney (born 1939). But it was Osborne's play that caught the imagination of
a generation. John Osborne (1929-94), like the novelists Alan Sillitoe, John Wain, and
John Braine, has made his reputation as one of the "angry young men" of the provinces who
expressed the disaffection of a sector of the British population that had been previously
silent. The "angry young men" resented the English establishment, educated at public
schools and "Oxbridge"22, and the hypocrisy in church and state. With his first successful
play, Look Back in Anger (1956), John Osborne together with Arnold Wesker and Shelag
Delaney (see her A Taste of Honey, 1956) virtually created what came to be called "kit-
chen sink drama". This term meant to catch the portrayal of working-class or lower middle-
class life, with an emphasis on domestic realism. The plays of this genre were written as a
sort of literary protest against the drawing-room comedies and middle-class dramas that
dominated the theatre before the 1950s, and also against the "highbrow" verse drama of
T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry.
Many of Osborne's contemporaries found in Jimmy Porter, the almost hysterical hero of Look
Back in Anger, an image of their own lives. Of working-class origin, Jimmy has been to a uni-
versity, but he has discovered no satisfactory profession and rages at the establishment and his
middle-class wife Alison. Porter rails against the crumbling authority of what he considers
Establishment values; he fulminates against the parents of his wife because of their upper
middle-class background, and against their son, his brother-in-law, who attended the military
academy of Sandhurst; and he delivers tirades condemning English literature (Shakespeare,
Wordsworth, Eliot), English music (Vaughan Williams), the Anglican Church, and much else.
Unable to endure her husband's furious attacks, Alison abandons him. But the ending of the
play, not without a touch of sentimentality, leads the couple together again, temporarily re-
conciled. Thus, although Jimmy Porter is a new type of character classless, aimless, and rest-
less the dramatic context in which he appears was largely conventional.
Since Look Back in Anger was dramaturgically still traditional, Osborne looked for new
techniques, yet none of his following plays met with the success of his first great drama.
Since the 1950s, Osborne has tackled a wide range of subjects, from The Entertainer (1957),
featuring a shabby and self-deceiving character from the final days of the music hall, and the
historical play Luther (1960) to the study of a sex-obsessed lawyer in Inadmissable Evidence
(1964). A Patriot For Me (1965) explores recent history in the character of a homosexual
21 The Theatre of Cruelty is discussed below, pp. 166-71.

22 The term Oxbridge refers to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and, by implication, to
the intellectual establishment trained in these institutions.
Austrian officer on the eve of World War I. Prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain (the censor)
because of its explicit treatment of homosexuality, one of the great taboos of the post-war
era, it was filmed by Istvan Szabo (Oberst Redl). Osborne's The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968)
and West of Suez (1972) analyze problems of human relations and the nature of English
identity. Though John Osborne retained some of his original anger expressed again in A
Sense of Detachment (1973), which abandons both plot and realism, and Watch it Come
Down (1976) his implicit stance seemed to be nostalgically conservative.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Osborne wrote mostly dramas for TV performance. When he re-
turned to the theatre with Djvu (1991), it was to reflect on the possibilities of the theatre
and his own dramatic work. In Djvu, which presents the same characters as Look Back in
Anger, a middle-aged Jimmy Porter returns to the stage. His original anger has gone as we
notice the force of dramatic and philosophical conventions in a drama that comments in a
self-referential manner on the political and ideological shortcomings of Osborne's previous
plays.
In Osborne's works one notices the influence of Bert Brecht (1898-1956), whose Berliner
Ensemble visited Britain in 1956, and of Samuel Beckett. The Brechtian epic theatre had
several aims: its episodic structure was designed to appeal more to the audience's reason
than to its emotion; identification with the drama on stage was to be avoided by alienation
effects and distancing techniques, and the individual is always seen in his/her social and
historical setting. Generally aiming at a change in the ideological outlook of the bourgeois
audience, Brecht's epic drama particularly affected the political history plays that became
political morality plays. The voice of Bert Brecht can be clearly heard in the plays of John
Arden, Arnold Wesker, and Peter Shaffer, who have tried to express their feelings of protest
against social injustice and cultural decay. John Arden (born 1930) is difficult to cate-
gorize, not because he takes unpopular views but because critics have found it difficult to
detect what they term moral commitment. It is obvious that Arden is indebted to Brecht in
theatrical technique and in his view of historical change, but he has consistently refused to
take sides in the presentation of problems. Arden's early Live Like Pigs (1958) juxtaposes
the vitality of anarchic vagabonds with the dreary life of the bourgeois. Serjeant Musgrave's
Dance (1959) is today recognized as his best drama. Since this play introduced the typical
Brechtian epic theatre and in fact consciously undermined the illusionist theatre to which
the British public had been used, it had no success on the professional stage, but everywhere
outside, and it remains one of the best anti-war parables in English.
It is the story of a deserter from the Victorian army who comes to a British coal town pretending
to seek recruits while really looking for victims for an act of reprisal. Musgrave sets violence
against violence, but in the end he fails because of the resistance of women and some of his
men. Arden handles the anti-militaristic theme with a mixture of Brechtian techniques and
music-hall elements (dances, songs). Although the setting is apparently Victorian, contemporary
spectators immediately recognized the allusions to contemporary circumstances (British army
conscripts, recruited to do "National Service", had recently died in the campaign in Cyprus).
Many aspects of the play were designed to disconcert audiences and to raise questions about
such "values" as duty and (military) order. In 1972 Arden reworked his play as Serjeant
Musgrave Dances On, giving it a much more overt political bent by focussing on the presence
of British troops in Ulster.
In the plays that followed, Arden never stopped questioning and criticising British legal,
political, military, and imperial traditions. The Workhouse Donkey (1964) is a frequently
funny play about the corruptness of local politics. As in most of his other dramas, Arden
wrote large sections in rhyming verse and added songs and dances in the Brechtian manner.
One of Arden's favourite themes is the conflict between anarchy and order in society. This is
the central theme of Armstrong's Last Goodnight (1965), which contains characters of the
morality plays and returns to sixteenth-century Scotland. Like Brecht, Arden has constantly
tried to deceive the audience's expectations while reminding it of the theatrical situation, but
unlike Brecht he offers no underlying political message. Instead, his plays written before
1965 offer gripping character studies and valuable social comment. Arden's later plays are
both political and historical, aiming at a dismantling of some of England's cherished myths.
Left-Handed Liberty (1965) is about the moral and social problems of the Magna Carta of
1215 and shows the barons as rather selfish characters while The Hero Rises Up (1968)
mocks the hero-worship of Nelson23. Convinced that "Northern Ireland is Britain's Viet-
nam", Arden has focused on what he considers the imperialistic suppression of the Irish
people. In collaboration with his wife Margaretta D'Arcy, who is an outspoken Marxist
and an Irish patriot, he has produced The Ballygombeen Bequest (1972), set in Belfast and
concerned with the situation in Northern Ireland. At that time both dramatists were con-
vinced of the necessity of a socialist revolution and of the political importance of the theatre.
Employing the means of agitprop theatre24, they combined in The Ballygombeen Bequest
their interpretation of the history of the Irish (i.e., their enslaving by the British) and a
Marxist view of history, suggesting that the solution of the problems can be found only in a
class struggle. This was the first of a series of plays about Ireland: In 1972 Arden and
D'Arcy wrote The Island of the Mighty for the BBC (published in 1974), which is a play
based on the Arthurian legends. It brought them into conflict with the Royal Shakespeare
Company (RSC), as they insisted on the right of the author(s) to have a say in the production
of the play. Their latest works dealing with Ireland are overtly Marxist and propagandistic.
Thus The Non-Stop Connolly Show (1975) focuses on the life and times of James Connolly
who was instrumental in the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916 and appears in this play as the
perfect Socialist hero. Vandaleur's Folly (1978) uses melodramatic means to dramatize the
attempt in the early 1830s of John Scott Vandaleur to establish a Socialist cooperative, but
the attempt is shown to be yet another variation of the mechanisms of historical suppression.
In radical political opposition to the established and even the new forms of British theatre,
Arden practically abandoned the theatre system in the 1980s, writing radio plays and nar-
rative prose.
Arnold Wesker (born 1932) shares with Arden a "Socialist" view of drama. Like Harold
Pinter, Wesker comes from a Jewish immigrant family in London's East End. The plays as-
sembled in his Wesker Trilogy (Chicken Soup With Barley, 1958; Roots, 1959; and I'm
23 Horatio Nelson, Duke of Bronte (1758-1805), British admiral. He defeated the French in the
Battle of Abukir and became notorious for his love affair with Lady Hamilton. He fell in the
Battle of Trafalgar, but the victory of the British fleet over the French and Spanish fleets made
Nelson a popular hero.
24 Agitprop is a Russian term in origin. Coined from abbreviations of "agitation" and "propa-
ganda", it first referred to a governmental agency directing political or ideological propaganda.
This agency (in former Socialist countries) also used the theatre as a form of education in
Marxism and Communism. In drama, it is used to characterize plays carrying an overt political
or ideological (mostly Left-Wing) message.
Talking About Jerusalem, 1960) deal with Jewish working-class life, the nature of Social-
ism, and the cultural poverty of the masses. Wesker has continued to defend passionately
both Socialist and humanitarian ideas in The Kitchen (1959), a study of inhuman working
conditions in a restaurant representing an unfair and hierarchical society; Chips With Every-
thing (1962), which is an anti-Establishment study of Royal Air Force conscripts, and Their
Very Own and Golden City (1965), a disillusioned dramatic comment on the realpolitik of
the Labour government. With The Friends (1970) Wesker returned to the treatment of
problems of the individual, retreating a little from general social themes. The Old Ones
(1973), for instance, explores the meaning of life from the viewpoint of elderly people, and
The Merchant (1976), a reworking of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, analyses the
Jew Shylock much more sympathetically than the original. Although Wesker failed with his
attempt to create a new theatrical democratic art with his Centre 42 in the early 1960s,
which was also supposed to forge links between the arts, socialist action, and society at large,
he has continued to propagate his view of a more humanized world in his more recent plays
(see Shylock, 1989; and Blood Libel, 1996). His Denial (2000) examines false memory syn-
drome, but was poorly received by reviewers.
If Wesker and Arden were among the first in trying to establish a new British left-wing
theatre, Edward Bond (born 1934) has struck a harsher note in radical dramatic diagnoses
of cultural deprivation and the dangers of modern society that breeds violence in various
forms. Of North London working-class origin, Bond left school at age 15 with no quali-
fications. An outspoken pacifist, he was for a long time fascinated by violence in human
beings, and this fascination comes to the fore in Saved (1965).
A naturalistic play, it made him both famous and notorious. In the course of the plot, a baby in
a pram is tortured and stoned by a group of hooligans in a London park. It is concerned with
unmotivated and badly educated people who have nothing to occupy themselves with except
mindless violence and sex. Len, the chief character, is picked up by Pam, a precocious girl who
lives with her parents and has sex at home with whomever she wishes. Len has an affair with
Pam, then she switches her attention to Fred, by whom she has a baby, but Len remains in the
house as a lodger. When Pam leaves the baby with Fred and his mates, something ensues which
the critic of The Times termed "the ugliest scene I have ever seen on any stage": they tease and
punch the baby and, carried away by excitement they strip it, cover its face in its own ex-
crement and then stone it to death. Despite the controversy over the killing of the baby, the vio-
lence in the play is credible and the characters are recognizable members of English society.
Like the more sophisticated novel by Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962), it severe-
ly criticizes the emptiness of life in a capitalist society.
Bond uses crude realistic detail and Surrealist settings, but his message, in which the ugli-
ness of evil often triumphs, is entirely moral. A disciple of Rousseau, Bond believes that
man has been corrupted by his environment as well as by his education and the established
morals. According to Bond, the artist must not merely seek truth and justice but must also try
to put them into social practice. In Lear (1972) Bond criticized Shakespeare's hero because
he did not initiate political and social change, and in Bingo (1973) Shakespeare himself
appears as a selfish landowner who ignores the needs of the Stratford tenants. With the
exception of the comedy The Sea (1973), which attacks the social hierarchy in a small Eng-
lish town in the early twentieth century, Bond's plays indicate that he has been preoccupied
with the relations between the artist and society. He returned to this theme in 1975, when
The Fool was performed. In this play the Victorian poet John Clare, who became insane in
the 1830s, berates the society of his day. Since Bond depicts much cruelty and brutality in
his paradigmatic presentation of the artist's role in society, he has been accused of sensation-
alism. His central argument, time and again, is that violence is not a function of human
nature but of human society; hence Bond tries to trace the origins of the particular evil he
has diagnosed in socially produced forms of violence as he casts his dramatic light on what
he sees as problem areas in the era of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher urban
terrorism (see The Worlds, 1979), and corporate takeovers (see Jackets, 1989, and In the
Company of Men, 1990). Whatever controversy his plays may arouse, one cannot deny their
message of human suffering and compassion.
Peter Shaffer (born 1926) is another representative of epic and partly political drama in the
wake of Brecht. His The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) received considerable attention.
It focuses on the Spanish conquest of Peru. Presented in a highly stylized form, with masques
and special music and dances, the play focuses on the fatal consequences that resulted from the
historic collision between American and European civilizations. Set between June 1529 and
August 1533, Shaffer's drama portrays the encounter between Spanish conquistador Francisco
Pizarro and the Sovereign Inca of Peru, Atahuallpa. The epic form is provided through a retro-
spective frame narrative. The narrator and commentator is Old Martin, Pizarro's page. Directly
addressing the audience, he recounts his story of "how one hundred and sixty-seven men con-
quered an empire of twenty-four million". There are many ritual (Christian and Inca) scenes in
the play which reminds one of the elaborate court masques of Inigo Jones in the early seven-
teenth century as they question the nature of worship and the desacralization of modern life.
In Equus (1973) Shaffer wrote a psychological study in which a psychiatrist, Martin Dysart,
is confronted with a 17-year-old, Alan Strang, who has blinded six horses. The play shows
the slow unravelling of the
motives behind the deed as
well as the crisis of the psy-
chiatrist who questions the
aim of his therapy. Shaffer's
The Battle of Shrivings, per-
formed in 1970 and published
as Shrivings in 1974, shows
an elderly pacifist professor in
conflict with an anti-liberal
poet. Amadeus (1979) is Shaf-
fer's Mozart drama portraying
the bitterness aroused in the
Italian composer Antonio Sa-
lieri by the success of his rival
Mozart (see also the film Scenic photograph. Peter Shaffer, Equus
directed by Milos Forman).
Shaffer has continued using the theatrical possibilities of the so-called "memory play"
(explorations of history on at least two time levels) in Yonadab (1985) and The Gift of the
Gorgon (1992).
Among the many young playwrights who came to the fore in the 1960s, some continued to
use the theatre as a means in their fight for social and political change. The late 1960s and
early 70s proved crucial for what can now be seen as the emergence of a New Left Theatre
in England. Encouraged by the Parisian student revolt of May 1968, which proved a real
watershed, by the international opposition against American involvement in Vietnam, and

by the voices of Arden, Wesker, and Bond, the new generation of radical dramatists had
mainly two aims firstly, to destroy any remaining affection for British official culture, and
secondly, to suggest, often indirectly, a beautiful utopia in a society without class divisions.
The critique by the New Left dramatists of a deeply divided British society was accentuated
in the spring of 1979 when the victory of the Conservative Party in the General Election led
to what they saw as the "regime" of Margaret Thatcher which was to last for twelve years.
Hence the uniformity in the early 1980s of theatrical protest against Government policies
and philosophies. The playwrights prominently associated with the new, radical drama were
David Mercer (1928-80), Trevor Griffiths (born 1935), David Hare (born 1947), David
Edgar (born 1948), Howard Brenton (born 1942), and Howard Barker (born 1946). In
Mercer's After Haggarty (1970) capitalist Britain is compared to the ideal of "real" (Eastern)
socialism while Griffiths's The Party (1973), much like Hare's The Great Exhibition (1972),
provided not only a critique of "Thatcherism" but also of the infighting that had been going
on in the Labour Party and amongst the political Left. David Hare collaborated with Howard
Brenton on Pravda: A Fleet Street Comedy (1985); the drama provides implicit parallels
between the manipulation of information in the USSR and the control of the British press by
a corrupt and unscrupulous newspaper tycoon. In his more recent plays (see the trilogy
Racing Demon, 1990, Murmuring Judges, 1991, The Absence of War, 1993; and his latest
dramas, Skylight, 1995, and Amy's View, 1997), Hare has focused again on the psychological
and moral consequences of Thatcherism.
Howard Brenton came to prominence and notoriety with his Magnificence (1973), which
deals with squatters25; tracing the way of the protagonist from criminality to terrorism,
Brenton probes and finally deconstructs the idea of freedom in political action while
questioning the possibility of revolutionary change. The Churchill Play (1974) was the first
of Brenton's epic plays deconstructing historical figures. Set in 1984 (cf. Orwell's dystopian
novel 1984), the play shows a future Britain full of concentration camps for political pri-
soners. With A Short Sharp Shock (1980) and again with Thirteenth Night (1981) Brenton
produced satirical dramatic attacks on the consequences of Thatcherism while his The
Romans in Britain (1980) is a cynical play that draws a parallel between the Roman invasion
of Britain and the British presence in Northern Ireland. The violent scenes of bloodshed and
homosexual rapes in this drama aroused a good deal of controversy. Mrs. Mary Whitehouse,
the guardian of "public morality" at that time, tried to have the play banned by starting an ill-
fated prosecution on the grounds that it contained pornographic material.
The Romans in Britain continues Brenton's deconstruction of historical figures and myths by
focusing, in Part I, on Julius Caesar's second invasion of Celtic Britain in 54 BC. Brenton's play
turns the idea on its head that the Romans brought enlightenment to Britain, as we see three
Roman soldiers, in Scene 3, killing two Celtic boys and raping a third one, Marban. The Roman
arrival is thus portrayed as an imperalist rape, much like the American soldiers' saying that they
"fucked" the Vietnamese. Historiography is mocked in Scene 5, when Caesar, surrounded by
raped and dead bodies (a "little massacre") on the stage, dictates occasional remarks to his
scribe for the "Official Biography". When the bound and naked Marban is brought before him,
Caesar commits a spiritual rape by tying a pendant of Venus around the neck of the young Celt
who is also a Druid priest. The Celts, however, are not simply victims the play shows them to
25 A squatter is a person who takes unauthorized (and illegal) possession of unoccupied flats or
houses.
be slave owners and oppressors too. But Brenton's message about cultural and spiritual rape
extends into the twentieth century in Scene 7, when Caesar returns with helicopters and in the
dress of a British Army Officer. The Romans in Britain suddenly become the British in Ireland,
as a British soldier swears at the corpse of an Irish woman ("Fucking bogshitting mick! []
Kick the shit out of your fucking country"). We begin to notice how the myths of history bleed,
sometimes literally. The two millennia separating ancient Britain from modern Ireland are
bridged in 24 hours as two Celtic societies are invaded. Brenton shows how "empires" destroy
entire cultures while historical writing describes this as the arrival of civilization.
It was especially because of this play that Brenton has been associated with the so-called
"Theatre of Cruelty". A confirmed socialist, Brenton also produced some utopian plays sug-
gesting alternative ways of living (see Bloody Poetry, 1984, and Greenland, 1988).
If Bond, in Saved (1965), stages the killing of a baby, and if Brenton, in The Romans in
Britain (1980; see also his controversial Chrissie in Love, 1969, with its female corpse and
bodies being dug up), exposed his audience to a scene in which a teenage boy is raped by a
soldier, both dramatists clearly intend to upset their audience in order to produce a new
consciousness of structural cruelty in society. This "Theatre of Cruelty" is a form of drama
which seeks to shock the spectator into an awareness of the underlying primitive ruthless-
ness of human existence. Created by the French director Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and
introduced to Britain during the 1960s through the productions of Peter Brook (born 1925),
this drama tries to be "a spike in the side of an audience", as Brook put it in 1968.
Howard Barker, like Bond, came to prominence through his association with the Royal
Court Theatre. Since the mid-1970s, the Royal Shakespeare Company has produced many
of his plays. Like Brenton, he has attacked the social and moral disintegration of what he sees
as a corrupt society in which there seems to be no difference between the criminal and the
ruling class (see Cheek, 1970, Alpha Alpha, 1971, Claw, 1975, and Stripwell, 1975). Later,
he focused on the Labour Party as the representative of an organized Left and the problems
of socialism in Eastern Europe (Fair Slaughter, 1977, No End of Blame, 1981, A Passion in
Six Days, 1981) while providing rather critical views and raising questions about the role of
the writer vis--vis responsible political action. In the 1980s and 90s, Barker, again like
Brenton, became more and more interested in the historical dimensions of his political
themes. Thus he dealt with the English Civil War in Pity in History (1985), with the Russian
Revolution in The Last Supper (1988), and the assassination of the Russian Tsar family in
1918 in Hated Nightfall (1994).
Finally, David Hare (born 1947), who collaborated with Brenton (see Brassneck, 1973; and
Pravda: A Fleet Street Comedy, 1985), has cast his political anger into satirical visions of
society and the British empire. In his Asian Plays (e.g., A Map of the World, 1983), he
focused on colonial imperialism and in The Secret Rapture (1988) he dramatised the conflict
between the consequences of Thatcherite capitalism and the naivet of liberal humanism.
By the late 1980s, most of the politically engaged dramatists realized that the theatre could
do little if anything to bring about a change in politics or society. David Edgar called his
early radical dramas "dead plays" precisely because their impact and effect depend so much
on the actual political background. This is one reason why, in the new millennium, most of
these radical plays from the 70s and 80s now appear dated. Some dramatists became dis-
illusioned as they noticed that the political-military system was stronger than they thought
and that they were unable to reach the larger theatre audience; others had great difficulties
accepting the failure of socialism in Eastern Europe, while others again undertook a more
serious criticism of the socialist ideology. Thus the disappointed Edgar turned to drama-
tisations of classic English novels (Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, 1980) and looked for a new
audience in his plays of the late 1980s. Edward Bond always wrote for alternative theatre
groups and, despite a few productions of his plays by the National Theatre and the Royal
Shakespeare Company, never managed to penetrate into the established theatre. David Edgar
staged the failure of Eastern Socialism in his Pentecost (1994), a dramatic study of the
disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. Howard Brenton reacted to the fall of Communism
with plays that demonstrate his bewilderment at the fact that his Marxist view of history has
not been confirmed by reality (see Moscow Gold, 1990, Berlin Bertie, 1992, and H.I.D (Hess
is Dead), 1993). And Howard Barker has become a marginal figure as, since 1987, his plays
have been produced by one group only, The Wrestling School, which was created for this
purpose. In the late 1980s, Barker admitted that he had come to realize, "no doubt belatedly,
that socialism too has the power to stunt life".
At a time when capitalism triumphs world-wide in an apparently unimpeded globalization
that makes it difficult for individual countries to take serious, protective action for the
disadvantaged, the marginalized, and the dispossessed, it is sad to notice that the political-
social engagement of the radical dramatists of the period 1970-1990 seems to fall into
oblivion. There is some hope, however, as older British playwrights abandon agitprop
theatre in order to face and demonstrate against the consequences of rampant capitalism as a
heavy price to pay. Thus David Hare, who accepted a knighthood in 1998, has focused his
attention away from ideology and class struggle. His play My Zinc Bed (2000) is concerned
with addiction and draws connections between the rise of chemical dependency and cults,
while younger British dramatists, discussed below, begin to focus on the moral conse-
quences of capitalism and the spiritual poverty that seems to be a hallmark of postmodern
life.
While playwrights like David Hare have experimented with theatrical techniques and have
written for the fringe theatre26, others Robert Bolt (1924-95), Alan Bennett (born 1934),
Peter Barnes (1931-2004), Simon Gray (1936-2008), Christopher Hampton (born 1946),
Peter Nichols (born 1927), and Charles Wood (born 1932) may not have a particular
political or class axe to grind, but their plays have shown a new eloquence in British theatre.
Since the 1950s a number of dramatists have developed what Martin Esslin has termed the
"theatre of the absurd", which is concerned with the metaphysical question of the purpose of
human existence. The concept of absurdity derives from the existentialist works of Albert
Camus27 and Jean-Paul Sartre28. Existentialist man/woman is a lonely creature confronted by
26 Theatres of minor (national) importance which often experiment with new techniques and
receive little if any financial support from the state. The British fringe theatre is the equivalent
of the American off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway theatre.
27 Albert Camus (1913-60), French writer and dramatist. Algeria, where he was born, provides the
setting for many of his works. He explored the absurd dimensions of the human condition from
a semi-existentialist viewpoint (he was less doctrinal in this respect than Jean-Paul Sartre). His
influential novels include L'tranger (1942), La Peste (1947), Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942), and
La Chute (1956). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957.
28 Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), French philosopher and writer and the major representative of
existentialism in France. After 1945, he had a considerable influence on French and European
intellectual life. Throughout his life he involved himself personally in many important issues of
a vast emptiness in which his/her acts seem insignificant. Desperately trying to confirm their
human identity, the characters in the drama of the absurd are both stoically hopeless and
strangely heroic. Playwrights like Samuel Beckett (1906-89), Eugne Ionesco (1912-94), a
French writer of Romanian origin, Harold Pinter, and, to some extent, James Saunders
and Tom Stoppard, have expressed in their plays the basic belief that man's life is essen-
tially without meaning and that hu-
man beings are unable to commu-
nicate. As a consequence, some of
these dramatists have abandoned
dramatic form and coherent dia-
logue: the futility of existence is
shown by illogical speeches and,
ultimately, by absolute silence.
Samuel Beckett (1906-89) has
voiced in his novels and plays the
disillusionment of the post-atomic
age in which God seems to have
failed man by not existing. Beckett
grew up in Dublin and studied at
the local Trinity College. At the
age of 22 he went to Paris, begin-
ning his literary career in the circle A painting that inspired Beckett for his seminal
of James Joyce. After writing some Waiting for Godot. C. D. Friedrich, Zwei Mnner
remarkable literary criticism on in Betrachtung des Mondes. 1819
29
Proust , short stories, poems, and
novels, which are indebted to the style of Joyce, Beckett spent the war in France and settled
there. After 1945, he wrote most of his works in French. This fact may help to explain the
distance, the precision, and the degree of abstractness his plays achieve. The theatre of the
absurd can be said to have begun with his Waiting For Godot (1955), which conquered
Paris in 1953 and then London and New York.
Waiting For Godot has no particular place, and the two days or passages in the life of the char-
acters represented in two acts symbolize the passing of time. The play tells us far less about
Godot than about hope and waiting. The two tramps Estragon and Vladimir (also called Gogo
and Didi) spend consecutive days on a country road whose sole landmark is a tree which is
totally bare in Act I but as if mocking spring sprouts four or five leaves in Act II. Indecisive
and bickering, the tramps wander from subject to subject in their conversation. In order to avoid
freedom and moral responsibility. His many works include philosophical treatises (L'tre et le
nant, 1943, Critique de la raison dialectique, 1960), novels (La Nause, 1938), and plays (Les
Mouches, 1943, Huis clos, 1945). His autobiography, Les Mots (1964), appeared in the same
year in which he received the Nobel Prize for literature.
29 Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French novelist and critic and one of the most influential mod-
ernists. His sequence of novels entitled la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) is written in
the form of an autobiographical report and deals with characters from the French aristocracy
and upper class around the turn of the century. His handling of time and interior monologue, his
use of memory as a structural device of plot and writing/thinking, and his view of literary art
have had a profound influence on several European and American writers.
boredom and to pass the time they play while waiting for the mysterious and undefined Godot
who never arrives. Twice they are visited by the whip-cracking Pozzo and his slave Lucky.
These two men, like the two tramps, are dependent on each other: thus in Act II Pozzo enters
blind, less leader than led. Vladimir and Estragon wait without hope, yet they dare not give up
their waiting.
Waiting For Godot is a play that makes its audience laugh as well as wince. This mixture of
comic and tragic elements characterizes almost all the plays in the theatre of the absurd. The
tramps are conceived as clowns, and the play incorporates elements of the circus and the
music hall, but their clowning is tragically sad as it only masks the vast emptiness and
meaninglessness of life which they are much too afraid to admit. What makes Waiting For
Godot an outstanding drama is its audacious technique, which uses two tramps/clowns and a
bare stage to explore the meaning of life, as well as its poetic style and tragi-comic tone. It
is not as negative a play as some critics suggest, for Beckett faced the hideous uncertainties
of existence with pluck and humour. It was not least for this play that he received the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1969. By this time he had written a few other dramas exploring the
helplessness of human beings in an apparently meaningless universe. Endgame (1958) fig-
ures Hamm, blind and paralyzed, surrounded by his parents, stuck in dustbins, and a
servant, Clov, who keeps threatening that he will go away. Beckett moved further and further
away from conventional theatre in an effort to convey with a minimum of speech and action
man's inability to communicate and the tragi-comic ignorance of his own role. Krapp's Last
Tape (1958) has only one actor, an old man who listens uncomprehendingly to recordings
he made as a young man. Happy Days (1961) shows the actress Winnie being progressively
buried in dirt until only her head remains visible; and in Play (1964) the heads of two name-
less women and one man speak from urns. With Breath (1969), which lasts about thirty
seconds, beginning with the cry of a newly born child and ending with the last gasp of an
elderly man, and Not I (1971), which shows merely the speaking mouth of a woman and the
figure of a male listener, Beckett reached a point where theatrical means are radically re-
duced. This may be a significant step, but there is no denying the fact that it leads to a dead
end in theatrical production.
Harold Pinter (1930-2008) tried to find a way out of this dilemma. He shares with Wesker
his London ethnic origin as the son of an East End Jewish tailor. As a conscientious objector
he refused military service and accepted a prison sentence in his early career. His anti-
establishment attitude became most obvious when Pinter unlike Tom Stoppard refused a
knighthood proposed by Prime Minister John Major. Although influenced by Beckett and
Ionesco, Pinter has his own voice, and it would be misleading to categorize his plays as
merely absurd. Pinter, too, has dealt with the problem of human relations, but unlike Beckett
he uses traditional techniques and quasi-realistic language that exploits everyday speech in a
very remarkable way. Pinter has exposed in his plays the underlying fear, brutality, and
human isolation in everyday life. His characters are presented in particular situations and are
driven by motives that often remain obscure. The Room (1957), The Dumb Waiter (1957),
and The Birthday Party (1958) are "comedies of menace" in which powerful forces sud-
denly enter private lives. It was with The Caretaker (1960) that Harold Pinter came to
prominence.
Aston, a mentally damaged man lately released from an apparently hellish asylum, takes in
Davies, a shabby and smelly tramp. Aston's room is in chaotic disorder and full of all sorts of
useful and useless things. Since he needs company and, probably, a friend, he has offered to let
Davies stay with him. Davies is suspicious and mistrustful, seeing people either as threats or
cheats, and his identity remains unclear he pretends to have lost his papers and also calls
himself Jenkins. Though treated kindly by Aston, who gives him a bed, a key, and money,
Davies is not a man to feel genuine gratitude. As the action unfolds, it becomes clear that Aston
is not the real owner of the house where he lives: his brother Mick, a self-employed builder
with ambitious plans, gradually makes his proprietorship brutally clear by first bullying and then
terrorizing Davies. The old tramp finally betrays Aston and tries to become Mick's caretaker.
But Mick exposes Davies's treachery and rejects him, and the play ends with Davies again im-
ploring Aston for help.
The search for identity, one of the themes of this play, has continued to fascinate Pinter.
Thus The Collection (1962) and The Lover (1963) show different or alternative lives of one
person, which is a topic that also recurs in The Homecoming (1964). This piece marks the
beginning of a series of "memory plays" by Pinter, dramas that are concerned with the
verification of the past, with the question of what really happened before and how one
remembers it. The Homecoming can hardly be termed a comedy, as we are introduced to a
family tradition of unfaithful women (the dead mother, an adulteress, and Ruth, her
daugther-in-law, whom the male members of the family treat as if she were a whore). We
also find the "Pinteresque" effects of meaningful silences and an unspoken threat lurking
outside, when Teddy, now a professor at an American university, returns home to his
London family only to find that his uneducated (and probably partly criminal) brothers
intend to use his American wife Ruth as a prostitute. The strange atmosphere is increased by
the fact that Ruth does not seem to mind this new profession. Pinter's Tea Party (1965) is
about a seemingly confident but essentially insecure businessman driven mad by the imag-
inings caused in him by his secretary and the close relationship between his wife and her
brother. Old Times (1971) and No Man's Land (1975) treat of the relations between the
present and the past as seen through the minds of the characters, who prove with their
differing versions that past experience is unreliable reality. Since the 1970s, Pinter has
written adaptations for the cinema and for television, such as The French Lieutenant's
Woman, based on John Fowles's novel, and Betrayal (1978). He also worked as a theatre
director. The Hothouse is a play he wrote in 1958, but did not allow to be performed until
1980. It is a grotesque satire on the inhumanity of bureaucracy and is set in a government-
run "rest home" whose staff mercilessly exploit the patients. Taking revenge, the latter
apparently massacre their torturers.
Pinter's particular style has been described as "Pinteresque", a term that signifies his telling
portraying, by means of realistic dialogue which produces the nuances of colloquial speech,
of the difficulties of communication and the many layers of meaning in language, pause,
and silence. The term also refers to one of his major themes an unspoken menace for indi-
viduals and the aggression contained in conversation. Apart from nameless menace, his
themes are erotic fantasy, obsession and jealousy, hatred, and mental disturbance.
Since One for the Road (1984), Pinter's plays have moved toward a more politically engaged
drama while almost abandoning representations of uncertainty. Whereas in The Birthday
Party Stanly was threatened by an unspecified menace, One for the Road and Mountain
Language (1988) focus on individuals oppressed by modern states. Himself a conscientious
objector and a supporter of CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), Pinter in the 1980s
and 1990s has tried to explore the suppression and oppression of the individual through the
act of politicians. Thus One for the Road thematizes the torture of political prisoners (e.g.,
in Turkey) while Mountain Language adds to this problem the suppression of the Kurdish
language. Pinter's political commitment is also quite obvious in The New World Order
(1991), which again focuses on the brutalizing of human beings who are not allowed to
speak their native language, and in Ashes to Ashes (1996), a short play of the Holocaust. In
2000, Pinter had a new play, Celebration, staged and published together with his first drama,
The Room (1957). Set in a fashionable London restaurant, Celebration is a Pinteresque, dark
comedy about the superficial lives of the new rich in the post-Thatcher era. The action
switches back and forth between two tables where some Londoners in their forties and
thirties celebrate a wedding anniversary while revealing in their dialogues the major forces
that determine their lives sex, money, and fun. The absurd is never far, as a waiter "inter-
jects" with invented stories about his grandfather, and Lambert and Suki, at different tables,
remember that they had sex with each other. While the language of Celebration is realisti-
cally obscene, the play is invested like Pinter's early work with what made him unique:
disturbingly familiar dialogue and abrupt mood and power shifts among the characters,
which can be by turns terrifying, moving, and wildly funny. In 2005, Pinter was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature and used the occasion for a public denouncement of what he
sees as the imperialist crimes of the United States on several continents over the past
decades.
Apart from James Saunders (born 1925) and his successful Next Time I'll Sing to You
(1962), which is based on the life and death of a hermit, Sir Tom Stoppard (born 1937) has
also contributed to the English theatre of the absurd. Stoppard was born into a Jewish family
in Czechoslovakia in 1937, his original name being Straussler, and became a British subject.
Stoppard is concerned with the comic and absurd as results of almost ordinary situations and
attitudes. Often a mixture of comedy, farce, and tragi-comedy bordering on the absurd, his
plays explore such subjects as the search for truth, "facts", and "history" in literature, art, and
science. If Stoppard's plays invariably remind one of Oscar Wilde's drama, it is because he
also employs metaphysical wit, a talent for pastiche (mixing genres), and a comic treatment
of serious ethical and intellectual problems with a strong theatrical sense that brackets
science and the arts. His success came with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967).
It is a tragi-comedy in which the two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet have
moved to the focus of a drama that plays with identities, perception, and human existence.
In this play Stoppard has fused several layers of reality and illusion, involving scenes and
characters from Hamlet and its play within a play even death is played on several oc-
casions. The same fusion of two levels of reality and fiction occurs in his comedy The Real
Inspector Hound (1968), which is about two dramatic critics who get drawn into the action
of the play they comment on. With these concerns, i.e., the wish to surpass reality and to
explore the problems of representation in words and images, it is hardly suprising that
Stoppard has also and repeatedly made use of art, e.g., the works of Ren Magritte in After
Magritte (1970), of Marcel Duchamp in Artist Descending a Staircase (1972), and of land-
scape gardening and painting in his superb Arcadia (1993). In Jumpers (1972), a professor
of moral philosophy defends intuition against contemporary rationalism. Stoppard has used
both parody and direct statement to attack what he perceives as the triviality and cynicism
of modern philosophy. The playing with consciousness and historical reality was resumed in
Travesties (1974), in which Stoppard presents a lively debate, involving James Joyce and
Lenin, on the justification for art. With his latest dramas, Stoppard has remained faithful to
both absurd drama and comedy. Dirty Linen (1976) is a satire showing MPs investigating
immorality in Parliament, and Night and Day (1978) is an almost naturalistic play on the
freedom of the press set in a fictitious African country. Professional Foul (1977), a tele-
vision play, derives fun from the coincidence in Prague of a convention of philosophers and
an English football team. Cahoot's Macbeth (1979), also set in Prague, figures oppressed
actors who can perform only in private houses. Like Wilde, Stoppard's plays possess a
meta-dramatic dimension in the sense that they always test, and sometimes explode, the
limits of the genre in which they are written. Thus The Real Thing (1982) is Stoppard's
witty, tragi-comic treatment of the love comedy while Hapgood (1988) is a whimsical
version of the spy intrigue, with twins, double-takes, and spies who explain the particle
theory of light.
Stoppard's most subtle play is Arcadia (1993). With its two time levels, witty and whimsical
discussions of art and science (chaos theory), and the comic display of the emotional in-
volvement of the characters, it returns to Stoppard's concern in previous plays with know-
ledge and understanding, and the tragi-comic failure to reach both.
The title of Arcadia alludes not only to a
kind of paradise in general but also to the
various paradises represented in literature
and art, from Sir Philip Sidney's Old Arca-
dia (1580) to Nicolas Poussin's Le prin-
temps (1660-64) and Les bergers d'Arcadie
(c. 1640). The second title of Poussin's oil
showing the shepherds ("Et in Arcadia
Ego") is discussed in the play and consti-
tutes just one of many allusions that turn
Arcadia into a highly intertextual work
brimming with references to important writ-
ers (Byron), scientists (Fermat), artists, and
architects. As in other Stoppard plays, this Nicolas Poussin, Les bergers d'Arcadie.
intertextual and intermedial dimension c. 1640
created by allusions to art, literature, and
mathematics contributes to the dramatic and literary richness.
Arcadia is set, on one time level, in Sidley Park, a large country house in Derbyshire in 1809,
where the precocious and highly intelligent Thomasina Coverly shares the company of her tutor,
Septimus Hodge, a friend of the visiting poet Lord Byron (who never appears on stage). Tho-
masina casually solves Fermat's theorem and finally dies tragically in a fire; she is as strong and
inquisitive a female character as her mother, Lady Croom, who has her country estate, designed
by Capability Brown, turned into a picturesque Gothic garden, the rage of the day. On the other
time level, 180 years later, we find Bernard Nightingale, a university lecturer, arriving at Sidley
Park to solve a mystery in the life of Lord Byron. Finally revealed as a don who would even
falsify historical facts to get media attention, Nightingale meets the descendants of the Coverlys
(e.g., Chloe and her brother Valentine, a specialist in chaos theory) and a journalist, Hannah
Jarvis, who is writing a history of landscape gardening. As the play takes us back and forth
between the centuries, it explores the nature of truth in literary and scientific life, of time, the
difference between styles and tastes, and the disruptive influence of sex on everyday life, "the
attraction", as one character remarks, "which Newton left out". As the spectator witnesses the
events on the two time levels, he is in a much better position than the characters and thus recog-
nizes the futility and ludicrousness of literay biographies and the limits of frames of un-
derstanding.
In a similar entertaining way, Stoppard's Indian Ink (1995; first published as a radio play, In
the Native State, in 1991) is set in India in 1930 and in England in the 1990s and examines
cultural identity in post-colonial India. With The Invention of Love (1997) Stoppard returned
to his favourite combination of themes art, literature, and love in a drama dealing with
the sexual complexities of late nineteenth-century Aestheticism, and the conflicts between
art and scholarship as evidenced in the contrasted careers and destinies of A. E. Housman
and Oscar Wilde. This play was followed in 2002 by a trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, com-
prising three sequential but self-contained dramas entitled Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage.
Set in the mid-nineteenth century in Russia and Europe, the trilogy tells an epic story of
some friends romantics and revolutionaries who come of age under the Tsarist autocracy
of Nicholas I. Involving more than fifty characters among them the anarchist Michael
Bakunin, the writer Ivan Turgenev, the critic Vissarion Belinsky, and the socialist Alexander
Herzen the plot focuses on the familiar Stoppardian mixture of witty biographical satire,
politics, love, loss, and betrayal. In 1997, Stoppard was knighted, the first dramatist thus
honoured since Sir Terence Rattigan in 1971. Sir Tom Stoppard has also written many
works for film, radio, and television, with Shakespeare in Love (1998), for which he revised
the screenplay, and Enigma (2000), adapted from the novel by Robert Harris, as outstanding
examples.
In the context of farce, mention should also be made of Joe Orton (1933-67), a skilled
practitioner of black comedy who made use of scandalous themes in his farces. A social
nonconformist, Orton lived in permanent conflict with the law. Before he was killed by his
bed-fellow, Kenneth Halliwell, he wrote a number of plays that will last, though they are
technically conservative. His Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964) is a parody of the comedy of
manners and shocked and amused its audience by the contrast between its proper and con-
ventional dialogue and the violence and outrageousness of its action. Loot (1966) is a satire
on police corruption and the conventions of detective fiction murder and perversity appear
to be almost normal in this play. And What the Butler Saw (1969) is an extravagant farce in
the style of Oscar Wilde and plays with mistaken identities.
The plays of Sir Alan Ayckbourn (born 1939) also have a touch of the absurd, though,
seduced by commercial success in London, he has chosen to remain on the border between
conventional farce and absurd drama. Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular (1973), Bed-
room Farce (1975), and Sisterly Feelings (1979) throw an ironic light on class distinctions,
sexual and other stresses of English middle-class life, without going too deeply into philo-
sophical questions. But Ayckbourn has shown that he is quite able to transform suburban
problems into more universal insecurities. His later works, which he sees as morality plays
about honesty and corruption, are black farces without happy endings (see A Small Family
Business, 1987; and A Man of the Moment, 1988). Today considered one of the most acute
writers about middle-class Britain, Ayckbourn continues to write dark comedies with far-
cical elements, that are successful both in the provinces and in the West End of London (see
his Comic Potential, 1999).
Farce or black comedy is a rather popular genre in Britain that caters to a middle-brow
audience and is preferred by amateur and provincial theatrical companies. Writers in this
dramatic genre often reach a larger audience through television or film, as did Michael
Frayn (born 1933) with his farce of theatre life, Noises Off (1982). Although farces are
often highly successful (Ray Cooney's Run for Your Wife, 1984, for instance, ran for seven
years), they also prove, more often than not, sadly non-innovative.
The politicisation of British drama in the 1970s, and again in the Thatcher years of the
1980s, brought about a change not only in ideology but also in the perspective of race and
gender in that formerly silent or silenced social groups began to speak out on the stage
through ethnic, homosexual, and women writers. Thus the Jewish playwright Arnold
Wesker, discussed above, has dealt with anti-Semitism in his reworking of Shakespeare's
Shylock in The Merchant (1976) while Julia Pascal (born 1949), also a British Jewish
dramatist, has dealt with the holocaust and Jewish identity in her The Holocaust Trilogy
(2000) and Crossing Jerusalem and Other Plays (2003). Mustapha Matura (born 1939) is
a Caribbean playwright whose The Coup (1991) was the first play by a black writer to be
produced on one of the main stages of the Royal National Theatre. It opens with a hilari-
ously moving monologue from the Archbishop of Trinidad at the funeral of the leader who
gave the island independence. His speech mixes religious prayer and West Indian patois
(Creole). At the end, he lights a joint. The play then switches to a military coup, as the
president has been imprisoned on charges of corruption. A light but sharp-edged comedy,
Matura's play is a good example of ethnic drama. He was one of the co-founders of the
Black Theatre Cooperative in 1979 which intended to raise the profile of West Indian
experience. Other ethnic groups, including the Asian-based Tara Arts and the British
Chinese Theatre Company, set up in the late 1990s, have also made such efforts. The
problems of a Pakistani family who have settled in the North of England were first
portrayed in Ayub Khan Din's (born 1961) East is East (1996). A popular comedy dealing
with such delicate subjects as interracial marriage, arranged marriage, and homosexuality, it
was made into an award-winning movie.
The most significant groups moving from a marginal existence to centre stage, as it were,
have been the gay and women dramatists. The international gay movement of the 1970s
made it possible for Martin Sherman's drama Bent (1979) to be performed; in a melo-
dramatic fashion the play equates the persecution of homosexuals with the Holocaust and
Nazi death-camps. The movement led to the creation of the Gay Sweatshop in 1974, a group
that was soon joined by women too. Concerned with the relationship between the gay
novelist E. M. Forster and Edward Carpenter, a leading socialist, Noel Greig's The Dear
Love of Comrades (1989) was a product of the Gay Sweatshop. This marginalized back-
ground also produced the occasional mainstream play, such as Sarah Daniels's radical
lesbian Masterpieces (1983) and Neaptide (1982, staged by the National Theatre in 1986).
However, the most incisive inroads were made by women playwrights who brought im-
portant areas of female experience and thinking to public attention. Their plays received
impulses from the women's movement after 1968, and most of the women playwrights of
the first generation (Pam Gems, Sarah Daniels, Louise Page, Caryl Churchill) had some
connections with the fringe theatre. Feminist drama evolved as a distinct form in the mid-
1970s. Allied with the Gay Liberation Front, and profiting from the rise in Black militance,
its roots were in the alternative theatre companies. Women began to form theatre groups,
some of them exclusively female, or joined existing groups, such as Women's Theatre
Group (founded in 1973), The Monstrous Regiment (1975, named after the misogynist
pamphlet by the sixteenth-century preacher John Knox), and Spare Tyre (1979). Other,
mixed, fringe groups such as Joint Stock (1974) or Gay Sweatshop (1975) have performed
plays by women in which they gave expression to their ideas about marriage, work, children,
sex, and gendering. Some of the dramas of the 1970s and 80s were "theatre in Education",
plays that had a clear ideological, feminist, message (e.g., Strike While the Iron is Hot,
1974, produced by Red Ladder, a union of feminists and socialists). The financial support
from the Arts Council during the 70s allowed women's theatre to develop further through
the creation of new groups (e.g., Bloomers, Sadista Sisters). A setback came with the cuts
during the Thatcher years and after when only the better known women playwrights re-
ceived money for productions.
Looking back, it seems that the voice of Caryl Churchill (born 1938) has been one of the
most innovative with her highly topical plays. Born in London and educated in Montreal
and Oxford, Churchill has worked with the fringe group Joint Stock and also with the more
feminist Monstrous Regiment. Cloud Nine (1979) was the first specifically feminist piece
she produced with Joint Stock. Using elements from historical drama, Brechtian alienation
effects (women are played by men, and male characters by women), and farce, the play
shifts between the Victorian era and present-day England while drawing disconcerting
parallels between British colonialism and sexual suppression. One of Churchill's best plays
is Top Girls (1982) which had a world-wide success.
The play combines feminist with political issues. One of the major characters, Marlene, em-
bodies the characteristics of the popular myths of the career woman as castrating female and
barren mother. Eventually, the audience is tricked into condemning the feminist hero as some-
one who practices a role that is much too conventional in the existing power structure. In Act
One, Marlene celebrates her promotion to managing director of the Top Girls Employment
Agency. Joining her at the party are five ghosts characters from history, painting, and fiction
the nineteenth-century Scottish lady-traveller Isabella Bird, the thirteenth-century Japanese
courtesan and later nun Lady Nijo, Dulle Gret from Brueghel's painting, the legendary Pope
Joan who headed the Church in the ninth century, and Patient Griselda, the long-suffering
heroine of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. Churchill puts Marlene's supposed professional success in the
context of the careers of these "top girls" who, with the exception of Dulle Gret, ultimately sub-
mitted or were sacrificed. In other scenes the play also contrasts Marlene's lifestyle as a pushy
executive with that of her articulate, rural, stay-at-home sister Joyce, who raises Marlene's
daughter Angie. Act Two opens at the office of the Top Girls Employment Agency where we
learn something about the dirty tricks used in the struggle for power between men and women.
Some flashbacks, a cinematic device, allow the audience to observe a number of changes that
will occur in Marlene's character as she argues with her sister and her daughter in Joyce's
kitchen. Essentially, the play contrasts Marlene's belief in middle-class individualism and
capitalism with Joyce's Marxist views. Marlene is shown to endorse a system that values profits
over the needs of people as she willingly accepts the sad destinies of her parents and daughter.
The last line of the play is uttered by Angie, who stumbles into the kitchen to find her mother
alone the single word "frightening" may refer to her mother's Thatcherite individualism or
perhaps to her own miserable future.
In Serious Money (1987) Churchill used the speculations on the stock market as a metaphor
for 1980s Thatcherism. Mad Forest, produced in 1990 with a group of British drama stu-
dents in Bucharest after the Romanian revolution, explores the aspirations (including fem-
inist ideals) and disillusionments in connection with a revolution as seen by two sisters who
find themselves at the extreme opposites of the ideological spectrum. More recently,
Churchill has probed the breakdown of language and the self-deception of characters in two
interrelated plays entitled Blue Heart (1997) while her Far Away (2000) shows the helpless-
ness of a young girl and her aunt as they are hit by world conflicts in news stories.
Like Churchill, Pam Gems (born 1925) has been concerned with the role of women in a
world still dominated by men. Her most successful play is Piaf, written in 1973 and pro-
duced in 1978. A chronicle play, it is based on the life of the French cabaret singer Edith
Piaf and shows an angry young woman making her way in a man's world as best as she can.
Using Brechtian techniques, Gems casts Piaf (who became a drug addict and aged prema-
turely) as a Mother Courage, an anti-heroine triumphing with her song, "Non, je ne regrette
rien". In other plays, Gems has continued her exploration of legendary figures (e.g., Queen
Christina, 1982, and Camille, 1984), but her more recent plays (see Marlene, 1996) have
not found as positive a critical echo as the dramas of Churchill and her contemporary Tim-
berlake Wertenbaker30. Today, she is one of the major forces in British drama, with some
awards under her belt, including a TV award for what is one of her best plays, The Love of
the Nightingale (1989).
A good example of the way women dramatists adapt classical myths for their postmodern,
feminist causes, the play re-tells the Greek tragic myth of the two sisters, Procne and Philomele.
In the story as recorded by Ovid, Philomele is raped by king Tereus when she visits him and her
sister. Tereus then has her tongue cut out so that she cannot tell the truth. But Procne learns of
his terrible deed through a carpet woven by her sister in which Philomele has represented her
fate; Procne takes revenge by killing Itys, the son she has had with Tereus, and serving him as
meat for his father during a meal. Wertenbaker changes Ovid's version: Procne learns the truth
in a puppet show and has Itys killed by her sister Philomele because she has no hope for the
maternal in a world completely dominated by male violence. The play uses silence as a device
through which truth can be shown but not told. And it also raises the question whether a new
language, a symbolical maternal language, could surpass the language of patriarchy.
Wertenbaker has continued her intertextual explorations of gender issues in such plays as
Break of Day (1995), which draws on Chekhov's Three Sisters in analyses of relationships
in time, and classical Greek myths again in Dianeira (1999), based on Sophocles' Women of
Trachis, and her latest piece, Credible Witness (2001).
The 1980s saw similar pieces with feminist issues by Louise Page (born 1955), best known
for her treatment of mother-daughter-relationships (see Real Estate and Golden Girls, both
1984, and Diplomatic Wives, 1989), Sarah Daniels (born 1957), who has written on the im-
pact on women of pornography and violence (see Masterpieces, 1983; also see Byrthrite,
1987), Nell Dunn (born 1936, see Steaming, 1981), and Sue Townsend (born 1946, see
Womberang, 1979), who treated women's solidarity.
Younger women playwrights have followed in the tracks of the older generation, making
use of historical characters or of mythological and literary figures to express their feminist
concerns in highly intertextual and intermedial dramas. Thus the Scottish poet and play-
wright Liz Lochhead (born 1947) resurrects Mary Shelley in Blood and Ice (1982) and
draws parallels between present-day Scotland and the past in Mary Queen of Scots Got Her
Head Chopped Off (1987); while Shelag Stephenson (born 1955), who emerged in the
1990s with a dramatic treatment of sisterly memories in The Memory of Water (1996), based
her An Experiment with an Air Pump (1998) on Joseph Wright of Derby's candle-light
painting (An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768) in a play on two time levels
(1799 and 1999) that discusses the role of women in science and society at large. Like
Wertenbaker, Joanna Laurens (born 1979) returns to Greek myth and the story of Tereus,
Procne, and Philomele, in her feminist version entitled The Three Birds (2001), for which
she received a prize as the best younger woman playwright.
30 Wertenbaker has remained silent about her background. She refuses to reveal her age and
believes personal details to be irrelevant (much like Samuel Beckett in Paris who, when asked
once whether he was English, replied "Au contraire"). We know, however, that she grew up in
the French Basque country and was educated in France and the United States before working in
Europe. When she came to England around 1980, she joined the Women's Theatre Group and
Shared Experience.
New life was injected into British drama in the mid-nineties with the breakthrough of a new
generation of playwrights who created what has been termed "in-yer-face theatre".31 Bla-
tantly aggressive and provocative and employing obscenity, violence and the breaking of
taboos in language and scenic representation,
this new form of drama takes the audience by
the scruff of the neck and jolts it out of con-
ventional responses. Filthy language and real-
istic representations of sex and violence on
stage are used to question ideas about what is
human, natural and unnatural and to challenge
traditional distinctions between normal/ab-
normal, good/evil, human/inhuman, real/un-
real, art/life, male/female. The new dramatists
made the language of theatre more direct, raw,
and explicit. In doing so, they drew on a long
tradition of shock tactics that encompasses
Greek and Jacobean tragedy (e.g., Sophocles'
Oedipus, and Shakespeare's King Lear), the
1960s Theatre of Cruelty (cf. Bond's Saved,
1965, discussed above) and the political plays
of that decade (by Brenton and Hare), militant
gay and feminist plays (e.g., Sarah Daniels's
Jake and Dinos Chapman, Chapmanworld. Masterpieces, 1983) and the contemporary ex-
Detail. 1997 ample of the "Chemical Generation" in fiction
(Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting was staged by
Harry Gibson in 1994). "In-yer-face theatre" provides a severe critique of the condition
humaine in a fin-de-sicle Britain with apocalyptic facets. The most remarkable new writers
among this generation are the Scotsman Anthony Neilson (born 1967) and the English play-
wrights Mark Ravenhill (born 1966) and the late Sarah Kane (1971-99).32 Kane was argu-
ably the most gifted woman dramatist of the 1990s. Suffering from depression, she com-
mitted suicide in 1999. Like the novelists Warner and Welsh, these playwrights use shock
tactics to make their points about the alleged nihilism of postmodern life. If Kane had a
feminist axe to grind at all, it was within the context of a society she saw mainly occupied
with what a play by Mark Ravenhill drastically describes as Shopping and Fucking (1996).
Severely attacked by critics, the violence in Kane's first plays is, ultimately, an attempt to
31 See Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber, 2000). Other
terms that have been suggested for this new variety of a "sensationalist theatre of cruelty" are
"new brutalism", "new realism", "the tough school", and "plastic drama"; see Merle Tnnies,
"The 'Sensationalist Theatre of Cruelty' in 1990s Britain, its Forbears and the Beginning of the
21st Century", in Margarete Rubik and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann, eds. (Dis)Continuities:
Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English (Trier: WVT, 2002):
57-73.
32 Other important representatives of "in-yer-face theatre" discussed by Aleks Sierz are Jez But-
terworth, Patrick Marber, and Martin McDonagh, briefly introduced below, as well as Philip
Ridley (see Ghosts from a Perfect Place, 1994), Nick Grosso (Peaches and Sweetheart, 1994),
and Joe Penhall (Some Voices, 1994).
express the frustration a playwright faces in a post-capitalist world, with a globalized eco-
nomy, that seems to be immune against any kind of moral criticism. Kane's Blasted, per-
formed at the Royal Court in 1995, brought her success and notoriety through the on-stage
violence that includes baby-eating and eye-gouging. The critical hatred Kane faced after-
wards may be due in part to the fact that the main character, a racist and rapist, is a middle-
aged journalist.
As in most fin-de-sicle plays of this kind, there are very few characters in this case only Ian
Jones, a 45-year-old Welsh journalist living in Leeds, his 21-year-old London lover, Cate, who
is psychologically disturbed, and a nameless soldier interrupting Ian and Cate at the end of
Scene 2. In the first two scenes, Ian and Cate, apparently former lovers, meet in a hotel in Leeds
and Ian forces Cate to have sexual intercourse with him, which is described in drastic detail. Ian
appears to be dying from lung cancer and is a brutal, cynical, journalist apparently involved
with a secret (right-wing?) organization. Cate both pities and hates him.
Until the end of Scene 2, Blasted could pass as a naturalistic drama set in a postmodern atmos-
phere, but this changes radically with Scene 3 that starts with the explosion of a mortar bomb
and the second appearance of the (black) soldier. He apparently represents a terrorist group
fighting the British government. During his conversation with Ian he describes acts of atrocity
he committed himself and others suffered by his girl-friend. Finally, he proceeds to rape Ian and
to suck out his eyes (a Freudian symbolic act leaving Ian with no sign of manhood or virility). In
Scene 5, the most aggressively obscene of all, Ian blind, hungry, but still in need of sex digs
up the body of the baby Cate has brought back and buried. There is a non-realistic, symbolic
ending reminiscent of Beckett as Ian dies, but "eventually" (stage directions) seems to come
alive (perhaps in another world) and is taken care of by Cate.
Experimenting with theatrical forms and exploding the conventions of the well-made play
and psychological realism, Blasted, like Bond's Saved, shows how a materalist, capitalist,
world (the stage directions at the beginning suggest that the hotel room in Leeds "could be
anywhere in the world") turns people into animals. Kane's dark and unsparing vision of hu-
man lives under late capitalist conditions is also obvious in other plays that won her an inter-
national reputation: Phaedra's Love (1997), an adaptation of a Greek tragedy; and Cleansed
(1998), set in a "University" resembling a mental institution as well as a concentration camp
and dealing with gender confusions in a parable about love in times of madness. By 1998,
Kane had acquired a "bad-girl image", due to the attacks on her plays in the conservative
press which focused on the violent aspects of her dramas while ignoring the socio-political
message (in Cleansed, for example, one character's eye is injected with heroin, another's
tongue is sliced off while a broomstick is shoved up his rectum, there are amputations of
bodily parts, and there is nudity, sex, and masturbation). So she published her new play,
Crave (1998), under a pseudonym (Marie Kelvedon) to test the reaction of the public. It is
less violent and consists of poetic monologues that are open-ended, allowing different read-
ings of the obsessions of love. Her post-humously staged 4.48 Psychosis (2001), partly
based on her own experience of depression, avoids staged atrocities and explicit imagery
while focusing on the inner states of the characters in what emerges as a very poetic play.
Kane was not alone in propagating her brutally honest and sad view of postmodern relations
between men and women in a society that has gone morally bankrupt. Anthony Neilson's
plays raise questions about the social origins of violence (see Normal: The Dsseldorf Rip-
per, 1991) and about male relationships (see Penetrator, 1993). His most remarkable drama,
The Censor (1997) explores the psychological dimension of censorship in a story about a
film censor who is persuaded and seduced by a filmmaker. This play became notorious be-
cause of its explicit sex scenes and use of obscenity (e.g., defecation). Mark Ravenhill's
(born 1966) Shopping and Fucking (1996), which featured controversially explicit sex
scenes and drug activity, challenged not only the limits of what can be staged but also of
aesthetic and moral toleration. It is a tragi-comedy in fourteen short scenes about four young
drifters Lulu and her bi-sexual friend Robbie and the homosexuals Gary and Mark; they all
depend on a media man called Brian. The lives of these average people revolve around
drugs, sex, night-clubs, and microwave meals. The underlying moral dimension of the
allegedly amoral "in-yer-face theatre" becomes quite obvious in Ravenhill's Some Explicit
Polaroids (1999), which is both a deeply moral and a highly political play. Looking at the
values people had in the 1970s and the absence of them in fin-de-sicle Britain, the play
asks whether this is a loss or an improvement as we follow the story of Nick, just released
from prison, where he spent two decades of his life for a politically attempted murder, who
meets his former girl-friend and revolutionary comrade Helen. Nick's learning process be-
comes a diagnosis of the lack of values of any kind in present-day England.
Critical of commercial capitalism, the younger playwrights also raise uneasy questions about
gender identity not least because they refuse to accept both traditional views of gender rela-
tions and theatrical conventions Mark Ravenhill, for example, sees his own work as "post-
gay". Beyond its critique of the social and human cost of late capitalism, "in-yer-face
theatre" is concerned with gender identity (e.g., masculinity; see, for example, Jez Butter-
worth's Mojo, 1995), with sexual relations in post-Thatcherite Britain and, time and again,
with the origins of violence. Sexuality in fin-de-sicle Britain is the subject of Patrick
Marber's (born 1964) play Closer (1997). It brought Internet sex to the stage with a play
that gains a comical aspect when one of the two male characters shown in front of their
screens while looking for a sex partner pretends to be a woman.33 Finally Martin McDonagh
(born 1970), who has Irish parents and grew up in London, situates violence in an Irish home
in his The Beauty Queen of Leenane (1996), a drama about the rancorous and, ultimately,
tragic relationship between a forty-year-old spinster with her clinging mother.
If the younger playwrights have focused on the lives of whores, pushers, rentboys, and the
unemployed in what some observers see as working-class homoerotic neobrutalism, it is
only partly because with the representation of brutality and obscenity they want to shock the
bourgeois audience out of its complacency. Equally important is the fact that these plays
show what a globalized capitalism, tolerated and even supported by an allegedly Socialist
British government, does to the lives of the weakest and the marginalised in contemporary
Britain.
It would be wrong to associate British theatre and drama mainly with London. There is
much excellent dramatic work produced in the regions as well as in Scotland and Ireland. As
to Scotland, apart from Liz Lochhead, discussed above, John McGrath (1935-2002) must
be mentioned as a playwright and director who founded in 1971 the socialist theatre group
7:84, which was to put into practice a genuine working-class theatre. McGrath has dealt
with the economic exploitation of the Highlands in The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black,
Black Oil (1973) and again with Scottish politics in Little Red Hen (1977). He then made
33 For a discussion of other recent Anglo-American examples of plays dealing with the techno-
logical revolution of the late twentieth century see Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann, "Cyberspace: The
Impact of Information Technology on the Stage", in Werner Huber and Martin Middeke, eds.
Anthropological Perspectives. Contemporary Drama in English 5 (Trier: WVT, 1998): 173-85.
films and wrote Mairi Mhor, a drama in Scotts Gaelic. One of his latest pieces is a satirical
version of the morality play, A Satire of the Four Estates (1996).
Ireland's rapid economic growth over the last twenty years has been accompanied by a simi-
lar explosion in drama. Frank McGuinness (born 1953) and Brian Friel (born 1929), al-
though of different generations, are among the major voices. McGuinness grew up on the
border between the Republic of Ireland and Ulster and hence knows conflicts produced by
isolation and violence. His best works are Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards
the Somme (1985), which stages the experience of Ulster loyalists in the First World War;
and Someone Who'll Watch Over Me (1992), which transposes the Irish conflict to Beirut
and a group of hostages held there. The more senior Brian Friel first emerged as a political
playwright in the 1970s. He has written almost exclusively about and for Ireland. Friel is
concerned in a humane and intelligent way with the consequences for Irish culture of British
and European politics, but also with the impact of Ireland on the individual. Thus one of his
early plays, Philadelphia, Here I Come (1964), traces the steps of a young man who escapes
from the frustrations of village life in Co. Donegal by emigrating to America. His public
and private consciousnesses are represented separately by two actors, which creates a tragi-
comic dimension. Friel's The Freedom of the City (1973) focuses on the events in London-
derry (Derry for the Irish) in 1970, as British soldiers disperse Catholic civil-rights
marchers. Subsequently, Friel founded Field Day, a small touring theatre company which
premired and transferred his productions to London theatres, thus winning Friel an inter-
national reputation. His most remarkable plays to date are Translations (1980), Making
History (1980), and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990).
Translations is a play that, eventually, proves important on several cultural and political levels
as Friel demonstrates what happens when cultures clash or are invaded and suppressed. Opening
in a hedge-school34 in a Gaelic-speaking community in the 1830s (and thus introducing the
theme of the survival of a culture through its language), the play is built around a confrontation
of languages (English, Irish, Latin, Greek) and around juxtapositions of cultures. As British
Army surveyors work on an Ordnance map of Ireland, they are revealed as imperialist intruders
and reckless colonizers who impose not only a new nomenclature on a landscape that already
has (Irish) names but also English ways of seeing and naming. On another level, the British
surveyors also represent disinterested scientific progress, catapulting the West of Ireland into
European conformity.
Friel's Making History lays bare the contradictions of historiography, which always imposes
ordered arguments and convenient interpretations on material which, upon closer analysis,
proves obstreperous, disordered, and inconclusive. His most subtle drama so far is Dancing
at Lughnasa.
Premired at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1990 and then made into an internationally suc-
cessful movie, this is again a multi-faceted play with psychological, cultural, and political di-
mensions that renders recent English attempts to write about the culturally disadvantaged crude
by comparison. In Dancing at Lughnasa we find, on the personal and psychological level, a
narrator who looks back at his childhood in Donegal and discovers confusions and half-truths as
he matures to adulthood. Politically, the play recalls 1936 from an Irish perspective, as Catholi-
cism becomes an issue in the Spanish civil war and in Irish missionary work in Africa. Friel's play
34 A hedge-school was, originally, an open-air school for the poorer people, especially in Ireland.
Often run by priests and nationalists, these schools also tried to preserve the (publicly forbidden
or suppressed) Gaelic language.
examines the values of a tightly-knit family and simultaneously the Catholicized culture of rural
Ireland in comparison with an allegedly inferior, pagan, Africa. Its verbal power, sympathy, and
its multiple layers of reference something we now call intertextuality make Dancing at
Lughnasa one of the best plays in English written in the last decade of the twentieth century.
The Abbey Theatre in Dublin continues to provide Irish dramatists such as Friel with a stage
for their ideas. Irish drama35 continues to flourish with such younger playwrights as Martin
McDonagh (born 1970), discussed above, and Conor McPherson (born 1971). Both
achieved international success in the 1990s with poetic plays analyzing the influence of the
past on the present. McPherson's The Weir (1997) centres around ghost stories told in an
isolated Irish pub. As soon as Irish playwrights stage a successful piece in Dublin, it is
transferred to London, and then to America. This has been the case not only with the plays
of McDonagh and McPherson but also with Billy Roche's (born 1949) The Wexford Trilogy
(1992), a triptych of small-town life which won multiple awards, and the works of Mark
O'Rowe (born 1970; see Howie the Rookie, 1999, an electrifying picture of gangland
Dublin), Gary Mitchell (born 1965; see In a Little World of Our Own, 1997; and The Farce
of Change, 2000) and Marie Jones (born 1951). Jones's delightful Stones in His Pockets, a
witty comedy, played by only two actors, about a Hollywood film crew colonising County
Kerry, embarked on a world tour in 2001.
A strong female voice in contemporary Irish drama is that of Marina Carr (born 1964).
Since the 1980s, she has written plays about dysfunctional families and social taboos that
have caused as much uproar and critical admiration as the works of Sarah Kane in England.
Thus On Rafter's Hill (1996) presents the story of three generations of a family in the rural
midlands of Ireland. This close-knit community has little love and affection to offer as
rumours spread about incest and child abuse. Carr's major plays (Low in the Dark, 1989;
The Mai, 1994; Portia Coughlan, 1996; and By the Bog of Cats, 1997) appeared in a collec-
tion, Plays I, in 1999.
The influence of the media TV, radio, and film on drama has been considerable over the
last 40 years. Thus Steptoe and Son, a subversive series concerned with two rag and bone
men in Shepherd's Bush, London, written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and televised
between 1962-5 and 1970-4, probably reached more than 20 million viewers a Pinter play
would require a continuous run of half a century to accumulate an equivalent number.
Television plays have provided a living for numerous dramatists. Outstanding playwrights
like Pinter and Osborne have written for TV; David Hare and Harold Pinter have written
many screenplays; and Samuel Beckett, in addition to a unique Film (starring Buster
Keaton), wrote a number of his one-act pieces for radio. Other very able dramatists have
worked mostly for the small screen. Among the TV dramatists Alan Bennett (born 1934),
Alan Bleasdale (born 1946), and Dennis Potter (1935-94) Potter has been widely
regarded as the first major dramatist who could handle the means of TV to perfection.
Bennett, who is also known for his play The Madness of George III, produced by the
National Theatre in 1991, emerged in TV with his six monodramas, Talking Heads (1987; a
35 There is not enough space here to deal with Irish drama in great detail. See D. E. S. Maxwell, A
Critical History of Modern Irish Drama, 1891-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984); Frank
McGuinness, The Dazzling Dark: New Irish Plays (London: Faber, 1996); Eberhard Bort, The
State of Play: Irish Theatre in the 'Nineties (Trier: WVT, 1996); Shaun Richards, The Drama of
Modern Ireland (London: Macmillan, 2001); and Christopher Morash, A History of Irish
Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).
second series was broadcast in 1998), basically self-revelatory monologues, and the more
recent, autobiographical, The Lady in the Van (1999). Alan Bleasdale is more politically
oriented, focusing on class division in The Monocled Mutineer (1986) and political and
social violence in GBH (1991). As the son of a miner in the Forest of Dean, Dennis Potter
was able to draw on his own working-class background, his experience of the English class
system as he penetrated through his education at Oxford to the upper middle class, and his
long suffering from psoriatic arthropothy (which affects the skin and the joints). He also
wrote fiction and staged plays but is best known for his superb television plays. Original
and highly inventive, these plays are always firmly rooted socially, geographically, and
psychologically. Providing a subtle critique of social conditions in Britain as well as of what
could be termed "la condition humaine", they are also vastly entertaining. With his success-
ful series Pennies From Heaven (1978), Blue Remembered Hills (1979), The Singing Detec-
tive (1986), and Lipstick on Your Collar (1993) Potter reached much larger audiences than
most stage plays, and these TV plays may yet prove to be among the best theatrical pro-
ductions for TV in the late 20th century. Pennies from Heaven, a six-part serial that was
published in 1981 and made Bob Hoskins famous as an actor, is set in the 1930s and
follows the destiny up to his tragic death of a travelling salesman. A tragicomedy, with
musical elements (pop songs) recalling the period as in Fassbinder's movies, the series is
concerned with the minor triumphs, the lies and disappointments, and the brief moments of
happiness in the life of a man from the lower class. Potter's Blue Remembered Hills, first
broadcast in 1979, was staged in 1996 and proved very successful in the traditional
theatrical medium. Set in the Second World War, the play casts adults as children growing
up in the West Country. Time and memory, adulthood and childhood, become telescoped in
a psychological exploration of the theme of "the child is father of the man".
Widely thought to be his finest work, Potter's The Singing Detective (1986) is based on his
long-time suffering from psoriatic arthropothy and presents a multi-layered narrative, again
incorporating songs of the period and surrealist elements connected with trauma, dreams and
nightmares. On one narrative level, Philip Marlow, a writer of cheap detective novels, finds
himself in a present-day hospital ward while suffering from a terrible skin disease and writer's
block. In his feverish nightmares, which constitute another narrative level, Marlow imagines
scenes from his own fiction and others he intends to write; these get mixed up with his trau-
matic childhood memories, visits by his wife whom he suspects of adultery, and conversations
with the hospital psychiatrist. Dwelling on such key themes as childhood trauma, disillusion,
betrayal, love, and guilt, the series is simultaneously poetic, tragi-comic, and deeply moving.
Based on Potter's National service experience, Lipstick on Your Collar (1993) did for Ewan
McGregor what Pennies from Heaven did for Bob Hoskins. A musical black comedy with
quite a few surrealist elements again, the series is set in the War Office during the Suez
crisis while following the dreams and aspirations of several characters from the lower
middle class working under incompetent if amusing upper-class superiors. Weeks before his
death from cancer, Potter completed his final work, a pair of linked serials broadcast in
1996 Karaoke is a nightmarish thriller la Potter while Cold Lazarus is the dying writer's
dystopian view of imminent death and the meaning of memory.
The first decade of the new millennium has seen further remarkable dramatic works by
established playwrights while such movements as "In-yer-face theatre" as well as political
and feminist36 drama have continued and received a new impetus by younger authors. Thus
Tom Stoppard explored the ironic interplay of romantic anarchy, utopian idealism, and
political reformation among the "intelligentsia" of nineteenth-century Tsarist Russia in the
monumental trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002). It received the Tony Award for best play
of the year and has been briefly discussed above. More recently, in Rock 'n Roll (2006), he
turned to yet another study of the nature of reality and the ability of historical discourse to
recapture it.
Like some of his earlier plays, this also has a biographical dimension37 in that the major
character, Jan, is a Jewish Czech and as a child finds refuge from the war in England. Unlike
Stoppard, however, he and his family return to Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s and again after
the fall of Dubcek in the late 1960s. In the course of the play, which spans the years from 1968-
1990 and is set in Cambridge and Prague, it becomes clear that Jan has served as a spy for the
Czech government, although he personally feels that he has stood aloof from political reality.
Literature does not, for once, play a large role in the play (except for some references to the
subversive poetry of Sappho and allusions to Vaclav Havel's plays). Literature is replaced by
song lyrics and a rock band, the Plastic People of the Universe, who pose the final challenge to
authority by refusing to take part in the political debate. It is precisely by not becoming dissi-
dents that the band deprive the repressive state of the possibility to retaliate and play the latter-
day inquisition. There is a second strand of the plot that involves Jan's Cambridge professor
Max Morrow, a Marxist don, and his wife and daughter, showing the increasing personal
frustration of the academic as he loses his wife Eleanor and all value in life through his grief.
Howard Brenton has remained faithful to political drama. With Never So Good (2008), he
examined the twists of character and circumstances which transformed Harold Macmillan
into the politician and showman who steered Britain from post-war austerity into the era of
egoistic consumerism to which the title alludes. Unlike Brenton, who shows some sympathy
for his protagonist, Howard Barker continues with his exploration of violence, sexuality
and the drive for power in what he describes as his "Theatre of Catastrophe" (see The Dying
of Today, 2008) while David Hare, knighted in 1998, focused on a political discussion of
the invasion in Iraq in 2003 in his The Vertical Hour (2006) and critiqued the Labour Party's
methods of fund raising in Gethsemane (2008). In a similar political vein, David Edgar
addressed the politics of New Labour and problems of multiculturalism in northern England
in his Playing with Fire (2005).
The movement termed "In-yer-face theatre" lost an important representative with the suicide
of Sarah Kane in 1999, but her colleagues Ravenhill, Butterworth and Martin Crimp have
kept the flag flying as it were. Born in 1956, Crimp is sometimes described as a member of
the group, though he rejects the label. Crimp's The City (2008), a companion piece to his
earlier The Country (2000), echoes Pinter's concern with language and failing human rela-
tionships as three middle-class characters are shown struggling to make sense of a surreal
and apocalyptic world. Occasionally derided as the English blood-and-sperma theatre guru,
Mark Ravenhill has produced a controversial attack on the superficiality and obscenity of
contemporary art in Pool (No Water) (2006) and The Cut (2006), a dystopian play in which
the protagonist literally and metaphorically "operates" on dissenters for a fascist government
36 On contemporary British women playwrights see the monograph by Kathleen Starck (2005)
and the collection of essays edited by Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt (2000) listed in the
bibliography of this book.
37 See Holger Sdkamp, Tom Stoppard's Biographical Drama (Trier: WVT, 2008).
and ends in jail. In Scenes from Family Life (2008), he returns to his subject of abandoned
teenagers in the partly non-realistic story (characters simply dissolve into air and later come
back) of Jack and Stacey trying to find roles with each other and in an adult world. These
writers seem to share a bitter, apocalyptic world vision in a post-capitalist society with little
interest in human values and the future of young people; it is shared by Jez Butterworth's
Parlour Song (2009), the naturalistic portrait of a stultifying marriage in a sterile middle-
class English neighbourhood. Butterworth's recent Jerusalem (2009) is only superficially a
ribald comedy it also focuses on one of his major themes, the worlds and ideals that are
lost in the transition between adolescence and adulthood.
The political-feminist drama in Britain continues with the plays of Caryl Churchill, most
of them premiered in London's Royal Court Theatre known for its politically aggressive
productions. Bush's war against terror is her target in Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?
(2006), a dialogue with numerous half-sentences (to be completed by the audience) between
two gay men. The characters may be understood as incorporations of Tony Blair (Jack) and
George W. Bush (Sam) as they exchange their sexualized Machivallistic ideas and plans
concerning countries attacked by the Unites States (Vietnam, Panama, Nicaragua, Iraq).
If there are rising stars on the firmament of contemporary British theater, Simon Stephens
(born 1971) and Dennis Kelly (born 1970) are certainly among them. Stephens's work
draws on Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill. Like the representatives of "In-yer-face theatre",
he is concerned with the sad and frustratingly empty lives of characters from the British un-
derclass, (younger) people left behind by the economic boom that lasted until the new mil-
lennium. Among the remarkable plays he produced after 2000 are the neo-naturalistic Port
(2002), Christmas (2004), On the Shore of the Wide World (2005), Motortown (2006), and
Pornography (2007). But these are not simply mimetic and bitter studies of the underclass
milieu and psyche, the desperation and loneliness of the characters is also conveyed through
a clever handling of pauses and silences as employed in the plays of Harold Pinter and
Samuel Beckett. One of his acclaimed recent pieces is Harper Regan (2008), which also
explores family relations in a woman's brave journey of discovery as she leaves her family
to visit her terminally ill father. Like Simon Stephens, Dennis Kelly grew up in England,
but has Irish roots. He came to national attention with his Debris (2003), a haunting play in
which two neglected working-class children compensate the poverty of their lives with
violent horror fantasies. Kelly has continued to explore the shockingly brutal lives of lower-
class youngsters in Osama the Hero (2005). More recently, he has turned to sarcastic and
ironic engagements with popular genres, as in After the End (2005), a dark psycho-thriller,
and Love and Money (2006), which parodies the screwball comedy in dialogues that are
abysmally bitter and cynical. In Kelly's Orphans (2009), urban violence disturbs the candle-
light dinner of a middle-class couple, Helen and Danny. To his utter horror, Danny gradual-
ly realizes that the intruder (Helen's brother) is as much of a psychopath as his own wife.
Alongside English mainstream drama, one also finds the representatives of various "fringes"
in ethnicity, gender, and nationality. Among Jewish British playwrights Julia Pascal
(born 1949) has come to the fore with The Holocaust Trilogy (made up of Theresa, A Dead
Woman on Holiday, and The Dybukk, 2000) and three plays about the Middle Eastern con-
flict contained in Crossing Jerusalem (2003). Scottish theatre was boosted in 2006 with the
foundation of the National Theatre of Scotland the inauguration saw ten different new
productions of plays from Shetland to Dumfries, all entitled Home and adopting specific
local/national approaches to the theme. Irish playwrights, too, have produced a string of
remarkable dramas. Thus Conor McPherson set Hell in the here and now of Ireland in The
Seafarer (2006), as a group of hard-drinking Irish males in Howth, a suburb north of
Dublin, experience the visitation of the Devil during an extended session of poker. Mean-
while, the Protestant Northern Irish dramatist Gary Mitchell had to find out that play-
wrighting can be a dangerous profession. He lambasted the brutality of the inner life of para-
military Protestant organizations such as UDA (Ulster Defence Association)38 in The Force
of Change (2000) and As the Beast Sleeps, first produced in 1998. When this was broadcast
by the BBC in 2001, he received threats and his car was bombed by loyalist paramilitaries
in 2005 Mitchell and his family went underground.
4. Prose Fiction
4.1 The Novel

Many of the novelists writing between 1890 and World War I spent their formative years in
the Victorian age. Such late Victorians as Butler, Hardy, Moore, and the American-born
Henry James influenced English prose fiction until well into the 20th century. In his early
novels the Irishman George Moore (1852-1933) emulated French naturalism, and Zola in
particular; but Moore gradually abandoned determinism. Upon his return in 1901 from
Paris, where he was educated, he became absorbed in the Irish Literary Renaissance.
Moore's The Lake (1905) portrays the inner unrest of an Irish priest who abandons his parish
and country for the love of a woman and emigrates to America. In the novels that followed
Moore reduced dialogue and developed a rich prose that reminds one of both Pater and
Proust. Apart from a number of autobiographical narratives, such as Confessions of a Young
Man (1888), Hail and Farewell (1911), and Avowals (1919), it is mainly his agnostic novel
on Christ, The Brook Kerith (1916), and his treatment of the great love story from the 12th
century, Hloise and Ablard (1921), that are remembered today.
More, and consciously, at home in the realistic tradition were Arnold Bennett and John
Galsworthy. Bennett (1867-1931) has left behind a great number of works, yet only three
of his novels have stood the test of time. Like some of his contemporaries, Bennett owed
much to Zola, Balzac, and Maupassant. His outstanding novel, The Old Wives' Tale (1908),
was inspired by Maupassant's Une Vie and relates the lives of two sisters, Constance and
Sophia Baines, during a time when Victorian traditions were coming to an end. Bennett was
best in the description of the area where he was born, the pottery district of Staffordshire. It
is this element of "local colour" which also distinguishes the two other works set in Staf-
fordshire, Anna of the Five Towns (1902), and the Clayhanger-trilogy, Clayhanger (1910),
Hilda Lessways (1911), and These Twain (1916).
If Bennett was concerned with provincial life in the lower middle class, John Galsworthy's
(1867-1933) reputation rests on his realistic treatment of the upper middle class in his six
novels entitled The Forsyte Saga, A Modern Comedy (1929), and The End of the Chapter
(1935). The Forsyte Saga, which consists of The Man of Property (1906), In Chancery
38 Together with UDA, the Ulster Volunteer Force constitutes the terrorist counterweight against
the IRA. Between 1971 and 2003, UDA killed 112 people, mostly Catholic civilians but also
some of its own members that were considered traitors. The Northern Irish police feared that
Mitchell and his family might become victims too and advised them to leave Belfast and hide.
(1920), and To Let (1921), presents the reactions of a well-to-do English family to the events
challenging their values and ideas, such as World War I and socialism. The hero of The Man
of Property, Soames Forsyte, embodies the money-seeking class while his wife Irene stands
for beauty and resists possession as well as the negative influence of property. Galsworthy
was drawn into the fictional world of the Forsyte family, and what starts off as social criti-
cism ends in the silent acceptance of the values and principles initially exposed and con-
demned. The TV series of the 1960s made the trilogy popular once more, but critics agree
that it is of interest more as a cultural-historical record of the end of Victorianism than as a
literary work in its own right.
Among the more traditional writers at the beginning of the century Joseph Conrad (1857-
1924), whose real name was Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, is an outstanding figure
who brought a new quality into the novel. His Polish origin and his love for the sea he
spent 20 years of his life at sea on French and British merchant ships before settling in
England had an impact on both his vision and his writing. He was less interested in social
conditions than in man's capacity to cope with nature and exotic countries. After reading
Shakespeare, Keats, Dickens, and Henry James, Conrad produced his first novel at the age
of 38. He then turned out a book every year, eventually completing 13 novels and 7 volumes
of short stories. Conrad became known with his early novels of the sea and far-away places,
such as Almayer's Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), which have a common
Malayan background and show characters trying to survive in an alien and often hostile
environment. He won critical acclaim with his masterful long novella The Nigger of the
Narcissus (1897), which tells the story of the Negro James Wait on his voyage aboard the
ship "Narcissus" from Bombay to England. Many critics agree that Lord Jim (1900) is Con-
rad's finest novel.
Concerned with moral conflict, with sin and evil, Lord Jim focuses on an officer in the English
merchant marine whose cowardice proves to be fatal. When his ship "Patna", laden with pil-
grims on a voyage to Aden, appears to be sinking, Jim instinctively leaps to join other officers
taking to a boat. But the ship is saved and towed to a harbour. Whereas Jim's fellow officers
escape, he alone has the courage to face the Court of Inquiry, and he is ordered to return his
certificate. The story is then continued by another narrator, Marlow (who is also the teller of the
story in Heart of Darkness), who relates Jim's rehabilitation after the "fall" in a remote tropical
community. There, Jim saves the natives from the Arabs, thus earning his title 'Tuan' (Lord), but
makes a great mistake in letting a notorious criminal escape. This person kills the only son of
the tribe's chief, and Jim, in a sort of self-sacrifice, has himself shot by the chief. Jim is thus a
romantic idealist who, faced with difficult situations, takes the wrong decisions and perishes. In
Lord Jim Conrad used a complicated narrative technique that includes an omniscient narrator, a
sceptical commentator (Marlow), and "factual" reports by Jim himself. In addition, the novel
has a dense pattern of symbolism and a sophisticated episodic time scheme.
Conrad treated the subject of evil again in his novella Heart of Darkness, published in 1902
in a collection of tales entitled Youth. This story inspired Francis Ford Coppola's memorable
movie Apocalypse Now (1979). Told by Marlow, the story describes how Mr. Kurtz, an
ivory trader in the Congo, gives in to the strange and evil power of the jungle while recog-
nizing with horror the negative potential of his character. Heart of Darkness also proves that
Conrad's fiction is an attempt to embody in words what the Impressionist painters of his
time39 expressed in their canvasses. Since Conrad used the private visions of his characters
39 The term Impressionism was first given in derision to the work of a group of French painters
(such as Monet's Impression: soleil levant, 1872) who held their first exhibition in 1874. They
in portraying images and emotions (see, for instance, the image of the fog that becomes a
symbol in Heart of Darkness), he has been called an Impressionist.
Apart from Impressionism in art, the most influential sources in literature for Conrad were
Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. From Stevenson he borrowed the frame of the
adventure story, and from his pen-friend James a convincing psychology of characterization.
Nostromo (1904) impresses one with its rich political and social background in a novel
exploring human and social corruption in Costaguana, an imaginary South American
republic. In The Secret Agent (1907) Conrad dealt with revolution and the London under-
world and achieved the suspense of a detective novel, while Under Western Eyes (1911)
treats of Russian revolutionaries. The influence of James on Conrad is most striking in
Chance (1913), which has two narrators and explores man's loneliness and the problem of
individualism. It brought Conrad his first popular and financial success.
For all his occasional sentimentality in handling love scenes and his stylistic overstatement,
there can be no doubt that Conrad is an outstanding writer quite capable of exploring moral
dilemmas with a complex prose and a brilliance of detail.
The majority of novelists writing between 1890 and 1914 were traditionalists in the sense
that they cared less about the form of the novel and more about their message, which was
either artistic, as with Conrad who emulated James, or didactic. The most conspicuous rep-
resentative of the didactic wing was H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells (1866-1946), who saw in
literature a means to achieve social equality and scientific advancement. In literature Wells
is especially known for his scientific romances combining elements of science fiction and
social criticism. Whereas The Shape of Things to Come (1933) is a utopian novel in praise of
scientific perfection, his better-known The Time Machine (1895) is in essence an anti-uto-
pian novel.
The book describes the efforts of the protagonist who, with the help of his time machine, is
carried forward some 800,000 years. But instead of an ideal future of comfort and ease, he finds
that nineteenth-century class distinctions have led to the development of two distinct species.
There are the Eloi, i.e. the lazy, degenerate and pleasure-seeking descendants of the upper class,
and the Morlocks, the former servants who live underground and come out only at night to eat
those of the Eloi they can capture. Though the planet Earth is now a garden, horror lurks behind
the deceiving facade of human "development". The Time Traveller undertakes a second journey
into the future from which he never returns.
In addition to his utopian and dystopian fiction, Wells wrote novels with a political bent.
Thus Kipps (1905) traces the way to wealth and success of a young man working at a
draper's shop, and The History of Mr. Polly (1910), which is partly autobiographical, devel-
ops the theme of the lower middle-class man shaking off the shackles of convention and
rising to a comfortable middle-class life. Wells's masterpiece is Tono-Bungay (1909). The
title of the novel refers to a basically useless medicine with which clever salesmen make a
fortune while cheating the public.
aimed to catch fleeting moments in representations of the effects of light on objects. The major
figures of the movement were Claude Monet (1840-1926), Berthe Morisot (1841-95), Paul
Gauguin (1848-1903), Alfred Sisley (1839-99), Camille Pissarro (1831-1903), Auguste Renoir
(1841-1919), Paul Czanne (1839-1906), and Edgar Degas (1834-1917).
Although Modernism can be said to have started in the second decade of the century, there
were writers who seemed to be undisturbed by the events of World War I and the innovation
in fiction as embodied in the works of Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. J(ohn)
B(oynton) Priestley, for instance, served on the Western front and yet his subsequent works
seemed untouched by the war. In fact, diversity is a hallmark of Modernism, which saw a
vast innovative output but also the continuing productivity of the older and younger realists.
This is often ignored when the harbingers of a new era in literature Joyce, Pound, Eliot,
Yeats, Woolf are discussed. Before turning to the early Modernists in the novel, it is im-
portant to have at least a brief look at the traditionalists writing between the two wars.
Unlike Wells, G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton (1874-1936), who often collaborated with his
friend Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), championed an aggressive Christianity and, after his
conversion, Roman Catholicism. Chesterton wrote a great many short stories and is also
remembered as a poet (see Lepanto and The Ballad of the White Horse). His best works are
the detective stories featuring Father Brown, collected and published between 1911-27, and
the novel The Man Who was Thursday (1908), a fantastic tale of anarchists and secret agents
with a serious message about the struggle between good and evil and the mystery of suf-
fering.
W(illiam) Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) started out in the naturalistic tradition of
Gissing with his study of London life, Liza of Lambeth (1897), followed by Of Human
Bondage (1915), a novel with strong autobiographical elements tracing the unsuccessful
career of the would-be artist Philip Carey. Maugham qualified as a doctor before he turned
to writing. The clinical detachment in his study of human character was undoubtedly re-
inforced by the fact that he was a homosexual and thus had an outsider's view. With The
Razor's Edge (1944) he came close to a philosophical novel; yet his wittiest book is Cakes
and Ale (1930). It relates satirically the story of an eminent novelist with a shady back-
ground. The study of French naturalists, and of Maupassant in particular, enabled Maugham
to exclude sentimentality from his fiction and to discuss sex with a frankness surpassed only
by D. H. Lawrence. Maugham was fascinated by the Orient. China and Malaya provide the
settings for The Trembling of a Leaf (1921) and The Painted Veil (1925), while The Moon
and Sixpence (1919) is a novelistic treatment of the life of Gauguin40 in Tahiti.
Among the writers attracted by the East, T(homas) E(dward) Lawrence (1888-1935) and
E(dward) M(organ) Forster (1879-1970) must be mentioned. Lawrence led the Arab
revolt against the Turks and became a legendary figure in his own lifetime. He recorded his
experiences in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), reissued in 1927 in an abbreviated form
as Revolt in the Desert, which stands between military chronicle, essay and novel. Forster, a
homosexual like Maugham, contributed to the novel proper six works of which only
Howards End (1910) and his magnificent A Passage to India (1924) are remarkable. The
first novel treats of the complex relations between an insensitive English middle-class fam-
ily and the cultured half-German Schlegel sisters. A Passage to India is concerned with the
English and the nations in British India trying to achieve a mutual understanding. David
Lean made a film based on this novel. Forster had travelled in India, and his novel, with its
40 Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), French painter and engraver. Gauguin gave up his career in a bank
and his middle-class existence and joined the Impressionist painters. He lived for some time on
the Marquesas in the South Sea and died there, leaving works that proved influential for the
Expressionists.
realism and genuine affection for the Indian people, is an admirable correction to Kipling's
romanticism. But A Passage to India is more than a novel about the exotic East. What
makes it an outstanding work of fiction is its treatment of fundamental human situations and
personal relations, of tolerance, love, and of the exposure of conventionalism. Forster was
also an able if conservative literary critic (see his Aspects of the Novel, 1927).
The three Powys brothers, together with Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), Compton
Mackenzie (1883-1972) and Hugh Walpole (1884-1941), belong to the late Victorian tradi-
tion of realistic and satirical fiction. John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) was a novelist of
great imaginative energy. His A Glastonbury Romance (1933) is set in Somerset and com-
bines associations of King Arthur's realm with a panorama of the modern world. Charles
Langbridge Morgan (1894-1958) brought philosophy and mysticism to his fictional ex-
ploration of love, art, and death in Portrait in a Mirror (1929), The Fountain (1932), and
Sparkenbroke (1936). Finally, Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is a figure between tradition-
alists and modernists. His work has long been neglected, but there are signs that he is at last
being recognized as a great novelist. Ford is remembered for his novels on Katherine
Howard41, such as The Fifth Queen (1905), and especially for The Good Soldier (1915). The
latter has in Dowell an unreliable narrator who proved influential for the technical develop-
ment of modern fiction. Ford's final work was the tetralogy Parade's End (Some Do Not,
1924; No More Parades, 1925; A Man Could Stand Up, 1926; and Last Post, 1928). The
major character of these penetrating satires of England from 1910 to the late 1920s is a late
Victorian, Christopher Tietjens, whose old-fashioned moral standards clash with the values
of a new age. It is perhaps telling that Joseph Conrad called Ford's Katherine Howard
trilogy "the swan song of historical romance", thus indicating the fact that the historical
novel was out of fashion with ambitious literary writers. Historical fiction continued to be
written, but mainly in its popular variety that appealed to the masses. Examples can be
found in the numerous novels of Georgette Heyer (1902-74), Barbara Cartland (who has
produced more than 600 works), C. S. Forester (1899-1966; see his Hornblower novels
modelled on Frederick Marryat's Victorian nautical-historical fiction), Mary Renault
(pseudonym of Mary Challans, 1905-83; see The King Must Die, 1958), and Eleanor
Hibbert. Writing under the names of "Jean Plaidy", "Victoria Holt", and "Philippa Carr"
and mainly for a female audience, Hibbert has produced more than one hundred historical
novels. These authors had no high literary aims but they knew that writing romance for the
millions would earn them, at least in some cases, millions too. One had to wait until the
postmodern period for the serious, literary, historical novel to make an impressive return in
the works of Byatt, Farrell, Unsworth and others discussed below.
The advancement of Modernism in English prose fiction is not an event that can be related
to one single cause. Nor was Modernism confined to literature. In painting, for instance,
there was a revolt against representation and impressionism, which brought a reevaluation
of design, texture, and colours. Painters like Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Pablo
Picasso (1881-1973) abandoned imitation and description in favour of abstraction while
others like Max Ernst (1891-1976) and Salvador Dal (1904-89), two representatives of
surrealism who worked in the wake of the "pittura metafisica" created by Giorgio de
41 Katherine (Kathryn) Howard (1521-42), the fifth wife of King Henry VIII. Accused of immoral
conduct in 1541, she admitted to premarital relations. She was beheaded in the Tower of Lon-
don in 1542.
Chirico (1888-1978), presented strange forms and symbols in their attempts to lay bare the
unconscious. Ren Magritte (1898-1967), the most intellectual and philosophical surrealist
painter, questioned the principles of representation themselves and, with his anti-mimetic
pictures, exerted a strong influence on postmodern artists and writers (see, for instance, the
plays of Sir Tom Stoppard). These artists, as well as the innovators in literature D. H.
Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf shocked their audience. The modernists were
opposed to the naturalistic tradition represented by Gissing, Moore, and Bennett. Virginia
Woolf, for example, was opposed to what she termed the Edwardian "materialists" (e.g.,
Galsworthy and Wells) and attracted by the poetic impressionism she found in the works of
Marcel Proust and in art. What stood behind these innovations in art, music, and literature
were the rejection of Victorian values by a new generation coming of age in a new century,
the social and political upheavals caused by the Great War (many of the Surrealists had
either served as soldiers or dealt with shell-shock victims), and the new socialism heralded
and symbolized by the Russian Revolution of 1917. For literature, however, the propagation
of Sigmund Freud's work between 1910-1940 must be seen as a major factor in the artistic
innovation. The increasing discourse on, and indeed obsession with, sex in modern literature
owes a great deal to the teachings of Freud who described the libido as an instinctual force
at odds with the needs and demands of society. The founding father of psychoanalysis
recognized that repression of sexual instincts could lead to neurosis and psychosis, but that
repressive sublimation was necessary for the rise of civilization. Civilization, Freud argued,
rechanneled sexual energy into art and religion.
For innovators such as Lawrence
and Joyce, sex and the uncon-
scious became central issues,
and at least for Joyce and
Woolf so did the question of
how they were to be represented
in the novel. D(avid) H(erbert)
Lawrence (1885-1930) did not
care much for the experiments of
his contemporaries Marcel Proust
(1871-1922) and James Joyce.
The son of a Nottinghamshire
coalminer, Lawrence knew the
cruelties of working class life.
He owed his education to his Paul Nash, Landscape from a Dream. 1936-38
mother, a former school teacher
who was anxious for her favourite son to rise above his origins. For Lawrence it was not the
form of the novel that mattered he was quite satisfied with the Victorian types he knew
but the ideas about sex and the relations between men and women he tried to express in his
works. Disgusted with modern civilization, he rejected the intellect and wanted to go back
to the repressed natural instincts and thus restore man's happiness. When his German-born
wife Frieda, ne von Richthofen, who abandoned her husband and her three children to join
Lawrence in 1912, acquainted him with the work of Freud, Lawrence felt reconfirmed. He
also wrote tracts on the unconscious (see Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, 1923) and
with his novels appealed to readers to have the courage to accept and explore physical love,
instinct, and human passion.
His first major novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), is a fictionalized autobiographical account of
Paul Morel, a miner's son, whose development Lawrence traces with psychological subtlety.
Sexual passion is the dominant theme in The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920).
These novels describe the lives of three generations of a Nottingham family, the Brangwens,
and especially Ursula Brangwen's rejection of the deadening mechanization of mind and
soul by the mining industry and her love for Rupert Birkin, a school inspector. Lawrence's
heroes all look for self-realization and are prepared to make sacrifices. Thus Aaron Sisson
leaves his wife and child in Aaron's Rod (1922), and Kate Leslie, in The Plumed Serpent
(1926), abandons Europe and Catholicism to find happiness in the ancient Aztec culture,
with its roots in sex, violence, and its exaltation of the dominant male over the passive
female. In 1928 Lawrence published Lady Chatterley's Lover. Its frank descriptions of the
sexual relations of two lovers made it his most notorious book the unexpurgated version
was banned until 1959. Much of the sensation the novel caused can be seen in the un-
abashed style, including four-letter-words, Lawrence used to express his sexual philosophy
of the pleasures of the flesh.
The novel is set in Nottinghamshire. At Wragby, seat of the Chatterleys, Constance Chatterley
is frustrated by her husband, Sir Clifford, who returned from the war an impotent and paralysed
man. For Lawrence, Sir Clifford's impotence is a symbol of the sterile and moribund upper-class
establishment that has ruled the country and defiled the landscape. Sir Clifford's adversary is a
miner's son, the gamekeeper Mellors. It is Mellors, the representative of lower-class virility and
instinct, who provides Constance with the sexual satisfaction she needs. Constance stays with
him, even after getting pregnant.
Lady Chatterley's Lover has elements of realism (Mellors's dialect and his drastic and un-
buttoned style), symbolism (forest and game) and mysticism (sexuality). And although the
intended realism does not always work and is apt to lead to comic obscenity, there is no
denying the fact that Lawrence's prose is unique. He had a rare eye for nature and landscape
and he could present human passion and the vitality of life in ways that remain unsurpassed.
Whereas Lawrence tried to uncover the neglected instincts and mysterious areas of feeling
we are not aware of, James Joyce (1882-1941) focused on both the unconscious and lan-
guage as used in the novel. Although not the first writer to use what came to be known as
"stream of consciousness", Joyce was the most original of the modern novelists. Literary
fashion in England in the 1920s, inspired by Continental ideas, demanded that fiction
explore the minds of characters rather than social and outer reality. One of the first to find
an appropriate narrative technique, "interior monologue", for this sort of expressionism was
Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957) in her series of ten novels entitled Pilgrimages (1915-
1938). But it was the Irishman Joyce who proved a master of this method.
Joyce was educated in Catholic schools and at University College Dublin. And though
much of his life was spent on the Continent, he never left Dublin in his mind. His native city,
Catholicism, and the social and mental environment they created for youths, distinguish his
early impressionistic short stories collected in Dubliners (1914). They already contain ele-
ments of stylization and of symbolism foreshadowing his later works. In 1916 A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man was published. Like Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, this is rooted
in autobiographical experience, showing the young Stephen Dedalus (an ironic allusion to the
Christian martyr and the Greek mythical figure who built himself wings) revolting against
the Catholic Church, Irish patriotism, and Dublin bourgeois society. Stephen's character, his
consciousness, his feelings and moods, are here recorded with an unprecedented subtlety.
Stephen's development until his decision for "life and art" is shown from within his own
mind and involves a number of styles reflecting the thought of infancy, childhood, adoles-
cence, and early manhood. It is in the sensitive adjustment of style to the character's stage of
development and mood that Joyce proves a real master of modern fiction.
The great innovative novel of the twentieth century appeared in 1922. With Ulysses, a title
that immediately establishes the ironical connection with Homer's epic, Joyce created a
masterpiece of epic proportions.
In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus appears again as one of the major characters. The novel deals with
events, mainly thoughts and reflections caused by actions, on a single day (16 June, 1904) in
Dublin. Unlike Homer, Joyce focuses on the mental, not
the geographical, wanderings of his characters. Homer's
heroes, Odysseus, Telemachus and Penelope, are recast
as modern anti-heroes in Dublin; they are Leopold
Bloom, an advertisement canvasser, Stephen Dedalus,
in search of a spiritual father, and Molly, Bloom's sexu-
ally neglected wife. The eighteen episodes of the novel
are divided into three books. The first part (3 episodes)
introduces Stephen as a suffering artist. The central part
of Ulysses (12 episodes) is dedicated to Leopold Bloom,
a small, mediocre Jew henpecked by his wife. Bloom's
past life is shown with the stream-of- consciousness
technique; he emerges as a modern tragi- comic hero,
Falstaff, Don Quixote, and Pickwick rolled into one.
Eventually, Stephen and Bloom are brought together. In
Dublin's red light district they have a long conversation
and afterwards, tired and drunk, they hallucinate and
celebrate a black mass. The final episodes (3) record
their return home. In Bloom's kitchen they have another
conversation which is followed by Molly's final interior
monologue, which runs to 40 pages, with no punctuation
marks, and expresses her sensuality and the animal
force of life.
Richard Hamilton, Illustration
It took Joyce seven years to write Ulysses. A very con- for Ulysses
sciously structured book whose prose often sounds like
verse, it alludes to numerous other literary works and genres by mockingly imitating their
styles (e.g., sermons, newspapers, romantic fiction, dramatic monologues, and many others).
Its form links it satirically with Homer's epic. In addition, Joyce tried to capture everything
that is important to men birth and death, love and sex, faithfulness and adultery, religion,
politics, national pride, literature and philosophy. The numerous allusions to literature, reli-
gion and classical mythology as well as the abundance of symbols and puns, often well hid-
den, make it difficult to read this monumental novel without a commentary.42 Ulysses is a
supreme novel because it combines stylistic artistry and virtuosity, complicated yet convinc-
ing narrative techniques (stream-of-consciousness, realistic description, association, musical
42 See, for instance, Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book. A Guide Through ULYSSES
(London: Routledge, 1996); Margot Norris, ed. A Companion to James Joyce's ULYSSES
(Boston: Bedford Books, 1998); and Don Gifford et al. ULYSSES Annotated. Notes for James
Joyce's ULYSSES (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).
patterns such as leitmotif, and montage as used in films), sophisticated characterization, and
earthy humour in a panorama of life and human consciousness. Like Shakespeare, Sterne,
and Rabelais, Joyce was able to be funny and serious in a work with many layers of mean-
ing.
Nothing in the English novel of the twentieth century can compare to Joyce's work; and
Joyce's experiments in Ulysses have influenced almost all modern English and American
novelists. Joyce tried to surpass himself with Finnegans Wake (1939). This novel attempts to
portray all of human history as a dream in the mind of a Dublin inn-keeper called H. C. Ear-
wicker. The unconscious world of dreams is central to this book in which new techniques of
verbal ambiguity constantly create complex meanings. This makes the text extremely dif-
ficult, even for "Joyceans", but it enriches the tale of Earwicker and his family. The ending
of Finnegans Wake picks up a sentence that starts the book and thus suggests Joyce's creed:
man and human society change continually, but they do so in a circular fashion, for life is
always renewed.
London's and England's literary life received some impulses in the 1920s from the members
of the "Bloomsbury Group", a number of writers and intellectuals who championed art,
truth, and aesthetics while rejecting the kind of literary realism Bennett and Wells had stood
for. One of the key members of this group was Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Together with
Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair, she is considered to be the founder of "female mod-
ernism", and she is often mentioned together with Joyce, because like the Irishman she used
interior monologue in a stream-of-consciousness technique to depict the inner life of her
characters. Instead of traditional plotting, description, and dialogue she aimed at a rep-
resentation of the fluidity of consciousness. Reality, for Woolf, was thus what goes on in the
mind, while experience meant aesthetic experience. Her first novel in this new way of
writing was Jacob's Room (1922), which gradually creates the hero through impressions
given by other characters. The mental reflections and flashbacks that reconstruct the
heroine's past in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) are the real substance of a novel in which "realistic"
events take place within a single summer day. Woolf extended her technique in To the
Lighthouse (1927). This novel recreates two days separated by a gap of ten years. The first
and last parts are concerned only with the inner lives of the members of the Ramsay family
while the central part of the book is held in a prose approaching poetry in its power to evoke
mood and feeling. But Virginia Woolf was always dangerously close to pretentiousness and
some of her passages seem to be over-written. The lighthouse, and the voyage to it, gradu-
ally emerge as symbols of human life. Woolf's technique reached an extreme in The Waves
(1931).
Tracing the lives and interactions of six friends and a mysterious seventh character, Percival,
the novel makes no concession to ideas of plot or imposed design. The protagonists of the book,
three female and three male, with an additional, unspecified voice (which opens the book and
intervenes occasionally in text usually held in italics), do not have realistic conversations; there
is merely the interior dialogue of the several consciousnesses reflecting aspects of other per-
sonalities. As we listen to the monologues, sometimes cut down to lines of one sentence, of
Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis, they evoke their personalities through their
reflections on themselves and on one another. The characters are differentiated not so much by
their speech patterns but by recurring phrases and images. In a rather oblique way, the reader
learns, for instance, that Susan marries a farmer, that Bernard cannot put into practice his am-
bitions as a writer, and that Louis becomes a man of power. The monologues of the characters
are introduced by sections of lyrical prose, held in italics, describing the rising and setting of the
sun over a seascape of water and shore. The thoughts of Percival are never directly presented; his
death in India, however, in his mid-twenties, becomes a focus for the others, as they give ex-
pression to their fears and defiance of mortality. Instead of traditional plot and characterization,
the novel offers powerful images, such as the sun and a fin breaking the water. Here are some
passages from the opening of the novel; they demonstrate Woolf's technique and aims in pre-
senting individual consciousnesses that provide different views of, and ultimately create, "reali-
ty":
The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea
was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it [] The wave paused, and then drew out
again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously [] the sky
cleared [] as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and
flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan [] The
birds sang their blank melody outside.
'I see a ring,' said Bernard, 'hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.'
'I see a slab of pale yellow,' said Susan, 'spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.'
'I hear a sound,' said Rhoda, 'cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.'
'I see a globe,' said Neville, 'hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of
some hill.'
'I see a crimson tassel,' said Jinny, 'twisted with gold threads.'
'I hear something stamping,' said Louis. 'A great beast's foot is chained. It stamps,
and stamps, and stamps.'
Two other novels by Woolf deserve to be mentioned. In Orlando (1928) the youthful,
beautiful and aristocratic major character lives through four centuries and changes sex on
the way. With this book Virginia Woolf celebrated her love for Victoria Sackville-West; the
lesbian implications of the novel are obvious. Finally, Between the Acts (1941) treats of
human life, art, and history, analysing the relations of a couple, Giles and Isabella Oliver,
and the central symbol of a village pageant.
Virginia Woolf's characters, like herself, live in isolated worlds distinguished by cultured
atmospheres, and they rarely encounter other consciousnesses. To many readers, her books
seem too static and in need of human interest. Compared to Joyce, she lacks earthiness,
ribaldness, and wit. Her main achievement lies in the transforming of the form and sub-
stance of the novel, although it must be said that even some of her avant-garde contem-
poraries criticized her severely.
Samuel Beckett (1906-89) is another innovator in the field of the novel, though he has
become much better known as a dramatist. His immediate influence was stronger in France
while the novelists in Britain or the United States reacted to him with a time lag of more
than two decades. Like Shaw and Wilde and unlike Joyce, Beckett had a Protestant Irish
background. He emigrated to Paris early in his life and became acquainted with his country-
man Joyce. Like Joyce he has been concerned with reality and fictional technique, and he
took Joyce's experiments with fiction (e.g., in Finnegans Wake) one step further while pro-
ducing, in his post-war fiction, a kind of anti-literature or metafiction which is held together
neither by plot nor character but by the idea that the "beautiful work of art" is an impos-
sibility after Freud and World War II. Beckett's pre-war fiction in English is not too difficult
to read, although we must remember that his episodic novel Dream of Fair to Middling
Women (1932, published posthumously in 1992) and the ten interconnected stories in More
Pricks Than Kicks (1934) are best understood when read as a response to Joyce's "work in
progress", Finnegans Wake. In 1938 Beckett published Murphy, and in 1953, Watt. These
two novels try to tap "non-literary" verbal sources and play with the traditional ideas of plot
and character until, in Watt, a surrealistic world full of strange logic and multiple irony is
achieved. Like Joyce's Ulysses, Murphy is still precisely placed in time and space (Thursday,
12 September 1935), as we follow the grimly entertaining destiny of an Irishman in London.
When Beckett returned to fiction after 1945, he chose to write in French. When his major
work appeared in English in 1959, the London edition assembling Molloy (French version
published in 1951, English in 1955), Malone Dies (1951, 1958), and The Unnamable (1953,
1959), bore the announcement that the three novels had been "translated from the original
French by the author". Finally complemented by How It Is (1961, 1964), the tetralogy con-
stituted the most radically innovative fictional statement of the 1950s and early 1960s.
Since they subvert anything one connects with traditional fiction (plot, character, regular time
sequences, and the very ability to express oneself), these (anti)novels make for difficult reading,
as we are presented with the interior monologues, and the desolate, obsessional black humour
of ageing characters who stumble over the contortions of their own syntax. As they need to pause
in order to reflect on what they really want to say, both narrative and language threaten to break
under the strain. There are no precise beginnings or endings, tenses shift constantly between
past and present, and the reader can never tell the difference between what is a digression or a
momentous event. Like Beckett's major plays (Waiting for Godot and Endgame), the speakers
are caught in a world and a consciousness they want to leave behind but don't dare leaving.
Thus Malone Dies opens with the telling sentence, "I shall soon be quite dead in spite of all",
and the ending of The Unnamable peters out in "where I am I don't know, I'll never know, in the
silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on". This found an echo in his play
Endgame, where Clov repeats the words of Jesus on the cross when he pronounces, "Finished,
it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished".
Beckett made use of French to write "without style", and this development in his plays and
novels is paralleled by a gradual reduction of plot and characterization through description
and an increasing and deliberate confusion of real and imaginary worlds. This is done with
irony and humour, elements that are also present in his Imagination Dead Imagine (1965,
1967), an extremely condensed novel, and his parable of life in hell, The Lost Ones (1972).
Mostly concerned with what he saw as impossibilites in fiction (identity of characters;
reliable consciousness; the reliability of language itself; and the rubrication of literature in
genres) Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narration
and character in fiction and drama won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His
works published after 1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his
own theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres.
Thus Mercier and Camier (1970, 1974) again probes the possibilites of narration in a novel-
text that consists mainly of dialogues; Company (1979) is yet another metatext on the impos-
sibility of finding a fable in a story, and Ill Seen Ill Said (1982) reduces to a minimum every
aspect of fiction in the "story" of an old woman, clad all in black, who lives in a hut and
whose only occupation consists in visiting a nearby grave and waiting for death. Beckett's
last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still (1988), breaks down the barriers be-
tween drama, fiction, and poetry, with texts of the collection being almost entirely composed
of echoes and reiterations of his previous work (see Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980,
1988; and As the Story was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose, 1990). Given his existen-
tialist and surrealist ideas, Beckett as a(n) (anti)novelist is thus rather a lonely and somewhat
belated figure in the post-war English novel. Very few writers in Britain or America re-
sponded to him immediately; the echoes were much stronger in France. But he was defi-
nitely one of the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued un-
dermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence,
and psychologically explained characters.
A great many writers born before 1900 were less concerned with the form of the novel.
Wyndham Lewis was a propagandist of modernism as a painter and writer. He published
philosophical and critical works and wrote a fantastic satirical trilogy entitled Childermass
(1928), Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, both published in 1955. Joyce Cary (1888-1957),
an Irishman, wrote lively novels about Africa An African Witch (1936) and Mister Johnson
(1939) and about the world of the young, as in A House of Children (1941). His best
novels are Herself Surprised (1941), To Be a Pilgrim (1942), and The Horse's Mouth
(1944). They contain picaresque themes, deal with British social history and have a typical
modern rogue-hero in Gully Jimson, an unprincipled artist.
The historical novel found two representatives in Hugh Walpole (1884-1941), whose The
Herris Chronicle started in 1930 with Rogue Herris, and Robert Graves (1895-1985), also
a distinguished poet, who enjoyed a great success with his I Claudius and Claudius the God,
first published in 1934, in which the Roman emperor Claudius tells his own story and that
of Rome.
L(eslie) P(oles) Hartley (1895-1972) did not become known before 1947 when the third
novel of a trilogy entitled Eustace and Hilda appeared. The series is distinguished by
sensitive and ironic control of character and plot in the description of a tragic brother-sister
relationship. Hartley's The Go-Between (1953) is also concerned with the psychology of
children. An excellent film version was made of this in 1971, winning him a wide audience
for his last novel, The Harness Room (1971). Other traditionalists are P(elham) G(renville)
Wodehouse and J. B. Priestley. Wodehouse (1881-1975) wrote a number of humorous
novels on idle gentry and their servants and was read by a vast audience. Such characters as
Bertie Wooster and his butler Jeeves became as well known in English literature as any, and
more than sixty years after the publication of The Inimitable Jeeves (1924) and Carry On
Jeeves (1925) British advertisements still alluded to these figures. The Yorkshireman John
Boynton Priestley (1894-1984) wrote journalistic pieces, plays and a series of successful
novels. His The Good Companions (1929) resurrected the picaresque novel, and his Angel
Pavement (1930) drew a realistic picture of lower middle-class life in London. His most
important later novels were Bright Day (1946), Festival at Farbridge (1951), and Lost
Empires (1965).
Of the satirists born around the turn of the century, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and
Evelyn Waugh are still being read today. A man of great intellect who wrote superb fiction,
Huxley (1894-1963) had Matthew Arnold among his ancestors. He attended Eton and
Balliol College, Oxford, and began his literary career with satirical and comic studies of the
cultural life of the 1920s: Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), and Those Barren Leaves
(1925) are all indebted to the dialogue technique of Thomas Love Peacock. Point Counter
Point (1928) is Huxley's best novel from this period. Technically, it aims at a musicalization
of fiction by arranging characters in groups that describe and satirize each other in turns (the
musical device of counterpoints). Huxley creates a cynical panorama of negative characters
and of modern society. He warned against too positive a view of the technological develop-
ments in Brave New World (1932). This is a dystopian novel about a totalitarian and mecha-
nized world controlled by the gods Marx and Henry Ford, a world in which culture is
suppressed, pleasures are standardized, and hygiene replaces ethics. After this novel Huxley
became increasingly interested in pacifism. His Eyeless in Gaza (1936), while less valuable
as a novel, is a plea for peace and an accusation of fascism. In 1937 Huxley settled in
California, and his subsequent works are strongly influenced by pacifism, mysticism, and
the occult. Ape and Essence (1949) is his last anti-utopian novel and a moving and horrible
description of the world after an atomic war. The Island (1962), his last work, expresses a
milder pessimism.
George Orwell (pseudonym of Eric Blair, 1903-1950) used fiction as a vehicle for his
political views. During his time at Eton and in the service of the Imperial Police in Burma,
Orwell became uncomfortably conscious of the disadvantages of the English class system.
Burmese Days (1934) contains some of his early impressions. He then lived voluntarily in
poverty and with the working class. From this experience emerged his autobiographical
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). This was followed by a number of novels
depicting the desolation of poverty and unemployment in France and England (see Keep the
Aspidistra Flying, 1936, and Coming Up for Air, 1939).
Apart from Burmese Days, Orwell wrote two outstanding works of fiction in which the
political message is balanced by the artistry of the fictional framework. Animal Farm (1945)
was written after Orwell had fought in Spain and expresses his disillusionment with
communism. It is a satirical fable about a revolution that ends in totalitarianism. The animals
chase away their oppressor, farmer Jones, and take over the farm. But very soon the pigs,
convinced of their own superior qualities, take over, and the dictator Napoleon establishes
his reign of terror and gets rid of the democrat Snowball. Orwell's great dystopian novel,
much more scary than Huxley's Brave New World, is 1984 (1949). It predicts the terrifying
triumph of totalitarian rule in Oceania, of which
England is merely a small part, when Big Brother
and the Thought Police manipulate the masses and
run a permanent war.
The hero of 1984 is Winston Smith, an employee in the
Ministry of Truth, whose job it is to falsify history by
adapting past records to the latest party policy. Smith
turns into a rebel, starts a diary, and tries to establish
contacts with the working-class population. In the second
part of the novel Smith falls in love with the girl Julia,
and they both intend to join the resistance by contacting
Smith's superior, O'Brien. But O'Brien proves to be a
staunch supporter of the Oceanian system, and he has
Smith and Julia arrested. The final part shows Smith's
forced reintegration into totalitarian society through tor-
ture and brainwashing. He betrays Julia and recognizes
Big Brother as the central figure in his life. Orwell's dys-
topian vision in this novel was certainly inspired by poli-
tical developments in Germany, Russia, and England.
His picture of a state controlling the thoughts and feel-
Stanley Spencer, Shipbuilding on ings of its people, even their language, was meant as a
the Clyde: Furnaces. 1946 warning.
Orwell's awareness of class distinctions in Britain influenced a number of younger writers,

among them the "angry young men", notably Kingsley Amis and John Wain.
Orwell's contemporary, Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), was less pessimistic in his outlook. He
preferred entertaining his audience with satirical novels bordering on farce. Like Huxley, he
began with ironic criticism of fashionable society in such novels as Decline and Fall (1928)
and Vile Bodies (1930). Black Mischief (1932) and A Handful of Dust (1934) are set in
Africa and South America and also discuss serious and religious issues. Waugh became a
Roman Catholic in 1930; this fact and his experience in World War II may have led to a
tone of greater seriousness in his subsequent works. His Brideshead Revisited (1945;
revised in 1960) bears the sub-title, "the sacred and profane memoirs of Captain Charles
Ryder". In this last nostalgic view of the English aristocracy Waugh tried to show the
working of God's grace and the power of religious values in the portrait of a group of people
fatefully held together by sins of the past. Waugh also contributed to the genre of the war
novel with his trilogy The Sword of Honour (Men at Arms, 1952; Officers and Gentlemen,
1955; and Unconditional Surrender, 1961), which was revised in 1965. These novels tell of
the war-time experiences of a Catholic from the upper class who finally surrenders to the
will of God.
Several writers born in the first decade of the century have proved influential for contem-
porary novelists. Henry Green (1905-73), with such novels as Living (1929), Party Going
(1939), and Loving (1945), was a conscious stylist and a brilliant observer who made an
impact on John Updike. C(harles) P(ercy) Snow (1905-80) has left a great number of nov-
els, most of them written in the traditional Victorian form and concerned with intellectuals
of the upper middle class. His Strangers and Brothers (1940-70) is made up of 11 volumes
and focuses on the power centres and the social circles of London. Snow also wrote thrillers
set in upper-class society, such as A Coat of Varnish (1979), but he never achieved the
literary excellence of his contemporaries, Anthony Powell (1905-2000) and Malcolm
Lowry. Powell's pre-war novel Afternoon Men (1931) satirizes fashionable bohemian life in
the 1920s in the manner of Huxley and Waugh. After the war Powell began an ambitious
sequence of twelve novels entitled A Dance to the Music of Time. Powell is indebted not
only to Proust's la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) and to Laurence Sterne's fiction
but also to Dickens. His narrator, Nick Jenkins, faces the problems of life from university
days in the 1920s through the Spanish Civil War down to the post-war years. From the first
novel, A Question of Upbringing (1951), to the last two, Temporary Kings (1973) and
Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975), Powell has recorded the disintegration of modern
society, and especially of middle-class life, creating some 200 characters in a series that is
symphonically structured and has been widely acclaimed. Malcolm Lowry (1909-57) put all
his skill and energy into one novel, Under the Volcano (1947), of which there is now also an
excellent film version. Born in England, Lowry lived for some time in Canada and Mexico
while struggling with misfortune and alcoholism. His novel is about the final hours in the
tragic life of an alcoholic British consul in Mexico. A moving study of an alcoholic's state of
mind and the suffering of his wife, the novel also contains more universal dimensions. Like
Joyce, Lowry managed to achieve artistic complexity in a combination of ambiguous and
symbolically charged tragi-comic scenes and realistic narrative that often alludes to myth.
Only a handful of novelists born in the second decade of the century can be said to have
added appreciably to the English novel before the arrival on the scene of the so-called
Angry Young Men. Like Powell, Mervyn Peake (1911-68), an artist and novelist, preferred
grouped novels. His reputation rests on a trilogy Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950),
and Titus Alone (1959) set in a gigantic castle peopled with grotesque characters. This
bizarre world, from which the hero, Titus, tries to escape, is disturbed by young Steerpike,
who becomes a murderer and destroyer. Peake's nightmare world holds a particular fasci-
nation and presents the ridiculous beside the momentous. After writing a number of short
stories, Angus Wilson (1913-91) turned to novels and concerned himself with cruelty and
horror and the sudden appearance of nightmares in everyday life. Such novels as Hemlock
and After (1952) and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) show Wilson's remarkable wit and gift
for minute observation, while The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot (1958) and Late Call (1964)
prove his ability to portray female characters and minds in a sensitive and persuasive way.
These novels seem superior to his long and technically ambitious No Laughing Matter
(1967) and As If By Magic (1973). With Setting the World on Fire (1980) he returned to a
more tightly constructed form to tell the story of the destinies of two brothers.
By 1945 modernism had largely lost its shaping force in the novel. Lawrence, Joyce, and
Woolf were all dead. Beckett wrote mostly in French and, initially, found little attention in
the English-speaking world. A new impetus came in the early 1950s with the literary works
of the "angry young men". One explanation for the rise of this new type of fiction must be
seen in the fact that socialism had made it possible for many young men and women from
the working class to get a university education but not the desired access to lite circles and
professional jobs. This younger generation voiced its criticism of the British establishment
by creating comic, aggressive, and picaresque anti-heroes who figured in a number of
novels. The "angry young men" among the novelists Kingsley Amis, William Cooper,
John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, John Wain, and Keith Waterhouse have always
refused to be considered as a movement, but their works have a few features in common.
They are mostly set not in London but in the provinces, develop situations in the lower
middle class or working class, and have discontented young heroes trying to cross class
barriers and to get ahead in life. Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), by William Cooper
(pseudonym of Harry Summerfield Hoff, 1910-2002), is generally credited with having
started the line of anti-heroes with Joe Lunn (see also the sequels to Cooper's first novel,
Scenes from Married Life, 1961; and Scenes from Metropolitan Life, 1982). Yet Amis's Jim
Dixon in Lucky Jim (1954) and Wain's Charles Lumley in Hurry on Down (1953) became
the archetypes of the neo-picaresque "dclass" heroes.
John Wain (1925-94) was one of the first "angries". He studied at Oxford and, for several
years, taught English literature as a lecturer. Also a poet indebted to William Empson, Wain
achieved his first success with Hurry on Down (1953).
Charles Lumley is the anti-hero of this novel. With his lower middle-class background and his
university education, Charles has become very class-conscious and, in an attempt to escape
middle-class conventionalism, tries a number of jobs including window-cleaning, drug-running,
hospital-portering, and, finally, "gag-writing" for radio. Although Charles resents the establish-
ment, he is not opposed to a lucrative occupation, which he finally gets.
Written with irony as well as moral commitment, Wain's novel stresses the value of the in-
dividual while exposing the disadvantages of modern society. Hurry on Down suffers from an
overdone criticism of middle-class respectability and from its almost sentimental love story.
But as a first novel that revived the picaresque tradition of Fielding and Smollett and set the
tone for a new way of writing, it must be considered an achievement.
Wain continued his study of the individual up against society in The Smaller Sky (1967) and
experimented with the novel form in A Winter in the Hills (1970) and The Pardoner's Tale
(1978). His later fiction includes his Oxford trilogy, Where the Rivers Meet (1988), Come-
dies (1990), and Hungry Generations (1994).
Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) was also a great admirer of the picaresque novel. Technically
and stylistically, he is superior to Wain. His hero in Lucky Jim (1954) became the idol of
middle-class intellectuals in England. With the handling of Jim Dixon, the young university
lecturer fighting pretentiousness and phoney dilettantism while trying to make a decent
living, Amis showed his talent for farce and slapstick, for exact social observation and
verbal sophistication. Starting in the 1950s Amis further developed his comic potential and
has taken a more conservative position in such novels as Take a Girl Like You (1960) and I
Want It Now (1968). These novels already allude to the themes of death and the supernatural
which he studied in detail in Ending Up (1974). With Russian Hide and Seek (1980) Amis
again proved his talent for irony and farce and for social criticism in a melodramatic spy
novel. His novel Stanley and the Women (1984) is a pseudo-attack on the feminist move-
ment that was probably provoked by the charge, made by several critics, that the sexist
heroes of his novels, who are stirred to enthusiasm only by alcohol and female breasts,
reflect Amis's own anti-feminism. Amis's strategy in his later novels was invariably the same
he tried to tackle difficult subjects and familiar literary genres with a humorous approach.
The Old Devils (1986), which won the Booker Prize43, focuses on the pseudo-problems of
retirement in a "ghost story" set in Wales. In Difficulties with Girls (1988) he resurrected
Patrick Standish and Jenny Bunn, now a married couple, from Take a Girl Like You, while
Folks That Live on the Hill (1990) casts an ironic light on the well-to-do in Hampstead,
London. His final works were the semi-autobiographical You Can't Do Both (1994) and The
Biographer's Moustache (1995).
In Room at the Top (1957), John Braine (1922-1986) shows the social rise of Joe Lampton,
a working-class hero, who gets what he wants at the expense of his lover and his ideals. Life
at the Top (1962) continues Joe's story, but Braine's subsequent works, such as Jealous God
(1965), did not fulfil the promises of his first novel. The same can be said of Alan Sillitoe
(born 1928), who has often been compared to D. H. Lawrence. Sillitoe's Arthur Seaton in
the much celebrated novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) has no intellectual
ambitions. For him, drinking and sex make up for the dreariness, the brutality, and the in-
justice of working-class life in the Midlands. Sillitoe's novel presents a good if bitter picture
of class warfare in Britain and of the violence and "unconsciousness" generated by a dis-
advantageous social environment. It has remained his best book and surpasses such sequels
as the story-collection The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959), with a rebellious
hero, an anarchic Borstal boy who fights the establishment in one story, and Key to the Door
(1961). Down to The Widower's Son (1976), Sillitoe was not tempted away from the subject
matter he knew best, the working-class life he described in the semi-autobiographical Raw
Material (1972).
43 Founded as the Booker McConnel Prize for Fiction in 1969, this is given by a panel of judges to
the best novel by a citizen of the UK, the British Commonwealth or Eire. The aim of the prize
is to stimulate the kind of public interest in literature aroused in France by the Prix Goncourt. In
1981, a "Booker of Bookers" was awarded to Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children. Up to the
year 2000, there had been only 12 female prize winners out of 36.
The provinces were investigated with serious concern in some of the novels of Keith
Waterhouse (1929-2009), who was brought up in Leeds (see Billy Liar, 1959), and David
Storey (born 1933), the third son of a miner in Wakefield (see This Sporting Life, 1960).
Both authors have also produced plays for the stage and TV and have continued their ex-
ploration of characters from the provinces or the lower class. By 2001, when his novel Soho
was published, Waterhouse had written 13 novels, while Storey's fiction, often preoccupied
with social mobility and the disturbance it causes, includes Savile (1976), an epic set in a
South Yorkshire mining village that won the Booker Prize, and the novels A Prodigal Child
(1982) and Present Times (1984).
Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954) created the prototype of the campus novel, which was
further developed by five writers David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, J. L. Carr, Howard
Jacobson, and Tom Sharpe. Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000) became known with Eating
People Is Wrong (1960) and Stepping Westward (1965), concerned with British and
American academics, and especially with his satire of the "revolutionary" late 1960s, The
History Man (1975), which was made into an excellent TV drama series. Bradbury's later
works were inspired both by the continuing ironic critique of academic life and an occa-
sional shot of critical theory. Thus Rates of Exchange (1983) works with structuralist con-
cepts of culture and follows the tracks of the linguist Dr Petworth on a British Council
lecture tour in Eastern Europe. His Doctor Criminale (1992) examines the changing aca-
demic relationships within Europe in the story of a journalist's search for the famous thinker
Dr Bazlo Criminale. Bradbury's last novel, To the Hermitage (2000), pursues the inter-
national dimension of the campus novel in a double narrative, one set in the Age of Reason
at the court of Catherine the Great visited by the philosopher Denis Diderot, the other a
modern academic story told by a novelist who is invited to a conference in Sweden and then
to Russia. Like Bradbury, David Lodge (born 1935) produced satires of university life that
began with a focus on England and then extended to North America and Europe. Lodge
made fun of the academic jetsetters in Changing Places (1975) and its sequel, Small World
(1984), which feature the American, unbuttoned, Professor Morris Zapp and his English
colleague, the shy Philip Swallow. Unfortunately, they confirm our prejudices far too often
to be entirely convincing as novelistic characters. Paradise News (1991) takes the reader
again to the United States in an examination of the contrasts between British and American
cultures. In Nice Work (1988), Lodge examines the impact of the Thatcher era both upon
British industry (in the character of Vic Wilcox) and academe (in his lover, Robyn Penrose,
a lecturer in English). Lodge's Therapy (1995) introduces Laurence Passmore, a writer of
TV sit-coms, and is concerned with his mid-life crisis. With Thinks (2001), Lodge returned
to his familiar academic turf in a novel set in the fictitious University of Gloucester; the plot
involves the brief love story of Ralph Messenger, a specialist in cognitive science, and
Helen Reed, a widowed writer in residence, whose conversations and autobiographical
recordings serve Lodge to send up academics, university life and politics, and the power
games connected with contemporary research. In comparison with Bradbury and Lodge,
J(ames Joseph) L(loyd) Carr (1912-94), also a children's writer, is less known, but perhaps
the better author. Also portraying the clash of cultures, his The Battle of Pollock's Crossing
(1985) is set in the 1920s and relates the journey of a young Yorkshire schoolteacher to the
American Midwest, where he comes into conflicts with various American myths including
the history of the Indians (Native Americans). In several of his novels, Howard Jacobson
(born 1942) has been concerned with Jewish cultural identity in Britain; his outstanding
campus novel is Coming From Behind (1983), set in a Midlands Polytechnic. Finally, Tom
Sharpe (born 1928) has given the campus novel a farcical twist. In Porterhouse Blue
(1974), Sharpe literally exploded the tensions among the members of a corrupt Cambridge
college. He subsequently found a gold mine with the invention of Henry Wilt, Assistant
Lecturer, who has to introduce a working-class audience to highbrow English literature.
Wilt makes riotous appearances in best-selling and sometimes grotesque works such as Wilt
(1976), The Wilt Alternative (1979) and Wilt on High (1984).
The twentieth century has seen some formidable works from the pens of women novelists.
Among the "first generation" can be counted the modernist innovators such as Dorothy
Richardson and Virginia Woolf, discussed above, and May Sinclair (1863-1946). Sin-
clair's fiction, deeply marked by Jung and Freud and some of it written with the stream-of-
consciousness technique (see especially Mary Olivier: A Life, 1919; and Life and Death of
Harriett Frean, 1922), had been largely forgotten when some of her novels were revived in
the 1980s. The first generation also includes novelists born in the 1890s; some of these
women writers produced their best works after the middle of the twentieth century. The fic-
tion of Ivy Compton-Burnett (1892-1969), Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1969), and Jean Rhys
(1890-1979) stands out. Compton-Burnett has left some 20 novels dealing with conflicts in
upper-class families. In Brothers and Sisters (1929), Elders and Betters (1944), and Mother
and Son (1955), tyranny, brutality, murder, and malice are revealed behind the facade of
Victorian drawing rooms. Indebted to Henry James, Compton-Burnett excluded the post-war
scene in her novels, whereas her contemporary, the Irishwoman Elizabeth Bowen, dealt
with new developments in the new century. She, too, had learned from James, and also from
Virginia Woolf. Bowen put into practice her knowledge of recent discoveries in psychology
in such novels as The House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), A World of
Love (1955), and The Little Girls (1964), all subtle studies of emotional life and the
tragi-comic aspects of events in the worlds of sensitive women. Jean Rhys made her per-
sonal experience of several cultures as well as her wide reading the subjects of her novels.
She was born in the Caribbean island of Dominica and came to England in 1907; in her later
life she lived in Paris, where some of her early works are set, and in England. Rhys's best-
known novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, appeared after a long silence in 1966. Championed and
highly praised by the women's movement after 1970, it is set in the 1830s in Dominica and
Jamaica, presenting the life of Mrs Rochester, the "mad woman in the attic", from Charlotte
Bront's novel Jane Eyre (1847). The heiress in the story, the Creole Antoinette Cosway, is
finally imprisoned by her husband in Thornfield Hall. She has come to be seen by feminist
critics44 as the symbol of misunderstood female suffering in society and in marriage.
The second generation of women novelists, born in the second decade of the twentieth cen-
tury, have recognized the literary importance of the first generation. Among these, Barbara
Pym (1913-80), Olivia Manning (1917-80), and Elizabeth Taylor (1912-75) were all able
and gifted writers. Remarkable works are Pym's Quartet in Autumn (1978) and Manning's
Balkan Trilogy (1960-65). From the group of women born in the second decade of the cen-
tury, three have gained an international reputation. Dame45 Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) was
44 See especially the influential book by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, which borrows its
title from Bront's novel, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).
45 A British title, bestowed by the monarch, given to a woman as a special honour because of the
work she has done.
born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents and studied and taught philosophy at Oxford. In such
novels as Under the Net (1954) and The Bell (1958), she studied the philosophical problems
of freedom and responsibility. As a professional philosopher she flirted with structuralism in
A Severed Head (1961), a novel which revives the mystery of the Gothic novel and features
characters caught up in bizarre sexual entanglements. These themes have also dominated
such works as Bruno's Dream (1969), The Black Prince (1973), The Sacred and Profane
Love Machine (1974), The Sea, the Sea (1978), and Nuns and Soldiers (1980). Murdoch was
capable of weaving philosophical and moral problems into novels that are also highly inter-
textual. Thus The Sea, the Sea, which won the Booker Prize, is on the surface concerned
with a theatre director and his childhood love, but
the more important issues (love as an illusion, the
self-delusions of memory, and the comic aspects of
sexual entanglement) are linked in hidden, playful
allusions to Shakespeare's The Tempest. Many of
her novels can be described as psychological detec-
tive stories, as she explored the nature of good and
evil, the importance of religion and belief, the
sacred and the taboo, and Freudian determinism
and the sexual drive (see The Philosopher's Pupil,
1983; The Good Apprentice, 1985; The Book and
the Brotherhood, 1987; The Message to the Planet,
1989; and Jackson's Dilemma, 1995). Murdoch's
final years were overshadowed by the gradual
physical and mental decay resulting from her suf-
fering of Alzheimer's. One of the finest last novels
she completed (Alzheimer's disease eventually
made it impossible for her to continue writing) was
The Green Knight (1993), which unites all her fa-
vourite subjects in a dense, intertextually charged,
allegory based on the medieval poem Sir Gawain
Iris Murdoch, photographed before
and the Green Knight.
Alzheimer's disease set in The work of Dame Muriel Spark (1918-2006), a
Catholic convert of Scottish-Jewish descent, is as
prolific but has a wider scope. The fictional worlds of her novels can be seen as microcosms
of reality described with detached irony. Her best works are Memento Mori (1959), a study
of old people faced with the prospect of death, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962),
which shows a charismatic and progressive Scots schoolmistress waging pedagogic war
with the authorities in the 1930s, and the technically more traditional The Mandelbaum
Gate (1965), set in Jerusalem. Critics have judged her later fiction less convincing (see The
Hothouse by the East River, 1973; The Takeover, 1976; Territorial Rights, 1979; and
Loitering With Intent, 1981, which is concerned with the problems of biography and auto-
biography). In her most persuasive fiction, Spark unites the eccentric and the sophisticated
with a touch of the perverse as she explores the role of women as inferiors or outsiders in
society (see The Abbess of Crewe, 1974; and A Far Cry from Kensington, 1988). Spark is a
prolific writer, her recent novels including Symposium (1990), Reality and Dreams (1995),
and Aiding and Abetting (2000).
Doris Lessing (born 1919) was born in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and went to
England in 1949 with a strong dislike of racism and the experience of a broken marriage. In
The Grass Is Singing (1950) she looks back on her early life in Africa. Her sequence of five
novels called Children of Violence (1952-69) chronicles the attempts of Martha Quest to
find sexual fulfilment and political satisfaction in Africa and England. The Golden Note-
book of 1962 is an experimental novel assessing reality and fiction by interweaving various
themes and levels of narrative with notebook entries. In the 1970s and 80s, Doris Lessing
turned to fantasy, writing "inner-space fiction" such as Briefing for a Descent into Hell
(1971) and a "cosmic chronicle" entitled Canopus in Argos Archives which consists of
Shikasta (1979), The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980), The Sirian
Experiments (1981), The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), and Documents
Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983), which are all fictional
studies of man's social and scientific future. Never losing touch with her major concerns
the self-discovery of women in a patriarchic society that needs a radical change she has
provided fictional studies of various forms of horror in middle-class life. In The Fifth Child
(1988), an ugly and violent child upsets the world of an ordinary couple; and in Love, Again
(1996), which has a theatrical setting, she explores sexual passion at the end of the nine-
teenth century. With Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999), Lessing returned to the turf she
knows best political and social dystopia. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize.
The development of the woman's novel in the 1960s was to some extent also influenced by
the fiction of Penelope Mortimer (1918-1999) who was one of the first writers to put an
emphasis on frankness of female experience in The Pumpkin Eater (1962) and Long
Distance (1974). By contrast, Anita Brookner (born 1928), who is also an art historian, has
focused on women, most of them spinsters, whose lives become difficult as they have to
endure pain and loneliness. Though restricted in theme and social context, her novels are
written in an elegant prose (see especially Providence, 1982; Hotel du Lac, 1984, which won
the Booker Prize; Lewis Percy, 1989; and Incidents in the Rue Laugier, 1995). In her
nineteenth novel, Undue Influence (1999), Brookner gave her audience the youngest heroine
in another story of unexpected loneliness. As one critic remarked in a review of Brookner's
The Next Big Thing (2002), "Anita Brookner's first novel appeared in 1981. Since then she
has published it again, slightly altered, almost every year".
Between 1960-1980 several young women writers (mostly born in the 30s or 40s) have
come to the fore. They can be considered as the third generation of writers concerned with
the role of woman in modern and postmodern British society. Margaret Drabble (born
1939) has dealt with pregnancy and motherhood from an educated feminist viewpoint in The
Millstone (1965) and has focused almost exclusively on London's academics in The Needle's
Eye (1972) and The Middle Ground (1980), the story of a journalist who begins to doubt her
feminist convictions. Drabble's trilogy of novels The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural
Curiosity (1989), and The Gates of Ivory (1991) examines the fortunes of three women
friends in Thatcherite Britain. Drabble has been criticised for writing "Hampstead novels"
(i.e., works of fiction about and for upper middle-class intellectuals), but The Gates of Ivory,
which takes the reader as far as the war-torn Cambodia, proves that such a judgment does
not hold water for her later fiction. While her early work deals with the dilemma of educated
young women struggling in their conflicting roles as mothers, lovers, and intellectual profes-
sionals, her later novels provide a broader canvas and also engage ironically with traditional
modes of narration. Thus The Witch of Exmoor (1996), a mordant family chronicle, looks at
family, madness, and relationships in a tragi-comedy set at the end of the century. In A
Peppered Moth (2001) Drabble returns to her own Yorkshire roots in the fictionalised story
of her own mother's survival in a mining community.
Among these women novelists, some (especially Byatt, Tremain, O'Brien, and Hill) have
developed the historical novel, with a good occasional shot of feminism included. Dame
A(ntonia) S(usan) Byatt (born 1936) is Margaret Drabble's sister and a distinguished
former academic, critic, and novelist. Whereas Drabble has been mostly concerned with
feminine and feminist issues, Byatt's fiction is rich in historical, literary, and mythical
allusions. She has almost made a habit of contrasting past historical periods with the twen-
tieth century in a trilogy that began with The Virgin in the Garden (1978). With Queen
Elizabeth's coronation in 1953 as one backdrop, The Virgin in the Garden portrays a second
Elizabethan age through a Yorkshire family, the Potters, with rich allusions to Spenser,
Ralegh, and Shakespeare as a verse drama concerned with Queen Elizabeth I is performed.
The sequels to this continue Frederica Potter's story in Still Life (1985), and Babel Tower
(1996). The latter picks up quite a lot of the postmodern spirit in fiction (intertextuality,
pastiche, parody) in a story set in the 1960s and containing, inter alia, a novel entitled
"Babbletower" which is prosecuted for obscenity, thus echoing Lawrence's Lady Chatter-
ley's Lover. Byatt's Possession (1990) was widely acclaimed and won the Booker Prize.
Again concerned with past and present, it focuses on a group of contemporary academics
reconstructing the relationship between two fictional Victorian poets (loosely based on
Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti), a search that also casts ironic light on the life and
times of today's university researchers. Byatt's interest in intertextuality and intermediality
(e.g., fiction making use of music or visual art) emerges to some extent in the marvellous
pastiches of Victorian literary style as she imitates the works of the imagined poets, and it is
also obvious in her Angels and Insects (1992), which contains two novellas set in the mid-
nineteenth century, and in her short stories (see The Matisse Stories, 1993).
Rose Tremain (born 1943) also came to prominence with a historical novel, Restoration
(1989), which follows the fortune of the narrator at the court of Charles II. Described with
wit and profundity, the central character is a Falstaffian figure who eventually learns to
understand himself in a difficult time in English history, which is reinterpreted in the light
of contemporary concerns and attitudes. Tremain expanded her range of fiction in Sacred
Country (1992), which focuses on gender and identity in a story moving from Suffolk
farmland to Nashville, Tennessee, and The Way I Found Her (1997), in which the hero is a
thirteen-year-old boy. With Music and Silence (1999), she returned to historical fiction in a
novel set at the royal court in Denmark in 1630, where an outsider, an English musician,
comments on the goings-on.
Mention must also be made of Susan Hill (born 1942) and Beryl Bainbridge (born 1934).
Hill wrote a fine historical novel on World War I, Strange Meeting (1971). When she
married, she stopped writing for a long period of time. In the 1990s, she returned to the nov-
el with examples of postmodern fiction that use fragmented time and multiple points of
view; Air and Angels (1991) relates the story of a middle-aged academic's passion for a
young girl, and The Service of Clouds (1998) is concerned with death, love, and memory.
Beryl Bainbridge has written tragi-comic novels on self-delusion (e.g., Sweet William,
1975; Injury Time, 1977; An Awfully Big Adventure, 1990) and some historical novels, such
as Every Man for Himself (1996), about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, and Master
Georgie (1998), a story divided into six parts (introduced by photographs) and narrated by
four mysterious characters who are led into the Crimean War.
Fay Weldon (born 1931) is an exception among the third generation of women novelists,
standing as she does between highbrow and popular fiction. Literary critics and reviewers
have objected to her use of clichs and stereotypes in a great number of novels that are
distinguished by satire and bitter irony in the guise of comedy. Refusing to describe her own
novels as feminist, she advocates an independent female attitude and unsentimental values.
She came to prominence with her amusing treatment of the battle of the sexes in Female
Friends (1975) and Little Sisters (1978). The women's movement serves as a background in
Down Among the Women (1971), a satirical yet compassionate meditation on what it means
to be a woman. Producing novels at the rate of almost one a year, Weldon is best known for
her The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), which was also adapted by TV and made into
a film. The novel is about an unattractive woman, Ruth, who loses her husband to a
beautiful romance novelist. In the course of the plot, Ruth takes revenge on the two phil-
anderers and, through painful plastic surgery, becomes an exact duplicate of her husband's
lover. A biting satire about the war of the sexes, the book indicts not only the establishment
by men of feminine standards of beauty, but also women's own willingness to subscribe to
these ridiculous standards. Weldon's fiction often suggests that women may perhaps be
victims of male expectations and wishes, but that they can liberate themselves if they wish
to do so. This is also one of the central arguments in her The Cloning of Joanna May (1989),
Life Force (1992), Trouble (1993), and Big Women (1998), the latter about the relationships
among a group of women who found a feminist publishing company. Equipped with a
wonderful gift for realistic dialogue and terse prose, Weldon has a large audience in Eng-
lish-speaking countries, but her fiction is marred by shallow characterization and simplistic
black/white distinctions. In this respect, the feminist novels of Maureen Duffy (born 1933;
see Capital, 1975; Londoners, 1983; and Change, 1987) and Eva Figes (born 1932; see
The Seven Ages, 1987; and The Tree of Knowledge, 1990, a fictionalised biography of John
Milton's wife) are far more demanding and formally more experimental.
Another, fourth, generation of women was born between the 1940s and 1960, with most of
them having their break-throughs in the final two decades of the past century. Like the pre-
vious generation, many of them show a deep interest in the workings of history which, in
some cases, they deftly combine with the history of women. One could start with Pat
Barker (born 1943) who made her notable debut with Union Street (1982), a feminist an-
swer as it were to the Angry Young Men in the story of seven working-class neighbours in
which the major characters are all women. Barker is today known for her outstanding
trilogy which started with Regeneration (1991), based on an encounter between the war
poet Siegfried Sassoon and a psychologist in a war hospital. Exploring individual responses
to the conflicts of war in terms of class, identity, and responsibility, the sequels The Eye in
the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995), winner of the Booker Prize are concerned
with the fortunes of the bisexual soldier Billy Prior. The trilogy was much praised for its de-
piction of tragic grandeur in an unsentimental prose with highly poetic qualities. Barker's
Another World (1998) contains some echoes of the trilogy, as World War I haunts a New-
castle family who collapses under the weight of history. Helen Dunmore (born 1952) has
been concerned with long-buried family secrets and betrayal in psychological examinations
of relationships. Her Zennor in Darkness (1993) fictionalises the time D. H. Lawrence spent
with his German wife in Cornwall; and her subsequent novels (Burning Bright, 1994; A
Spell of Winter, 1995; which won the Orange Prize for women's fiction, Talking to the
Dead, 1996; and Your Blue-Eyed Boy, 1998) deal with the impact of the past on the present
in a richly textured prose and with mysterious plots. Some of the fourth-generation women
writers also draw on their personal histories while exploring the whole gamut of female
social and emotional experience, with a special emphasis on sexuality. In that sense, their
writing apparently contains the therapeutic dimension Virginia Woolf also saw in her own
fiction. The two cases that come to mind immediately are those of Jenny Diski (born 1947)
and Jeanette Winterson (born 1959). The London-born Diski had a difficult childhood,
some of it spent in institutional care. Her novels seem to be as much informed by this
experience as by her studying of anthropology. She treats of sexual obsessions in Nothing
Natural (1986), a study of a single mother trapped in a sadomasochistic relationship leading
to depression, and Rainforest (1987), an ecological drama set in Borneo, Surrey, and north
London. Diski has further explored social and sexual roles as well as extreme states of con-
sciousness in Then Again (1990), about a disturbed Jewish adolescent, and The Dream
Mistress (1996), which focuses on a bag lady in Camden Town, London. With Only Human.
A Comedy (2000), Diski departs from her familiar turf in a comic examination of the story
of the life-long love of Abraham and Sarah (described in Genesis 11-22), as God turns this
into a love triangle through his own interference. Jeanette Winterson is a novelist who has
drawn on her own family history she was brought up by Pentecostal evangelists and her
lesbian identity; both figure prominently in the themes of female homosexuality and
religious oppression in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), which won the Whitbread
Award and was adapted for TV in 1990. Sexual and feminine identities are at the centre of
her Sexing the Cherry (1989), which transforms a fairy tale, and Written on the Body
(1992), an exploration of gender in a triangular relationship in which the gender of the
narrator is not clear. Winterson moved on to a combination of gender issues and postmodern
ways of writing in Art and Lies (1994), which centres on the role of the artist just before the
new millennium in an unconventional narrative style deploying three separate narrative
voices called Sappho, Handel, and Picasso. On the surface, Winterson's The Powerbook
(2000) seems to be a novel that reacts parodically to the form and conventions of e-mail; but
this highly innovative work uses the new medium only for the means of narration as we are
introduced to canonical writers such as Malory, Spenser, and Donne, and to traditional
themes of literature love and passion from a special lesbian angle. Whereas the fiction
of Diski and Winterson seems to be rooted to some degree in personal experience, Lesley
Glaister (born 1956) has repeatedly engaged with the literary genre of Gothic fiction which
she enlives with late twentieth-century female characters. Thus her first novel, Honour Thy
Father (1990), is a Gothic tale narrated by one of four ageing sisters in the East Anglian
fens, as the heroine looks back at a life of murder and incest. Glaister's The Private Parts of
Women (1996) also has a Gothic frame story (one woman character is kept prisoner in an
attic) in which the "private parts" (i.e., the darker sides of female sexuality and psyche) of
the characters Inis and Trixie (who is also Ada and a boy) are revealed. Her eighth novel,
Sheer Blue Bliss (1999), borrows from both the novel of terror and film noir in a story of the
search for total bliss that leads to absolute horror. Glaister's strategy mostly consists in the
juxtaposition of two different characters as she dives into the psychosis lurking in suburbia.
In addition to the women authors born between the 1940s and 1960, there are at present so
many younger female novelists at work in Britain that it seems imperative to write a history
of recent women's fiction of the kind Ina Schabert has produced for the nineteenth century.46
Among the youngest distinguished women novelists mention must be made of Esther
Freud (born 1963) and Nicola Barker (born 1966). What they have in common is a
preference for unusual voices and views of life those of (disturbed) adolescents, for
instance, or those of characters from the margins of late twentieth-century British society.
Esther Freud, for instance, chose a child narrator for her Hideous Kinky (1992), about a
girl's youth in Morocco, a novel that achieved immediate success. It was followed by bleaker
if occasionally ironic novels Peerless Flats (1993), concerned with dysfunctional families,
and Gaglow (1997), which presents the parallel stories of an impoverished single mother
and her ancestors in East Germany. Freud's The Wild (2000) is again concerned with
children's views of the world in a novel that is as susceptible to adolescent experience of
family life as Roddy Doyle's best-selling Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993). Nicola Barker
has also focused on adolescents and marginal characters. She received the IMPAC Dublin
Literary Award for her Wide Open (1999), a darkly funny novel set on the Isle of Sheppey,
which has a nudist beach, a nature reserve, and a wild boar farm run by two women. In the
course of the plot, several bizarre characters (two men called Ronnie, for instance, the
pornographer Luke, and 17-year-old Lily) enter into conversations and relationships which
do not, ultimately, tell us very much about their true beings. Similarly, Barker's Five Miles
from Outer Hope (2000) focuses on the rites of passage from youth to adulthood in the story
of the 16-year-old Medve who is stuck in a semi-derelict hotel on an island off the coast of
Devon. We are introduced to Medve's strange family, including her younger sister Patch and
her little brother Feely, and especially to Medve's fantasies combining the murderer and
writer Jack Henry Abbott, the tennis player John McEnroe, giants of pop music, and sex-
laden pictures. Medve's life changes dramatically with the arrival of a ginger stranger.
Barker's fiction is distinguished by a wry humour, an acidic wit and, in each of her works, a
gallery of unforgettable, mysterious characters one becomes endeared to even those that
are repulsive.
If women writers have focused on the social and personal experience of women in several
generations, three men Graham Greene, William Golding, and Anthony Burgess each
with a special approach and a distinct style made the study of good and evil in modern
man and society the subject of their prose fiction. Although contemporaries of the Angry
Young Men, they were, on average, more than ten years older and thus separated by dif-
ferent upbringings and attitudes. Yet their fiction successfully competed with that of Amis
pre, Braine, Sillitoe, and Wain. Graham Greene (1904-91), like Waugh a converted Ro-
man Catholic, has turned from moral inquiry to the treatment of political and ethical issues.
He has divided his work into "entertainments" and "novels". But even the "entertainments",
which combine adventure and detective fiction, are concerned with moral problems. Exam-
ples are A Gun for Sale (1936), The Confidential Agent (1939), The Ministry of Fear (1943),
The Third Man (1950), originally a film script, and The Human Factor (1978). Greene's
best works of fiction appeared between 1938-1951. Brighton Rock (1938) is poised between
thriller and serious novel. It is a study of a Catholic teenage delinquent, Pinkie, who com-
46 See Ina Schabert, Englische Literaturgeschichte aus der Sicht der Geschlechterforschung (Stutt-
gart: Krner, 1997). For surveys and collections of recent women's literature, see Sandra M.
Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (New York:
Norton, 1985); and Susan Joanne Shattock, ed. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
mits multiple murder and, finally, suicide. Sinners also figure in the other "Catholic" novels
from this period The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and
The End of the Affair (1951). The hero of The Power and the Glory is a "whisky priest" suf-
fering from cruel treatment by the police in Mexico, while the protagonist of The Heart of
the Matter is persecuted by his own conscience. Greene's experience of the Cold War and of
the McCarthy era, and his changing political views, are reflected in The Quiet American
(1955) and Our Man in Havana (1958). Such later novels as The Comedians (1966), which
is set in Haiti, and The Honorary Consul (1973), set in Argentina, show an emerging hu-
manism and the influence of Teilhard de Chardin47 as Greene deals with fear, persecution,
sex, atheism, and faith in a world apparently abandoned by a mysterious God. Greene's
growing concern with political and humanitarian problems is most obvious in the books he
has published since 1980. Doctor Fisher of Geneva (1980) is a black comedy on the greed
of the rich; J'Accuse, published in French and English in 1982, put Greene under con-
siderable criticism because he sided too rashly as it proved with a girl involved in the
world of organized crime in Nice. Also published in 1982 was Monsignor Quixote. It is a
modern parody of Cervantes's seventeenth-century classic, with Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza replaced by a priest and a Communist mayor. Their travels and adventures in Spain
are merely the backdrop for conversations and discussions exploring politics, ethics, faith,
and the modern world.
Ever since he published his Lord of the Flies in 1954, William Golding (1911-1993) was
preoccupied with the nature of evil, original sin, and civilization from a distinct Catholic
viewpoint.
Lord of the Flies is a simple and exciting story of a group of English schoolboys left to them-
selves on a desert island in an atomic war. Based on R. M. Ballantyne's nineteenth-century
story The Coral Island, Lord of the Flies reverses the pattern of the children's adventure story
as the boys gradually regress to savagery and find that evil is located in themselves and not in
nature or "wild savages".
Ralph, the archetype of the good in man, is deprived of his leadership by the brutal Jack who
establishes a rule of terror and reverts to a primitive cultural level. Jack's regime has no need for
intellectuals or prophets, and so the representatives of these groups Piggy and Simon are
killed. Ironically, Ralph is finally saved by a British man-of-war that takes the boys into a
world where an even more savage fight is going on.
In his fiction, Golding worked with symbols, archetypes, and myths in a continued effort to
comment on the fall of man. The Inheritors (1955) turns evolution upside down, with the
result that "homo sapiens" appears as the destroyer of innocent life and the pious state of
mind of Neanderthal man. Pincher Martin (1956) presents the consciousness and imagin-
ation of a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a rock in the sea and refusing to accept death. In
Free Fall (1959) an artist looks back on his life and the events that led to the loss of his soul,
and in The Spire (1965) the forces of heaven and hell are shown at work in a complex study
of Dean Jocelyn who is obsessed with building the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. After the
publication of The Pyramid (1967), set in a rural environment, Golding took a long pause
47 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), French Jesuit Priest and author of a series of works
published after his death. His Le Phnomne humain (1955) establishes a system of cosmic
evolution in which every physical being has an inner consciousness. Man's appearance marks
the emergence of self-consciousness and of a new dimension in evolution.
that was interrupted only by a collection of short stories in 1971. He returned to the novel
with Darkness Visible (1979). This treats of the upbringing of the orphan Matty in a post-
war world that is evil and unwilling to listen to Matty's prophecies. The prophet is eventually
killed in a bombing. Golding's more recent novels, Rites of Passage (1980) and The Paper
Men (1984), pursue with much irony his favourite themes of the corruption of modern man.
There can be no doubt that Golding's artistic talents were limited. Fiction, for him, was a
mere vehicle allowing him to express his view of the human condition. More often than not,
this means that Golding turns into a moralist with a didactic message. He analyses his prot-
agonists with a psychology that is far too simple, while the structural patterns of his fiction
fable, allegory and myth seem too neat and schematic. If Golding received the Nobel Prize
in 1983 it was no doubt because of his persistent moral vision, which remains his strong
point, although it hampers the artistry of his fiction.
Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was a better fictional craftsman than Golding, although he
has found less favour with the critics. The sheer volume of his fiction has been held against
him. But Burgess argued that he had to write to earn a living and seemed to be unperturbed.
Together with several works of less interest, he has produced a number of outstanding
novels that rank among the best of twentieth-century English fiction. As a novelist, Burgess
tried to remain on the border separating "serious" from "popular" literature. Shakespeare
and Joyce are the writers that influenced him most; this is evident in his love of puns and his
general verbal virtuosity as well as in his comic use of fable and allegory. Unlike Golding,
Burgess, who was a lapsed Catholic, is less moralistic and vastly more entertaining in
dealing with the issues of good and evil and man's freedom of choice. Burgess's vision,
tempered by humour and irony, seems to suggest that evil is a powerful force and often a
condition for good, while man must be given the choice between the two to be really free.
After a witty and melancholy account of the end of British rule in the Far East in his
Malayan Trilogy (1956-1959), success came with what is often regarded as his most famous
work, A Clockwork Orange (1962), a novel Burgess himself does not rank among his best.
Stanley Kubrick made the novel into a much discussed film in 1971. Burgess's book is an
anti-utopian novel whose moral theme of human freedom is beautifully balanced by literary
artistry. A comparison with Golding's Lord of the Flies, which is on the same subject, re-
veals Burgess's superiority.
A Clockwork Orange shows a future England terrorized by gang warfare. The narrator, Alex, is
the leader of a group of teenage delinquents who commit theft, rape, and murder for the sheer
pleasure they take in violence. But Alex, though he loves violence, is not entirely painted in
black. His love of music (Beethoven) and his special "nad-sat" slang render him not altogether
negative for the reader. Captured by the police, Alex is subjected to brainwashing and develops a
disgust for violence and classical music. Emotionally and ethically, he has thus become a neutral
creature, a living machine or "clockwork orange", that is exploited by the state and reckless
politicians. After a failed attempt at suicide, Alex is restored to his former self, but, in a chapter
left out in the American edition and in the film script, eventually loses his taste for violence.
This novel indicates Burgess's great potential as a writer. An important ethical issue, man's
freedom of choice (much debated after Skinner's behaviourist theories48 had been published
48 B(urrhus) F(rederic) Skinner (1904-90), American psychologist and teacher. Through experi-
ments with animals he developed a theory of learning that is based on conditioning (behaviour-
ism). His books include Walden Two (1948, rev. in 1969), and The Technology of Teaching
in the 1950s), is here treated in a subtle narrative framework and in an allusive language that
creates irony and multiple meanings and is highly entertaining. The threat to the human
freedom of choice became one of Burgess's central themes. It is present in the novels on the
comic middle-aged poet Enderby, who can compose only on the toilet seat (Inside Mr.
Enderby, 1963; Enderby Outside, 1968; The Clockwork Testament, 1976; and Enderby's
Dark Lady, 1984), as well as in the spy thriller Tremor of Intent (1966) in which the spy be-
comes a Catholic priest. Burgess also wrote fictional biographies of Shakespeare (Nothing
Like the Sun, 1964) and of Napoleon (Napoleon Symphony, 1974). He had a vast knowledge
of music, composed several operas and symphonies, and parodied Wagner's Ring der Ni-
belungen in The Worm in the Ring (1961). In 1980 he published his most ambitious novel,
Earthly Powers.
The book provides a panorama of the 20th century presented by an old pessimistic and homo-
sexual writer of popular fiction. Rich in characters, both real and invented, and linguistic skill,
this is one of the best works of fiction written since the 1960s. As Kenneth Toomey relates his
life and entanglements with his former friend, the poet and sectarian Godfrey Manning who
leads his followers into death, and with the later pope Carlo Campanati, Burgess develops his
theme of the forces of good and evil at work in man's nature and in society. Toomey's story ends
with himself and his beloved sister Hortense retired to the provincial cosiness of Sussex; but in
the course of the novel one becomes aware of Burgess's distrust of moral institutions created by
man. The book is a great pleasure to read and must be justly termed an outstanding novel.
Burgess's The End of the World News
(1982), a pun on a BBC radio program,
is an ingenious science fiction novel
uniting the dying Sigmund Freud, a
Broadway musical on the subject of
Trotsky in New York, and the last
throes of the planet Earth in AD 2000.
The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985) is
Burgess's satire on the early Christians.
Burgess's fiction, as well as a few works
by women authors discussed above (nov-
els by A. S. Byatt and Jeanette Winter-
son), contain some elements that have
been considered hallmarks of postmod-
ernism; for instance, the bending or
breaking of genres, as in Burgess's last
piece, Byrne, 1995, a comic epic in verse
related by a first-person narrator, the
John Hilliard, 765 Paper Balls. 1969 playing with literary traditions and con-
ventions of narration (in A Clockwork
Orange) and the punning use of language and allusions. With good reason, Burgess has
been categorised as an "experimental realist"49, a forerunner and contemporary of those
(1968). Skinner's theories were popular and much discussed in the 1960s and 1970s, although
practical teaching, at least in Europe, has not profited much from his theory.
49 See Ansgar Nnning, Der englische Roman des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Klett, 1998):
chapter 6.
postmodern novelists who proved more radical in

their use of fictional forms and narratological proce-
dures. As a movement or current in literature (the
term is also used in art and architecture), postmod-
ernism is not easy to define and it is still being de-
bated among critics as to its beginnings (the 1960s)
and ending (presumably, we still live in it).50 In the
second half of the 1960s, critics began to use the
term to distinguish the radically experimental post-
World War fiction of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis
Borges, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon. Postmod-
ernism, then, can be used at least in two ways
firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which
would then encompass all forms of fiction, both
innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe
the highly experimental literature produced by writ-
ers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John
M. C. Escher, Waterfall. 1961
Fowles in the 1960s and reaching to the breathless
works of Martin Amis and the "Chemical (Scottish) Generation" of the fin-de-sicle. In
what follows, the term "postmodernist" is used for experimental authors (especially Durrell,
Fowles, Carter, Brooke-Rose, Barnes, Ackroyd, and Martin Amis) while "postmodern" is
applied to authors who have been less innovative. The more radical experimenters have
been influenced by a number of movements and notions, including Modernist ideas (pro-
pagated by Joyce and Beckett), such as the attempt to portray consciousness, Continental
existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism, the nouveau roman lacking a subjective
narrator (as exemplified by Alain Robbe-Grillet), and American examples of postmodernist
fiction (Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo).51 Some British novelists have confessed to
their adoption of ideas by theorists of postmodernism, such as Roland Barthes (the in-
spiration of John Fowles), Jean-Franois Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard.52 The hallmarks of
postmodernist fiction are the following:
50 For surveys, see Alison Lee, Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction (London: Rout-
ledge, 1990); Annegret Maack and Rdiger Imhof, eds. Radikalitt und Migung: Der eng-
lische Roman seit 1960 (Darmstadt: WBG, 1993); Wolfgang Riedel and Thomas Michael Stein,
eds. A Decade of Discontent: British Fiction of the Eighties (anglistik und englischunterricht,
vol. 48: 1995); Luce Bonnerot, "Le roman britannique contemporain (1980-95): Introduction
gnrale et bibliographique", Etudes anglaises 50: 2 (1997): 131-43; and Dominic Head, Mod-
ern British Fiction, 1950-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
51 For definitions of the technical terms used here (postmodernism, structuralism, poststructural-
ism, and nouveau roman) see the Glossary of Literary Terms.
52 The following works were especially influential: Roland Barthes (1915-80), Le degr zro de
l'criture (1953), Mythologies (1957), L'Empire des signes (1970) and S/Z (1970); Jean-
Franois Lyotard (1924-98), La condition postmoderne (1979; English version 1984); Jean
Baudrillard (1929-2007), L'change symbolique et la mort (1976). For brief discussions of
these critics see Ansgar Nnning, ed., Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 2008).
- an attack on "litist" art and literature (of high Modernism) by levelling the allegedly high
and low in culture;
- the deliberate ignoring of the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow in art and literature
(as a consequence of the beat movement, pop and rock music);
- the destruction of traditional forms of narration; narration itself becomes a focus of attention
and an object of analysis in what is often termed metafiction53;
- a consciously high use of intertextuality and intermediality (i.e., use of other texts and art
works) that demonstrates how texts and images circulate in art and fiction. The favourite
forms for showing these ideas are parody, pastiche, collage, and quotation. Postmodernist
fiction abandons the idea of originality it prefers the ironical quotation;
- the tragi-comic exemplification of the belief that human beings and art cannot escape the
snares of the (post)capitalist and, today, globalized capitalist contexts;
- a general questioning, often conducted ironically, of the nature and reliability of language.
The novels of Lawrence Durrell (1912-90), for instance, present themselves as complex
"Knstlerromane" in which nearly all the characters are also narrators. Durrell was also a
poet and, to some extent, indebted to Samuel Beckett. He grew up in India, lived only briefly
in England, and then moved to Greece and Egypt. Trying his hand at the novel sequence "
la Powell", he first produced a tetralogy, The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60), which is written
in a rich prose style well suited to the atmosphere of the Near East. The four novels provide
a study of passion, guilt, intrigue and espionage in Alexandria, the whole presented from
different angles. Durrell's "doubledecker" novels Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970), published
together in 1974 as The Revolt of Aphrodite, make use of all the liberties modern novelists
possess and explore the question whether the individual can withstand the forces at work in
any given culture. In 1974, when he published Monsieur or the Prince of Darkness, Durrell
began working on another series of five books, The Avignon Quintet, which were completed
with Livia (1978), Constance (1982), Sebastian (1983), and Quinx (1985). Creating his own
fictional realism " la Beckett", Durrell attempted in this series to break down precon-
ceptions of time while assaulting inherited prejudices. Unlike Beckett, who was economical,
Durrell was prodigal and indulged in a libertine passion for words. His novels also express
the doubt that language can express a subjective inner or objective exterior reality. One finds
frequent comments on the act and technique of narration until the reader finally notices the
very technique that produces illusion the metafictional novel distinguished by a high
degree of reflexivity which is, in turn, underlined by mirror images and endless, paradoxical
circularity as one also finds it in the art works of M(aurits) C(ornelis) Escher (1898-1972).
In comparison with Durrell, John Fowles (1926-2005), who is often described as the first
postmodernist English novelist, seems a lesser writer because his literary effects are too
laboured and because his experiments with fictional forms do not always produce the
desired effects. In a number of his novels, Fowles has worked with literary allusions and the
philosophy of existentialism54, from the tragic study of a psychopath who imprisons his
53 See Mark Currie, ed. Metafiction (London: Longman, 1995).

54 The name given to a group of loosely associated doctrines expressed in the works of Camus,
Sartre, Heidegger, and Jaspers. These writers emphasize the unique in human experience; they
place man and woman at the centre of their idea of the world; and they distrust general laws and
principles allegedly controlling human nature. Existentialists give priority to honesty in moral
lover in The Collector (1958) to The Magus (1966, revised in 1977), an "educational" novel
inspired by Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and a best-seller, The French
Lieutenant's Woman (1969).
The latter is a nineteenth-century love story with three endings, Victorian and modern ones, in
which the Victorian idiom is parallelled by a twentieth-century perspective. The novel combines
the formal aspects of metafiction (different time levels, several endings) with traditional sus-
pense and detailed description of social milieu. Fowles uses plot patterns, narrative conven-
tions, and even moral ideas of the Victorian novel, not to reconstruct the past but to juxtapose it
with the present. Largely set in Lyme Regis (where Fowles lives himself) in 1867, the novel
follows the story of a wealthy amateur scientist, Charles Smithson, who is engaged to a respec-
table girl and falls under the spell of the eccentric and sensual Sarah Woodruff, apparently a
"fallen woman". Breaking his engagement, he pursues Sarah and finds her again under the
protection of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (one of the numerous allusions) as a New Woman, the fem-
inine ideal of the Victorian fin-de-sicle. The author intrudes at several instances, revealing
himself to be a contemporary of Roland Barthes and Robbe-Grillet who offers the reader three
alternative endings for the hero: a) acting as a conventional Victorian, b) rejecting these ideas in
a Romantic ending, and c) accepting an independent life marked by an existentialist attitude.
Harold Pinter reworked the novel into a script that served as the basis for a celebrated film.
The postmodernist preoccupation with the problem of telling a story is quite central in The
French Lieutenant's Woman, and Fowles has dealt with it repeatedly. Thus Daniel Martin
(1977) shows experiments with the point of view and with time; and Mantissa (1982) con-
sists of extended erotic fantasy. In A Maggot (1985), Fowles lays bare the conventions of the
historical novel and crime fiction in a story set in the eighteenth century and reconstructing
events (as unreliable) through different, multiple perspectives. Objective reality is replaced
with subjective views. After this novel, Fowles seems to have suffered a writer's block.
If Fowles experimented with narrative forms and conventions, other postmodernists have
focused on the possibilities of language as demonstrated by Burgess in his pioneering A
Clockwork Orange (1962). The most radical experimentalist in this area is Christine
Brooke-Rose (born 1926). She was brought up in Belgium and England and, until her retire-
ment in 1988, taught English literature at a Parisian university. Marked by bilingual neo-
logisms and the conventions of the nouveau roman, her novels are both metalingual and
metafictional (see Such, 1966; Between, 1968). In Thru (1975) the reader is faced with lan-
guage theories and must explore the multiple functions of semantic unities arranged on the
page. And in Textermination (1991) the reader finds himself again in the role of discoverer
and detective as characters from narratives of all ages gather at a convention in a San Fran-
cisco hotel. The delight of reading this book lies in the recognition (or mistaking) of char-
acters (borrowed from as wide a field as Jane Austen and Thomas Mann) who are eventually
saved from terrorist attacks by Italo Calvino's knight. The organizers of the conference try in
vain to restore order, and the whole convention culminates in a dazzling mock-apocalypse.
This disregard of (traditional notions of) reality together with an excessive play with literary
allusions also marks the fiction of Angela Carter (1940-92), which has an additional fem-
inist angle. Her idiosyncratic combination of fantasy and reality, first used in the prize-win-
ning The Magic Toyshop (1967), associated her with the tradition of magic realism (as used,
issues and would defend any decision as justified if it is made in perfect sincerity. The appeal of
their writings can be attributed to their impressive insights that have greatly extended the area
of human self-knowledge.
for example, by Gabriel Garca Mrquez). Carter's novels are distinguished by an extreme
intertextuality (she considered Western literature as her junk-yard) and sketch a new image
of woman by mingling fantasy and elements from fairy tales, myth, and even horror fiction.
In Heroes and Villains (1969), set in the aftermath of a nuclear war, a young girl finds her
identity in an apocalyptic time marked by violence. Carter's fictional idea of the late twen-
tieth-century New Woman emerges in the female Victorian circus performer called Fevvers,
the heroine of Nights at the Circus (1984). This novel employs forms of picaresque and
historical fiction as well as fantasy as a self-confident heroine (equipped with angels' wings)
uses her femininity to assert her rights and place. Her last novel, Wise Children (1991), is a
chronicle of two theatrical families.
Both intertextuality and the levelling of popular and highbrow fiction distinguishes the
works of some novelists born in the late 1940s Julian Barnes, Peter Ackroyd, and Martin
Amis. Barnes and Ackroyd use such a high degree of intertextuality that in reading their
works one gets the impression of being in an echo chamber; they also consistantly refuse to
separate or demarcate fiction and reality. Julian Barnes (born 1946) has worked for the
Sunday Times and The Observer and is also a writer of crime fiction (under the pseudonym
Dan Kavanagh). He became known as a postmodernist with Flaubert's Parrot (1984).
In one way, this is a realistic account of an ageing doctor's fascination for the French novelist
Gustave Flaubert (1821-80), author of the vastly influential Madame Bovary (1857) and L'Edu-
cation sentimentale (1869). But Barnes also playfully abandons conventional narrative in favour
of pseudo-biography, a bestiary, a kind of dictionary (between 1962-72, Barnes worked as a
lexicographer on the supplement of the Oxford English Dictionary), a series of intimate conver-
sations with the reader, and a vari-
ety of other unusual devices. Thus
a double focus on "biography" is
developed, as bits and pieces of
Flaubert's life are woven into a fic-
tional narrative. The reader eventu-
ally realizes that the voice of Dr
Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator,
is as obsessed as the people he de-
scribes. Looking for authentic ma-
terial, such as Flaubert's stuffed
parrot Loulou, Braithwaite wants
to find out the exact relation be-
tween reality and literature only
to learn that he has chosen the
wrong approach, for Flaubert's
Barry Flanagan, Leaping Hare. 1980
house has been destroyed and three
parrots exist of which each is sup-
posed to be the original. The search for the real parrot proves as futile as that for the person
called Gustave Flaubert, who is a fiction sustained by representations (pictures), falsifications,
imitations, and doubles. In addition to undermining the (still highly popular) fashion of literary
biography, the novel also contains numerous intertextual dimensions. For example, there are
many ironic parellels with Flaubert's story "Un coeur simple", and in this parellel view the par-
rot becomes a metaphor for the dead (stuffed) author. As the narrator of Barnes's novel links his
life to that of Flaubert, life seems to imitate literature. Listening to an obsessed Braithwaite
(who is himself a reader, author, and detective in search of the "real" Flaubert), the reader learns
that literary biography is nothing else but a collage of intertextual and intratextual references.
Barnes has continued this postmodernist undermining of literary genres and forms of rep-
resentations in The History of the World in 10 Chapters (1989), fictional pieces and
essays linked by the themes of shipwreck and survival; The Porcupine (1992), a satirical
novella based on his visit to post-communist Bulgaria; England, England (1998), a satire on
England becoming a Disneyworld or theme-park set up on the Isle of Wight; and in a return
to the technique of the nouveau roman (no narrator, no "objective reality") in Talking It
Over (1991) and Love, etc (2000), in which the characters Stuart, Gillian, and Oliver speak
directly to the reader while arguing for their versions of the truth.
Exploring the worlds of literature, art, and London's urban culture, Peter Ackroyd's (born
1949) fiction also works with the popular postmodernist mixture of high and low genres,
intertextual allusions, different time levels, and with characters borrowed from the literature
of the past. Thus The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) purports to be by the great
aesthete himself; in Chatterton (1987) a poet-detective looks for documents about the life of
the Romantic boy-poet Thomas Chatterton who committed suicide at 17 after publishing
falsified poems. Elements of detective fiction and the gothic horror tale also inform Ack-
royd's Hawksmoor (1985). This novel is set in London and moves back and forth between
the late seventeenth and the late twentieth centuries. In the former, the architect Nicholas
Dyer (a contemporary of Sir Christopher Wren) is commissioned to build new churches in
the aftermath of the great fire; and in the latter, Detective Nicholas Hawksmoor investigates
a series of macabre murders on the sites of these churches. Each chapter is written in the
language and style of the period, thus foregrounding the act of representation. In most of his
novels set in London, Ackroyd plays with representation (e.g., in biography) and literature:
in English Music (1992), which also includes pictures and is structured like a musical piece,
a boy-dreamer encounters artists and writers such as William Hogarth, Daniel Defoe, and
Lewis Carroll; and his postmodern pastiches of the gothic novel return to Elizabethan times
The House of Dr Dee (1993), set in the alleys of Clerkenwell and to late Victorian
popular culture Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994), which places the story of
Jack the Ripper in the context of the theatre of the time as it brings together the music-hall
performer Dan Leno, Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Analytical Engine, and the
novelist George Gissing. Milton in America (1996) transports the Puritan poet John Milton
to the New World in a historical fantasy. Ackroyd's The Plato Papers: A Prophecy (2000)
again combines his favourite subjects (the history and writers connected with London) and
technical strategies.
The Plato Papers also has a London setting, though this time in AD 3700 after a nuclear
catastrophe, and provides hilarious literary findings as the novel treads the thin line between
fantasy and biography. In this future London, a great orator named Plato is introduced in 55
chapters as he converses with his (feminine) soul and his disciples (who also discuss him in
separate chapters). Along the way, archeological-literary discoveries are made Sigmund Freud
is re-evaluated as a clown and the author of a comic masterpiece (Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious), an African singer called George Eliot is identified as the author of The Waste
Land, Charles Dickens becomes the author of The Origin of Species, and E. A. Poe's works are
believed to be the record of an entire civilization. But the novel doesn't settle for elegant gags.
Plato also addresses the rites and rituals of former eras, such as "the cult of webs and nets" that
enslaved the population in the period called "Mouldwarp" (our own age), and, after a journey
into the underworld (the past) he is eventually tried for corrupting the young by introducing
uncertainty into a world smugly convinced that it knows itself, and thus knows all.
Martin Amis (born 1949) is the son of a famous novelist and one of the best known post-
modernist writers. He parodies sensational popular genres, such as science fiction, detective
fiction, and the pornographic novel in attempts to combine the technique of the nouveau
roman with traditional ideas of plot, suspense, and humour. Using a frank and sometimes
obscene English in the case of his lower-class characters, an aspect of his occasionally
violent fiction that has shocked some critics (see Dead Babies, 1975), Amis has explored
the postmodern identities and moralities of the "yuppies" in novels marked by fractured
time schemes and puzzles (see Success, 1978; and Money, 1984). One of his best novels is
London Fields (1989), a metafictional novel drawing on both thrillers and science fiction.
Set in a London that seems familiar yet is also a futuristic construct and threatened by some
unnamed catastrophe, it is a murder story and a love story with many diverting and some
bizarre characters. The novel is innovative through its deconstruction of traditional elements
(e.g., the separation of murderer and victim in whodunits) and its implicit condemnation of
the immorality of the postmodern age best exemplified by Keith Talent (an ironic telling
name). Talent is a symbol of the 1980s; amoral and a TV addict, he is prepared to do any-
thing to achieve fame and fortune by appearing on TV as a darts player. Amis is a master of
style with an excellent ear for language varieties and the subtle differences they indicate.
His novels are always distinguished by their strategic incorporation of street and lower-class
English, American English, and minority dialects. Simultaneously, he produces metafiction
by undermining traditional genres and ways of narrating. Thus Time's Arrow (1991), his
most ambitiously structured novel, is an experiment in the backward narration of time pres-
enting the story of a Nazi war criminal. Amis's linguistic dexterity, his inventiveness and
use of popular genres tend to obscure his moral concerns; yet they are always present. In
The Information (1995), for instance, for which he received the biggest advance payment
ever given to a novelist, two novelists are pitted against each other in a world that seems to
be marked by the growing insignificance of people and books. He has continued his
experimentation with novelistic forms in his recent works.
Thus Night Train (1997) is, on the surface, a thriller set in an unspecified contemporary Ameri-
can city (probably Chicago), but upon closer analysis proves a typical Amisian variation of the
thriller. The investigation of a suicide by the female detective, "Mike" Hoolihan, turns into a
psychological exploration of the narrator herself in a serious examination of innocence and
guilt, power and responsibility. Held in American colloquial English, as Hoolihan talks straight
to the reader, Night Train is a tragi-comic metafictional novel that tackles serious subjects, such
as gender issues and depression, in a subtle play with intertextuality (e.g., allusions to Goethe's
suicidal hero in Werther, 1774) and intermediality (the title of the novel refers to a jazz piece by
Oscar Peterson).
The novels of the major postmodern experimentalists55, then, show the direct influence of
post-structuralist theories, especially the "death of the author" (as proclaimed in 1968 by
55 Additional authors and novels that belong to this group but, for want of space, cannot be dis-
cussed here include John Berger (born 1926), G. (1972), Pig Earth (1979); B.S. Johnson
(1933-73), Christie Malry's Own Double Entry (1973), See the Old Lady Decently Buried
(1975); D.M. Thomas's (born 1935) fiction, which combines his knowledge of Russian lit-
erature and psychoanalysis (see The White Hotel, 1981; Ararat, 1983; and Lying Together,
1990); Gabriel Josipovici (born 1940), Words (1971), The Present (1975), The Echo Chamber
(1979), Conversations in Another Room (1984); Andrew Sinclair's (born 1935) "Albion
Tryptich" Gog (1967), Magog (1972), and King Ludd (1988); and the historical metafiction of
Nigel Williams (born 1948; see Star Turn, 1985; Witchcraft, 1987; East of Wimbledon, 1993)
Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault) and the importance of the reader, the impossibility of
constructing a reliable reality with language, and the idea of personal and social history as a
construct and, more often than not, a falsification. The author thus becomes an imitator, and
originality can only be achieved in the dexterous imitation of others.
But there is also a more traditional variety of recent English fiction. As indicated above, this
could perhaps be described as postmodern (i.e., set in the last decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, for example) but not postmodernist in that it largely avoids experiments with form,
characters, and narrative. To some extent the traditional novel owes its survival to the spon-
soring of literature and the influence of a popular market. Various literary prizes have helped
to stimulate an interest in new fiction and, even more, guaranteed the continuing flourishing
of the novel as most readers know and cherish it. Thus the annual Booker Prize, modelled
on the French Prix Goncourt, was founded in 1969. The Whitbread Prize followed suit in
1971.56 The Booker Prize for 1998, for example, was awarded to Ian McEwan's (born
1948) novel Amsterdam, a formally traditional novel with an omniscient authorial narrator
who delivers a story about love, death, and euthanasia. McEwan is one of the numerous
contemporary writers whose fiction is postmodern rather than postmodernist. His hallmark
is a kind of neo-Gothic in urban settings. He came to prominence with The Cement Garden
(1978), a short novel about orphaned children and their secret disposal of a corpse under
domestic cement. His subsequent novels include The Comfort of Strangers (1981) which is
set in Venice and deals with sexual menace; and The Child in Time (1987), about the kid-
napping of a girl and the emotional consequences for her parents. McEwan then turned to
the exploration of Europe's post-war experience in The Innocent (1990), which is set during
the early years of Cold War espionage and is based on the stories surrounding the Berlin
Tunnel, and Black Dogs (1992), a study of evil in the story of an English couple encounter-
ing terrifying dogs on their honeymoon in France. Many critics agree that one of his best
novels to date is Enduring Love (1997). Concerned with religious erotomania and obsession,
it has a bravura opening chapter describing an accident to a hot-air balloon near Oxford, and
then traces its effect on the surviving witnesses. Another theme of this excellent novel the
nature of human love and genetic heritage demonstrates McEwan's growing interest in
scientific discoveries and the way they affect life in the late twentieth century. McEwan's
more recent fiction has lived up to the expectations one connects with one of England's most
gifted contemporary writers. The novel that should have won the Booker Prize is Atonement
(2002), which proves McEwan's extraordinary understanding of the mind and feelings of
children in a haunting story stretching from 1935 to the end of the century.
Presented in what is eventually revealed as the fictionalized account of the tragic mistake of a
hyperimaginative 13-year-old girl, Briony Tallis, McEwan's novel consists of three parts. The
first describes a domestic crisis in an upper-middle-class home as the adolescent Briony
wrongly accuses Robbie Turner, the boyfriend of her sister Cecilia, of raping her cousin Lola.
This event radically changes the lives of half a dozen people Robbie is jailed and must
abandon his plans to study medicine; Cecilia becomes a nurse; and the raped girl eventually
and Penelope Lively (born 1933; see Moon Tiger, 1987; City of the Mind, 1991). For a detailed
study of these authors, see Ansgar Nnning, Der englische Roman des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stutt-
gart: Klett, 1998): chapters 6-7.
56 It is awarded to writers who have been resident in the UK or Eire for three years, and it is
chosen from five prizes for first novel, new novel, biography, poetry, and children's book. The
winners of these categories are then candidates for the overall award.
marries the man who actually attacked her. Reminiscent of the settings of the novels of Virginia
Woolf and Henry Green, this is a masterfully sustained opening section (with an additional
ironic twist at the end: the writer is the older Briony, now a successful novelist). It is followed
by Briony's vision of Robbie, now freed and retreating with the British army near Dunkirk. In
the third part, Briony becomes a nurse amid wonderfully observed scenes of London as the
nation mobilizes. Atoning for her crime, she tends the war casualties and comes to terms with
her family, offering to make amends to Cecilia and Robbie, now together as lovers. But the
ironic epilogue, by an elderly Briony faced with an impending disease that will render her
senile, presents yet another coup de theatre as the narrator of the entire book confesses to her
fabrication of the aftermath of the crime: the middle section of the book is shown to be the
fiction of Briony Tallis, the well-known novelist, for Robbie actually died of a wound in Dun-
kirk and Briony was never reconciled with Cecilia and her cousin Lola. Atonement is thus a
fascinating piece of fiction that conjures up the 1930s while focusing on the pleasures, pains,
and dangers of adolescence, of writing, and of responsibility. McEwan's preference for black
comedy (which usually has the bad win over the good) adds an additional dimension to a
beautifully constructed novel that is equally remarkable for its evocation of a historical period
and society, its characterization, and dense atmosphere.
Like McEwan, William Boyd (born 1952) is a great story-teller. A Scottish novelist born in
Africa and with an international rather than a regional outlook, Boyd first attracted attention
with An Ice-Cream War (1982), which in a serio-comic manner examines a marginal
episode in East Africa during World War I. His best novel is probably The New Confessions
(1987); it presents the history of the twentieth century as seen through the sadly comic
autobiography of a self-styled genius and maniacal film director. It also plays structurally
and thematically with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's seminal autobiographical work Les con-
fessions (1781-88). Boyd often combines exotic locations with deep moral concerns, as in
Brazzaville Beach (1990), which deals with anthropology and the origin of human and
animal violence, and The Blue Afternoon (1993), a mystery story set in the Philippines. His
Armadillo (1993) has a London setting but a Romany-born hero, and the book tells about
his amorous and financial adventures in the late twentieth-century English capital. With Any
Human Heart (2001), a novel in the form of a life-long diary kept by the protagonist Logan
Mountstuart, Boyd returned to his favourite subjects biography (preferably false or
falsified; see also his fictional biography, Nat Tate. An American Artist, 1998) and identity.
Any Human Heart also returns to the successful pattern of The New Confessions, as Boyd
follows his hero through every decade of the last century, as well as several continents,
marriages, and careers.
The historical novel57 has made a triumphant, postmodern return in the fiction of a number
of writers which is distinguished less by realism than by scholarly historical pastiche. They
include J(ames) G(ordon) Farrell (1935-79; see The Siege of Krishnapur, 1973), Barry
Unsworth (born 1930), Charles Palliser (born 1947), Graham Swift (born 1949),
Sebastian Faulks (born 1953), Adam Thorpe (born 1956), and Lawrence Norfolk (born
1963). Thus Unsworth's Sacred Hunger (1992) focuses on the slave trade in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries; and Palliser (who was born in America) uses Victorian settings and
narrative conventions in The Quincunx (1989), which is full of deliberate echoes of Dickens,
and in his neo-Gothic Victorian suspense thrillers Betrayals (1994), and The Unburied
(1999). With his Morality Play (1995), Unsworth also wrote a historical detective novel set
57 See Fritz-Wilhelm Neumann, Der englische historische Roman im 20. Jahrhundert (Heidel-
berg: Winter, 1993).
among a troupe of medieval travel players. Graham Swift has dealt with the telling and
impact of history in a family saga entitled Waterland (1983) set in the Fens of East Anglia;
he continued his excavation of the past in moving character studies contained in Out of This
World (1988) and his prize-winning Last Orders (1996), which plays with time, class, suc-
cess, and failure in the story of four south Londoners on a pilgrimage to the coast to scatter
the ashes of a friend. The working-class slang in which the novel is narrated achieves the
same effects as the fiction of the "Chemical Generation" discussed below. Sebastian
Faulks's Birdsong (1994) brought a new fictional perspective to the First World War while
his The Girl at the Lion D'Or (1998) retraces small-town France in the 1930s. France during
World War II is also the setting of his Charlotte Gray (1998), a novel about a Scottish
woman in search of her missing lover and a witness of the descent of a civilisation into
barbarism as the French collaborate with the Nazis. Adam Thorpe explored the formal and
generic possibilities of the historical novel in his Ulverton (1992), the story of a fictional
Wessex village from the seventeenth century down to the present day. Presented from
multiperspective angles and including various media, each chapter in this novel is held in a
different style (see also his more recent novels that explore Englishness in history, Still,
1995; and Pieces of Light, 1998). Similarly, Lawrence Norfolk's Lemprire's Dictionary
(1991) a novel replete with facts and pageantry and set largely in the eighteenth century in
Jersey, London, and Paris traces the story of a Jersey family while focusing on the prot-
agonist John Lemprire, a dictionary compiler. Trying to achieve the effects of historical
pastiche, Norfolk integrates elements of the sensational novel and of detective fiction, a
mixture that also characterises The Pope's Rhinoceros (1996). This novel is set in the
Renaissance and describes the violence of Europe at that time in a quest for the rhinoceros
in Africa. Whereas the fiction of most of these writers is prevailingly urban, the novels of
Tim Pears (born 1956) form a moral, cultural, and philsophical chronicle of the last two
decades of the past century. In the Place of Fallen Leaves (1993), Pears's first novel, was set
in an English village during the drought of 1984 while In a Land of Plenty (1997), which
was made into a TV series, was an epic family saga of English provincial life. In Wake Up
(2002), Pears reduced the cast of characters and chose a first-person narrator (as opposed to
the multiple viewpoints of his previous novels). Wake Up presents the story of an anti-hero,
John Sharp, an Oxford biologist turned potato magnate who is faced with two deaths caused
by illegal trials of genetically manipulated products. This gives Pears ample opportunity to
explore issues of human and social concern.
History, whether English or European or Colonial, occasionally concerns even the youngest
English novelists who made their debuts in the 1990s, though some such as Tibor Fischer
and Philip Hensher also pursue surrealist and comic aims in fiction that often transcends
generic boundaries but is still not radically experimental. Their novels do not really under-
mine narrative conventions but contain a few playful aspects or elements. In the 1990s,
John Lanchester (born 1962), for instance, produced two unique novels. One, The Debt to
Pleasure (1996), is a recipe book and a mystery story about the art of murder recalling an
essay by Thomas de Quincey. The other is Mr Phillips (2000), which describes a day in the
life of a rather ordinary man in London who has lost his job. A man without much to re-
commend him, Mr. Phillips echoes the non-hero of Robert Musil's The Man Without
Qualities (English version 1953-60). Lanchester's Fragrant Harbour (2002) is quite dif-
ferent from his previous work. Set in a world stretching from England to Hong Kong, it has
four narrative voices and is concerned with the grand themes of love, history, and globali-
zation reflected in the life of Tom Stewart, the principal narrator, and Dawn Stone, a sassy
and ambitious journalist. Distinguished by Lanchester's humour and taste for facts, this is
again a remarkable achievement in recent fiction. Fantasy and the comic as well as magic
realism make inroads into Louis de Bernire's (born 1954) Captain Corelli's Mandolin
(1994, made into a movie), about the Italian occupation of the Greek island of Cephallonia.
South America provides the setting, and Gabriel Garca Mrquez the technique of magic
realism, for Bernire's vivid and cruelly witty trilogy The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether
Parts (1990), Seor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991), and The Troublesome Offspring of
Cardinal Guzman (1992), which mingle elements of eroticism, classical mythology, philos-
ophy, and political satire in gripping narratives. The comic and partly surrealist vision dom-
inates in the fiction of Tibor Fischer (born 1959 and of Hungarian parentage). Fischer's
Under the Frog (1992) is a tragi-comic tale of life in Hungary during the revolution of 1956,
seen partly from the perspective of a travelling basketball team. In The Thought Gang
(1994) a failed philosopher and a one-armed bank robber plan the ultimate bank robbery and
in the equally bizarre The Collector Collector (1997), the narrator is a garrulous and vindic-
tive Sumerian bowl with a fantastic memory. Philip Hensher's (born 1965) much praised
Kitchen Venom (1996), a family drama, also has its comic moments and his Pleasured
(1998), set in Berlin in the late 1980s, offers occasionally comic but also bleak and un-
settling accounts of lives caught in espionage and terrorism. Jim Crace (born 1946) is an
older writer who has also re-examined historical processes and conventions. In The Gift of
Stones (1988), ostensibly set in Stone Age Britain, he parodies free market economics; and
the horrors of postmodern life confined to a shopping mall are the subject of Arcadia (1992),
though this is set in a timeless future and a nameless city. Crace returned to a more historical
orientation in Signals of Distress (1994), which describes the consequences of a shipwreck
off the English coast in the 1830s; and Quarantine (1997), which is set in the first century
and debunks religious myths in the character of Jesus Christ unable to survive in the wilder-
ness. Crace tackled one of our remaining taboos the description of dying and death in
Being Dead (1999); this traces the death of a zoologist couple, who re-enact their first love
in an uncaring, cruel landscape. Finally, Will Self (born 1961) seems to be the author who
apart from the more experimental Martin Amis represents best the fertile and hectic prose
marking the fin-de-sicle. A former cartoonist and journalist who came to prominence and
notoriety with confessions about his drug addiction (see Junk Mail, 1995), Self emerged
with Cock and Bull (1992), a pair of novellas commenting on gender reversal. He caught the
surrealist mood of the late twentieth century in his first full-length novel, My Idea of Fun
(1993), a disturbing "Bildungsroman". A distinguished writer of short stories and novellas
(see, for instance, the novella The Sweet Smell of Psychosis, 1996), his best novel to date is
Great Apes (1997), a satiric parable written in the spirit of Jonathan Swift in which people
find themselves transformed into monkeys.
In 2000, Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne edited an anthology of short stories written by
fifteen younger emerging writers. It contained a catalogue of strictures, "The new Puritan
Manifesto", not only for the stories in the collection but for new British fiction as such. An
attempt to found and define a new movement, the manifesto openly attacked the principles
of writing of the Amis-Swift generation while laying down the rules of the "new Puritans"
no technical experiments la Calvino or Amis, no flashbacks, no genre writing, present
tense, and textual simplicity. The "New Puritans" have since shaken off these self-applied
shackles but one notices in their works an insistence on new issues (racism, alcoholism,
feminist antistereotyping), a preferably demotic style, and allusions to themes that are at the
heart of the experience of younger people, such as drug taking and rock and rap music.
Examples of this writing can be found in recent prose fiction by Matt Thorne (born 1975;
Tourist, 1998; Eight Minutes Idle, 2000), Nicholas Blincoe (born 1965; Manchester
Slingbag, 1998; The Dope Priest, 1999), Daren King (born 1971; Boxy an Star, 1999),
Scarlett Thomas (born 1973; Bright Young Things, 2001), and younger British black
writers like Courttia Newland (born 1976; The Scholar, 1999; Society Within, 2000) and
Luke Sutherland (born 1970; Jelly Roll, 1998).58
As the reaction of the "new Puritans" shows, there is also continuity in British fiction, for
what they demand is essentially a return to the British novel of the 1950s, when Kingsley
Amis and John Wain introduced the concerns of a new generation of urban young people.
The rise in the 1990s of what has been termed "Lad Lit" and "Chick Lit" is a good example
of this continuity. Nick Hornby (born 1957) might be considered the pioneer of "Lad Lit",
whilst its counterpart was initiated by Helen Fielding (born 1958). Emphasizing the sexual
and professional anxieties of the urban young, this confessional fiction usually deals with a
young hero/heroine in London who faces emotional difficulties and refuses to adapt both to
the new sexual mores and the demanding and dehumanising professional world.
Hornby's High Fidelity (1995), for instance, features the typical confessional narrator in Rob
Fleming, whose gender-specific troubles and shortcomings would remind the urban reader of
his own situation. Like Bridget Jones, his female counterpart in Fielding's novel, he suffers from
the smart new singles culture where weakness is deemed unappealing. Resisting the lifestyle
imposed on him, he seeks comfort in popular culture as he tries to become a "fully-functioning
human being". The story of the novel depicts a protracted process of critical self-evaluation.
Initially, Rob loses his partner Laura, and as the plot moves to their eventual reunion, caused
not least by the experience of the death of Laura's father, he learns to respect the needs of the
other and to find his own place in the culture of his time.
Like Hornby, Helen Fielding successfully blurs the distinction between high-brow and low-
brow fiction in a novel that seems to have touched the heart of a generation. Published in
1996 and quickly snapped up by Hollywood and turned into a movie, Fielding's Bridget
Jones's Diary is not just a best-seller written for a young urban female audience.
Based on a column written for The Independent, the novel that developed from a series of
humorous newspaper sketches is well-crafted and has substantial literary ambitions. The plot
exemplifies what has been said, rather disparagingly, about "Chick Lit" "twenty-something-
girl-shares-flat-has-crap-job-and-life-full-of-petty-annoyances-which-can-only-be-alleviated-by-
finding-the-right-guy". The protagonist, Bridget Jones, has a junior post in publishing and em-
bodies the anxieties of the single urban female as she records in her diary her successes and
disasters relating to weight, alcoholic consumption, and sex. Trying to find "Mr Right", she has
to learn some lessons before finding him in a high-profile barrister called Mark Darcy. The
name is of course an intertextual allusion to Jane Austen's Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, which
Fielding uses as an ironic blueprint throughout the novel. Fielding's novel provides a witty satire
of the vanity and self-regard of the professional world in which Bridget works, including male
sexist behaviour (in her sexually incontinent boss with whom she has an affair); it also uses the
58 In a survey of "the best young writers in Britain today" conducted in April 2001, The Inde-
pendent on Sunday lists as further talented young novelists Justin Hill (born 1972), Ben Rice
(born 1972), Maggie O'Farrell (born 1972; see After You'd Gone, 2000), Bidisha (born 1978),
Patrick Neate (born 1970), and Zo Strachan (born 1975), a Scotswoman whose fiction has
been compared to that of Alan Warner.
form of the diary to deflate Bridget's romanticism and to achieve a romantic ending in which
the heroine learns as much as her predecessor in Jane Austen's novel.
"Lad Lit" and "Chick Lit" thus advances the democratisation of traditional narrative fiction
by picking up themes and attitudes already treated by the "angry young men". In doing so it
also marries literary ambition with popular culture.
Among the themes that can now be treated realistically and with candour one finds drug
consumption and sex (by the "Chemical Generation" discussed below) and homosexuality.
As a consequence, we have witnessed the rise of the gay novel. Homosexual writers such as
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), E. M. Forster (1879-1970), and Christopher Isher-
wood (1904-86) still had to fear prosecution if they wrote openly about their own sexual
inclinations only Isherwood did so in his classic A Single Man (1964), but Forster's
Maurice, written rather early in the century, was not published until 1971. Somerset
Maugham's nephew Robin Maugham (1916-81) wrote an explicit gay novel in 1958. En-
titled The Wrong People, it was published pseudonymously in the USA in 1967, and in
Britain, with the author's name, in 1970. In the new climate of the 1970s, it became a best-
seller and with its portrayal of gay love did much to change readers' perception of homo-
sexuality. Recent gay novels of literary value include Alan Hollinghurst's (born 1954) The
Swimming Pool Library (1988), which features the eighteenth-century homosexual writer
William Beckford as a major character, The Folding Star (1994), a love story set in Flan-
ders, and The Spell (1998), a satire on sexual
manners. The gay world, past and present, has also
been explored in the fiction of Neil Bartlett (born
1958; see Mr Clive & Mr Page, 1996; and Ready
to Catch Him Should He Fall, 1999), and in the
gay "bodice-rippers" with an occasional historical
touch of Chris Hunt (born 1943; see The Honey
and the Sting, 1999).
One of the most fascinating developments in late
twentieth-century fiction from Britain and Ireland
is the flowering of what could be termed the re-
gional novel. To some extent, this is a consequence
of the process of political devolution in Britain and
Ireland, which led to peace talks in Ireland and the
creation of national assemblies or parliaments in
Scotland and Wales in 1999. While not all of the
Scottish writers deal with regional concerns (see,
for instance, William Boyd, discussed above), oth-
ers have contributed to the formation of a distinct
Scottish fiction.59 To these belong the twentieth-
century pioneers of the Glaswegian novel, Alas-
Alasdair Gray, Illustration for dair Gray (born 1934) and James Kelman (born
Lanark. 1981 1946). With Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981),
59 See Susanne Hagemann, ed. Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present (New York: Lang,
1996); Keith Dixon, "Le roman cossais contemporain: voix urbaines, voies nouvelles", Etudes
anglaises 50:2 (1997): 195-205.
Gray established himself as a leading figure in Scottish fiction. Rather experimental (Gray is
also a playwright and painter and insists on the integration in his books of his own designs
and drawings), this novel is reminiscent of Sterne's Tristram Shandy (Gray begins his novel
with Book III) as, in a modern vision of hell, the author gives us the interwoven tales of
Lanark and Duncan Thaw in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow. Gray's vast
picaresque fable and phantasmagoria of writing and illustration has been compared to John
Bunyan, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, and the painters Hieronymus Bosch
and William Hogarth writers and artists who are all alluded to in the book either verbally
or visually. Gray's 1982 Janine (1984) is formally more conventional. Set inside the head of
Jock McLeish, it presents the sadomasochistic musings of this ageing, divorced, alcoholic,
insomniac supervisor of security installations who is drinking in the bedroom of a small
Scottish hotel. With Poor Things (1992), a prize-winning novel, Gray returned both to the
neo-Gothic and Glasgow in a pastiche of the Victorian mystery story and a satirical look at
the medical profession in nineteenth-century Scotland. Gray's fiction puts Scotland (espe-
cially Glasgow and Edinburgh) on the map as he is concerned with realistic problems (un-
employment, poverty, alcoholism) and the role of art in Scottish society. His latest novel, A
History Maker (1994), portrays the future of Scotland as experienced in the border region
during the 23rd century. The novel has its postmodernist qualities in that the border wars in
2220 echo and subvert the Scottish border wars described in the Romantic fiction of Sir
Walter Scott. Like Gray, James Kelman has contributed to the Glasgow novel in his
naturalistic pictures of urban desolation, portrayed with grim humour and empathy. Al-
though Jeff Torrington (1935-2008) has been credited with writing the ultimate Glasgow
novel (see Swing Hammer Swing!, 1992), it is Kelman who is best at depicting Scottish
working-class life with terse touches of humour and the authentic language of the streets
which many non-Scottish readers find daunting. Kelman's first success was The Buscon-
ductor Hines (1984); this was followed by A Disaffection (1989), a study of the frustration
of an alcoholic secondary school-teacher on the edge of middle age, and How Late It was,
How Late (1994), which won the Booker Prize. The novel owes much to Beckett in its form
and spirit as a monologue held in violent and obscene language presents the story of an
unemployed Glaswegian construction worker and petty crook. As the reader listens to
Sammy's tale who, after two days of drinking, finds himself blind and in police custody, he
is reminded of the frustration and aggression of the characters in the fiction of Kafka and
Beckett. Kelman left school at the age of 15, lived in America for some time, and held a
succession of temporary jobs, alternating with unemployment. His financial success has not
made him forget the fate of the marginalized in society; he sees himself as a spokesman in
fiction of the ill-educated and the formerly excluded. Thus The Good Times (1998) presents
another working-class voice from Scotland in twenty first-person monologues while Trans-
lated Accounts (2001), set in a nameless country under military rule, has a similar mode of
presentation (monologues or voices) and an apocalyptic theme.
Both Gray and Kelman, but also Beckett, seem to have exerted an enormous influence on
the younger Scottish writers of the so-called "Chemical Generation" (e.g., Irvine Welsh and
Alan Warner). For the most part, these writers do not profess any political aims (Alasdair
Gray still has Socialist leanings), they are culturally sophisticated, and primarily engaged
with the music, drugs, and customs of late twentieth-century club and youth culture. The
first and most important member of this group is Irvine Welsh (born 1957) whose novel
Trainspotting (1993), concerned with a group of young heroin addicts in 1980s Edinburgh,
achieved great popularity and cult status, especially after it was filmed in 1996. If Kelman
uses Glaswegian in his fiction, Welsh writes in broad Edinburgh dialect. Welsh has much
more in common with Kelman he also left school rather early, worked in many jobs in
Edinburgh and London, and took an MBA in Edinburgh in 1990. Both writers share a brutal
and honest way of portraying a lost generation in occasionally shocking fiction tempered by
compassion and the comedy of life. Welsh's subsequent works include collections of short
stories and two novels: Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), which takes the reader inside the
mind of a man in a coma, and Filth (1998), the story of a corrupt Edinburgh policeman that
includes the narrative voice of the protagonist's own excrement. In Welsh's Glue (2001) we
get the stories of four men, as the author follows his characters from 1970 to 2002. The
novel shows us how a boy, Terry Lawson, who is a legend at school, loses his fame as he
grows up, while the quiet kids his friends Billy Birrell and Carl Ewart achieve success in
adulthood. These stories are balanced with the doomed life of a fourth friend, Andrew
Galloway, who ends up in prison and contracts Aids from sharing needles. There is less
violence in this novel; when it does occur it tends to be off-stage, allowing Welsh more
space to explore its effects on the characters. With Porno (2002), Welsh returns to the lives
of some of the characters of Trainspotting, as Simon Sick Boy Williamson is back in his
native Edinburgh after a long spell in London. To realize his dream of directing a porno-
graphic movie (hence the title), Sick Boy teams up with a young female student and his old
pal Mark Renton and the unhinged Frank Begbie in a fight for first-class seats in a ruthless
environment.
Taking a nihilistic view of human destiny, both Kelman and Welsh seem to have lost any
hope for the social advancement of the underprivileged, yet their sexually and scatologically
explicit fiction is also an accusation of postmodern British society which, through its
acceptance of inequities, allows such neglect of its youth. While the "Chemical Genera-
tion's" graphic use of language (which some readers find offensive) forges a new English
for literature, they must also be credited with capturing the alienation of the young in the
final decades of the twentieth century. This alienation is caught both realistically and
poetically in Alan Warner's (born 1964) Morvern Callar (1995).
Written in the voice of a semi-literate young woman in the West Highlands of Scotland, and set
in the early 1990s, this novel appeals to younger readers as much as the voice of Holden Caul-
field in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951), one of the narrative models on which Warner
draws in his book. When Morvern's mysterious older boyfriend dies, she seizes the money and
an unpublished manuscript he has left her and runs away to live a life of pleasure, including
sex, drugs, dancing, and music. Her journey takes her to Spain and back to Scotland. The novel
is held in a poetic style that combines spoken Scots with sophisticated moral and philosophical
ideas. Warner is able to catch not only a feminine consciousness from a sub-culture of the
Celtic fringe in Britain, but also the mentality of a desperate, hedonist generation trying to
escape the frustrations of their lives by heading into different states of mind produced by drugs
and alcohol.
With his second novel, These Demented Lands (1997), Warner resumed his Morvern story
in a more experimental sequel as he evokes a nightmarish shipwreck on an offshore island.
His The Sopranos (1998) returns to a more traditional structure in a story about a group of
drunken Highland girls on a journey to Edinburgh. Though Warner announced that he might
return to his Morvern Callar character, his subsequent novel, The Man Who Walks (2002),
presented two male protagonists, the eponymous Man Who Walks, and his nephew, who is
referred to throughout as "the Nephew". While stylistically the book is not very different
from what has gone before it, its content is both shocking (in its explicit sexual details that
include all kinds of S & M scenes) and original. The major characters are fascinating pre-
cisely because they are extremely bizarre and on the verge of madness, the Man Who Walks
believing himself to be a Hollywood screenwriter and the Nephew being a feckless dupe and
impotent sex maniac. The prose is again lyrical and highly intertextual with many allusions
to films that enrich the Scottish background.
Apart from the "Chemical Generation", Scottish novelists of note include some women
writers who have brought the female experience fully into the forefront of the recent flour-
ishing of Scottish literature. Thus Janice Galloway (born 1956) described the psychological
collapse of a woman in The Trick is to Keep Breathing (1990), and in Female Friends
(1994) followed her two women heroines on a trip to France in search of adventure and
friendship. A(lison) L(ouise) Kennedy (born 1965), better known as a short-story writer,
has produced some novels peopled by her incomprehending (male and female) characters
adrift in a world without meaning Looking for the Possible Dance (1993) covers a train
journey from Glasgow to London while the train and the trip become metaphors for life.
Kennedy's 1999 novel Everything You Need, which features the self-loathing protagonist
Nathan Staples, is also characterised by bleak humour, an intense lyricism, and a focus on
mental derangement and sexual obsession. Jackie Kay (born 1961), also a poet and of
Nigerian origin, won several prizes with her first novel, Trumpet (1998). The story of a
female musician who pretended to be a man, this work deals with questions of gender and
identity and employs various narrative perspectives.
Scotland also boasts a great number of mainstream novelists who have produced successful
fiction often inspired by the Scottish landscape or history. They include George Mackay
Brown (1921-96), who wrote about his native Orkney Islands (see, for instance, Greenvoe,
1972; Beside the Ocean of Time, 1994); Allan Massie (born 1938), who has been concerned
with classical and Scottish history (see The Hanging Tree, 1990); and Iain Banks (born
1953), who is also a prolific writer of SF novels (under the name Iain M. Banks). Writing
with a wide range of styles and subjects, Banks has produced some marvellous if occa-
sionally controversial fiction. One of his best works is The Wasp Factory (1984). It is nar-
rated by a 16-year-old boy, Frank Cauldhame, who lives on a Scottish island and indulges in
obsessive fantasies of violence and death. The book probes macho values, sexual identities,
and an adolescent consciousness as Frank discloses a most surprising discovery at the end of
his tale. In Espedair Street (1987) Banks uses the world of pop music to explore postmodern
solitude and values while A Song of Stone (1997), set around a castle after a civil war, pre-
sents a post-apocalyptic story.
If there has been a strong Scottish revival in fiction, the continuing Irish Literary Re-
naissance has been as forceful in the novel.60 It encompasses writers of Irish descent who
have been little or not concerned with Eire or Irish issues (e.g., Joyce Cary, Iris Murdoch,
and Elizabeth Bowen, discussed above), authors who emigrated from Ireland but never left
it in their minds (e.g., Brian Moore), and those who made Irish characters, landscape, and
the "troubles" their major issues (see, for instance, the novels of John McGahern (1934-
2006; The Barracks, 1962; The Pornographer, 1979; and Amongst Women, 1990). One
might imagine that Irish authors, faced as they are with such literary and innovative giants
60 See A. Norman Jeffares, Anglo-Irish Literature (London: Macmillan, 1982); Christine Hunt
Mahoney, Contemporary Irish Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998); Rdiger Imhof,
ed. Contemporary Irish Novelists (Tbingen: Narr, 1990).
as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, find it difficult to raise their voices. But this is not the
case. Thus McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002) is firmly grounded in
Irish heritage and life; it borrows its title from the custom in Ireland to bury the dead so that
they face east and describes a year in the lives of a motley crew of Irish people in an idyllic
farming country in a story driven by the love of talk and alcohol. While the influence of
Joyce and Beckett is undeniable in the concerns of many Irish novelists with language and
the absurdity of life, the harvest of Irish fiction since the end of World War II has been rich,
exciting, innovative and deeply poetic. The Irish have contributed appreciably to the post-
modern short story Liam Flaherty, Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Connor, and William Trevor
are names that come to mind immediately (see the discussion below) and they have
excelled in the major genres of the novel.
Among the older generation, the figure of Flann O'Brien (1911-66) stands out. A postmod-
ernist avant la lettre, his real name was Brian O'Nolan (he wrote as Flann O'Brien and, in his
pieces for The Irish Times, Myles na gCopaleen). He was born in Co. Tyrone and educated at
University College, Dublin (UCD) and became a civil servant. His first novel, At Swim-Two-
Birds (1939), is an exuberant experimental work showing his strong sense of satiric irony, a
delight in words (both English and Irish) and an immense capacity for fantasy.
One senses the influence of Joyce behind the structure of the novel, which in its multidimen-
sional exploration of Irish culture and Dublin life operates on several levels by presenting
shifting Chinese-box-like views of experience. O'Brien used a medieval Irish tale that is set
against the story of the narrator, a Dublin student living with his uncle. The book also contains
a novel within a novel, written by the eccentric author Dermot Trellis and dealing with the
legendary Irish hero Finn Mac Cool. Employing parody, pastiche, and his marvellous sense of
the absurd, O'Brien thus satirizes the sentimental treatment of the Irish Gaelic inheritance and
explores the nature of fiction in parodies of westerns and folk tales.
The shadow of Beckett's nihilism lurks behind the major character, de Selby, in O'Brien's
The Third Policeman, completed in 1940 and published in 1967. The novel examines a state
of fear in the mind of the eccentric intellectual hero and his imagination. O'Brien's third
novel was written in Gaelic An Bal Bocht: n, An Millenach (1941) , appeared in an
English translation in 1973 as The Poor Mouth and provides much black humour in a
savage attack on the treatment and status of Gaelic Ireland. There followed two more novels
of which The Dalkey Archive (1964) is perhaps the more interesting with its satiric, inter-
textual engagement with the character and works of James Joyce. Less inventive, but also
concerned with Ireland in his early works was Brian Moore (1921-99), who left Ireland for
Canada, and then California, in 1948. His Irish novels, mostly set in and concerned with
Belfast, are The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) and The Emperor of Ice-Cream
(1965). Catholicism and identity are central questions in one of Moore's best novels, I am
Mary Dunne (1968). Reminiscent of Molly Bloom's monologue in Joyce's Ulysses, it is nar-
rated by a woman in America. While North America and its history occasionally occupied
Moore (e.g., in Black Robe, 1983, about a missionary in seventeenth-century Qubec), he
could never escape his Irish background, to which he returned again in a treatment of the
troubles in Northern Ireland in Lies of Silence (1990; see also The Magician's Wife, 1997, a
historical novel set in nineteenth-century France and North Africa). Unlike Moore, William
Trevor (born 1928), a native of Co. Cork and also a distinguished short-story writer, spent
much of his life in Ireland, which provides the setting for many of his novels. He has
focused on cranky misfits in The Old Boys (1964), Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel (1969),
and Other People's Worlds (1980). Trevor has also dealt with the effects of terrorism in
Northern Ireland and returned to a typical Irish theme, emigration, in his powerful novel
Felicia's Journey (1994). The winner of the Whitbread Novel Award, this covers a young
girl's journey from rural Ireland to industrial Britain. Another Irish girl's tragic life provides
the plot for Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), as the young Lucy, unwilling to
emigrate with her parents, escapes into the forest and is believed to be lost and dead. Set
mainly in rural Cork, the book traces Lucy's lonely adolescence and her later reunion, both
sad and joyful, with her aged father.
As one might expect, younger Irish writers have found in the Gaelic heritage (language and
literature), in Catholicism, and increasingly in the post-colonial situation in Ulster, subject
matters which they explore from various angles. Thus Bernard McLaverty's (born 1942)
Cal (1983) reached a wide audience as a novel and a film (1984). Combining thriller ele-
ments and a love story between an IRA member and the widow of one of his victims, this is
a deeply moving piece of fiction. It was followed by his third novel, Grace Notes (1997).
Rooted in Irish identity and culture, it provides a reflection on the power of art to transform
life in the story of a young composer who escapes a repressive Catholic youth and the
political troubles in Northern Ireland. Similarly, Seamus Deane (born 1940), also a poet
and a scholar and another emigrant to North America, has described the political and social
landscape of his native Derry in the 1940s and 1950s, with its sectarian violence and
enmities and equal share of love, in his moving autobiographical novel Reading in the Dark
(1996). Colm Tibn (born 1955), in The South (1990), has written about an Irish Protestant
in Spain who returns to Dublin for a reunion with her son, and about religion and sexuality
in The Heather Blazing (1992). Also a travel writer, Tibn is a gay novelist and has written
journalism and moving biographical pieces about Oscar Wilde's suffering in the Reading
Gaol. In The Story of Night (1997), he chose Argentina as a setting for a story describing a
young man's gradual awakening to his homosexuality. In his fourth novel, The Blackwater
Lightship (1999), he returns to Ireland and the early 1990s in a family story that brings to-
gether three women of different generations who, after culture clashes and clashes of per-
sonalities, must learn the meaning of compassion and love. Patrick McCabe (born 1955)
earned much critical praise with his third novel, The Butcher Boy (1992), about the horrible
experiences of a disturbed and finally homicidal young boy, Francie Brady, in a small town
in Ireland. Playing back and forth between humour and horror, the narrator's voice depicts
his loosening hold on reality in a virtuoso performance that is both realistic and compelling.
He has attempted the same technique in two further novels. In Breakfast on Pluto (1998) a
transvestite adolescent, Patrick "Pussy" Braden, escapes to London and becomes involved
in prostitution and the dealings of the IRA. In McCabe's Emerald Germs of Ireland (2001)
the title of this novel is a sarcastic pun on the Irish song book collection Emerald Gems of
Ireland; it appears as a leitmotif in the story of another young man, Pat McNab, born to
nightmarish parents in rural Ireland and growing up to commit horrific crimes often
triggered by the sentimental songs of the kind collected in Emerald Gems. Chosing a nar-
rator who is comically ill-equipped for the task of telling a story, and distancing the horror
through black humour and the imposed structure of the song book, this is Irish fiction at its
best almost entirely comic, with streaks of darkness, and powerful poetic passages in a
structurally inventive form.
Among the contemporary Irish novelists, John Banville and Roddy Doyle command inter-
national attention. John Banville (born 1945) is also a journalist and a literary editor of The
Antoine Watteau,
L'embarquement
pour l'Ile de
Cythre. 1717
Irish Times. Indebted to his Irish literary ancestors (Joyce and Beckett) and deeply interested
in postmodernist ideas of narration and characterization, he has produced the Irish equi-
valent of British metafiction novels rich in allusions to art and literature, ironic in style,
and often preoccupied with the act of writing or telling itself. From his first novel, Night-
spawn (1972), in which the narrator invents a character for himself, to his trilogy of fictional
biographies of scientists (Doctor Copernicus, 1976; Kepler, 1981; The Newton Letter: An
Interlude, 1982), and a coda to these novels (Mefisto, 1986), Banville has been preoccupied
with problems of artistic and literary expression, with reality, falsification, and fiction. To
this he adds occasional touches of pastiche, borrowing structural ideas of the thriller or
biographies in his exploration of systems of knowledge and forms of representation. Thus
The Book of Evidence (1989), which started another trilogy of novels, introduces a narrator
who is both a thief and a murderer. As Freddie Montgomery confesses to the theft of a small
Dutch master and the murder of a chambermaid who caught him in the act, he tries in vain
to construct a world for himself. In Ghosts (1993), Banville engages with intermedial allu-
sions to The Tempest and Watteau's painting L'Embarquement pour l'Ile de Cythre (1717)
in a mystery story set on an island and involving a nameless scientist formerly convicted of
murder and now visited by a band of castaways. Art, its imitation, and the relation of both to
life, are central in the sequels to Ghosts. In Athena (1995), the narrator from Ghosts returns,
now called Morrow, and gets ensnared in criminal machinations involving stolen works of
art. While this novel is held in the form of the narrator's love letter to the female protagonist
and is interspersed with mock art criticism, Banville's The Untouchable (1997) plays with
the spy novel and with the art historian and famous homosexual spy Anthony Blunt. He ap-
pears as Victor Maskell. Again concerned with reality and illusion, fact, fiction, and falsi-
fication, this beautifully written novel explores multiple shades of duplicity while focusing
on politics, painting, and sexuality. Often inspired by his favourite painters (Poussin, Wat-
teau), Banville's magic prose harbours the danger that in his attempts to render errant, nos-
talgic minds his works appear slightly contrived. In his epistemological and aesthetic con-
cerns he is far removed from Roddy Doyle (born 1958), who came to literary stardom with
the filming of his novel The Commitments (1988), about a white Dublin band trying to
achieve success with black American music. In the sequels to his history of the Rabbitte
family (The Snapper, 1990; and The Van, 1991), Doyle has been the chronicler of working-
class life in Dublin, as he combines bleakly comic descriptions of the Irish lower and middle
classes with authentic dialogues, sympathy, and affection. Critics agree that Paddy Clarke
Ha Ha Ha (1993), which won the Booker Prize, is his best novel in this genre. Set in
Dublin's Barrytown quarter in 1968, it provides a vivid, nostalgic, melancholic picture of
the childhood world of ten-year-old Paddy whose life is overshadowed by the gradual
marital break-up of his parents. For his next novel, Doyle chose an equally unusual narrator
in The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996), the story is told by the semi-literate
alcoholic Paula Spencer who must find out that her husband, when he is killed by the
Gardai, was not only a wife-beater but also a criminal. Doyle's fiction is characterised by
precise social observation, a sharp and ironic focus on working-class life in Dublin, and a
portrayal of postmodern Ireland that is realistic in its use of dialogue as well as humorous
and compassionate. With A Star Called Henry (1999), he looked for another turf. The first
part of a projected trilogy, it is a historical novel concerned with the Irish fight for inde-
pendence at the beginning of the last century.
As in poetry, Irish women have also raised their voices in prose. The pre-war situation of
Irish women writers is well illustrated through the life and work of Molly Keane (1904-96),
a novelist and playwright born into a leisured Anglo-Irish family in Co. Kildare. In the
1930s, she wrote 11 novels under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell to hide her literary gift from
her sporting friends (and from men). It was only after the death of her husband that she
dared publish a novel under her own name: Good Behaviour (1981) is a sensitive and bitter-
sweet chronicle of the manners and morals of Anglo-Irish life, with sharp satiric observa-
tions on the cruelties, snobberies, and oddities of a narrow world (see also Loving and
Giving, 1988). The novelist Edna O'Brien (born 1932) has been a spokeswoman for fem-
inism. In her Country Girls trilogy The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and
Girls in Their Married Bliss (1963) she has dealt with the impact of the Irish Catholic
tradition in the stories of Irish women who discover their sexual needs and rebellious dis-
content and move from rural Ireland to Dublin and on to London. She returned to rural Ire-
land in A Pagan Place (1971) and has continued her exploration of female sensuality, male
treachery, and Irish nostalgia in such novels as Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977), Time and
Tide (1992), and House of Splendid Isolation (1994). In her In the Forest (2002), O'Brien
turned to the exploration of the consciousness of a (male) child in a novel based on the true
story of an infamous triple murder in Ireland. A study of evil in the guise of Mich O'Kane, a
boy growing up in reformatories in England, this sobering novel is an investigation into the
question of what warps a child and turns him into a criminal. Another Irishwoman, Jennifer
Johnston (born 1930), has portrayed Ireland and the Anglo-Irish gentry with compassion
and humour in The Gates (1973) and How Many Miles to Babylon? (1974). In the 1970s,
she moved to Derry in Northern Ireland and began to focus on the legacy of Irish history
and especially on what the Irish term the Troubles, i.e., the war for Irish independence from
1916-1923, and the post-1968 events opposing the IRA to the British presence in Northern
Ireland (see her Shadows on Our Skin, 1977; and The Railway Station Man, 1984). In her
novels of the 1990s, Johnston has been concerned with feminine issues; The Invisible Worm
(1991) portrays a sterile marriage and Two Moons (1998) follows the history and love of
women through three generations.
Apart from the Celtic revival in Scottish and Irish fiction, there is another chorus of voices
that deserves some attention. This chorus is connected with the fragmented and still frag-
menting former British Empire witness the return to China of Hong Kong in 1998. From
pre-war fiction set in the East (e.g., Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil, 1925) down to
Paul Scott's (1920-1978) four novels collectively known as The Raj Quartet (1966-75), the
Orient, for example, has held a notable fascination for mainstream British novelists. Scott
served in India during the war and left a beautiful and penetrating record of the final years
of British rule in that country with his quartet, of which The Jewel in the Crown (1966) was
selected for a TV series (see also his final novel, Staying On, 1977, about two ageing minor
characters from the quartet). Even more interesting is the new fiction produced by writers
who came to Britain (or whose parents emigrated to the British Isles) from India, Pakistan,
China, Japan, Africa, and the Caribbean. Though making Britain their (second) home, some
of them have focused mainly on their native countries. This is the case, for instance, with
two novelists born in Nigeria Ben Okri (born 1959; see his novels The Famished Road,
1991; and Songs of Enchantment, 1993) and Buchi Emecheta (born 1944; see the two
novels collected in Adah's Story, 1983), two important African writers in "The New Liter-
atures in English"61. As Salman Rushdie (born 1947) remarked in a witty article in The
Times in 1982, the "Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance", and this occurs not only in
what has been termed "The New Literatures in English" that has come out of the former
Empire but especially in the fiction written in contemporary Britain by such writers as
Rushdie who have had the experience of several cultures. Born of a Muslim family in
Bombay, and educated in England, Rushdie has discussed India's transition from Raj to
Republic in Midnight's Children (1981), which deals phantasmagorically and with much
magic realism with some children born as India passed to self-rule in 1947. The central char-
acter, Saleem Sinai, finds himself handcuffed to history, and the history, culture, and politics
of India and its neighbours (e.g., Pakistan) also provide the background in Rushdie's Shame
(1983). He was to find himself handcuffed to history when the Iranian government issued a
fatwa (a death sentence), considering his novel The Satanic Verses (1988) to contain blas-
phemy. Less convincing than his earlier fiction, this book has international and multicultural
dimensions as the plot moves between Bombay and Britain, Argentina and Mount Everest,
in another phantasmagoric exploration of illusion, reality, and the importance of faith and
tradition. Protected by the police, Rushdie had to hide for years, first in Britain and then in
New York, producing further "multicultural" fiction and another important novel, The
Moor's Last Sigh (1995), which traces the departure of the Moors from Spain in the fifteenth
century in a witty play with family history, magic realism, and cultural conjunctions.
Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) is an attempt (not well received by the
critics) at marrying music and popular culture with the socio-historical novel. Like Rushdie,
Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) has been concerned with the clashes and conjunctions of
Eastern and Western cultures. The son of an English mother and a Pakistani father, he grew
up in London and has produced screenplays (e.g., My Beautiful Laundrette, 1986) and
novels, such as the much acclaimed The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), in which the bisexual
Karim Amir offers a comic, startling panorama of multi-cultural suburban life in south
London, including cross-cultural conflicts, taboos, and interracial marriage. In The Black
Album (1995), Kureishi deals with racial difference and religion in contemporary London
61 For surveys of that literature from Africa, India, the West Indies, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand, see Christa Jansohn, ed. Companion to the New Literatures in English (Berlin: E.
Schmidt Verlag, 2002); and Eberhard Kreutzer, "Die neuen englischsprachigen Literaturen", in
Hans Ulrich Seeber, ed. Englische Literaturgeschichte (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999): 394-463.
while Intimacy (1998) is a confessional novella concerned with a man about to leave his
family. The multi-cultural experience has also been covered by younger writers. Thus char-
acters from three different families provide the background in Zadie Smith's (born 1975)
fictional dbut, White Teeth (2000).
This greatly publicised first novel is an attempt at a comic family epic of little England into
which an explosion of ethnic colour is injected. White Teeth tells the story of three families, one
Indian, one white, one mixed, in north London and Oxford from World War II to the present
day. The plot takes the reader through Jamaica, Turkey, Bangladesh and India and, eventually,
to a scrubby London borough, home of the two anti-heroes and friends, Archie Jones and
Samad Iqbal. Epic in scale and intimate in approach (Smith has a great gift for rendering
meaningful even the most trite everyday conversation), the book also tackles such ambitious
subjects as genetics and eugenics, and gender as well as race and class are weighty issues
treated with wit and inventiveness.
The Anglo-Chinese and Anglo-Japanese experience provide the material for the fiction of
Timothy Mo (born 1950) and Kazuo Ishiguro (born 1954). Born in Hong Kong of an Eng-
lish mother and a Cantonese father, Mo has examined the post-colonial situation both in
England in the black comedy Sour Sweet (1982) and in Asia, in the huge historical novel
An Insular Possession (1986) and in The Redundancy of Courage (1991), a political thriller
about a young Chinese hotelier. With his next piece, Mo ran into difficulties, as most pub-
lishers considered Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995) scatological and ill-conceived.
So Mo had to publish this graphic, satirical critique of third-world corruption himself. He
made a triumphant return with Renegade or Halo (1999). This novel won the James Tait
Memorial Prize. In tune with recent developments in post-colonialism, it starts out in the
Philippines and then explores globalization, tribalism, and cultural identity in times of fre-
quent migration. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki and came to England in 1960, studying at
the universities of Kent and East Anglia. His Japanese background is used in his first two
novels, A Pale View of the Hills (1982), concerned with a Japanese widow in England who
is haunted by memories of her daughter's suicide, and An Artist of the Floating World
(1986), the story of an ageing Japanese painter's awareness of, and detachment from, the
development of late twentieth-century Japan. Ishiguro has come to be admired for his under-
stated narrative style, which he combines with a thoughtful, slightly satirical, analysis of
English class customs and history in The Remains of the Day (1989). A subtle story con-
cerned with the memories of a butler in the 1930s, this novel justly won the Booker Prize
(and was made into a film) for its examination of personal and political loyalties in a time of
upheaval. Ishiguro has continued to explore the nature of memory and the sense of displace-
ment in The Unconsoled (1995), concerned with a travelling piano player, and When We
Were Orphans (2000), which employs the form of the detective story to question issues of
identity in a novel moving between Shanghai and London in the 1930s.
Ever since Sam Selvon (1923-94) practically invented London Caribbean English in his
novels of the 1950s (see The Lonely Londoners, 1956; and the sequels, Moses Ascending,
1975, and Moses Migrating, 1983), the West Indian or Caribbean experience has found ex-
pression in fiction written by immigrants in England. In 2001, Sir V(idiadhar) S(urajpra-
sad) Naipaul (born 1932), the grand old man of British-Caribbean literature, received the
Nobel Prize for Literature for his life's work which is firmly based on his multi-cultural
background. He was born in Trinidad of a Brahman62 family, the son of a journalist, and has
62 A member of the hightest caste (or social division) in Indian Hindu society.
lived in England for some time. He was knighted in 1990. Naipaul has written a superb
novel about his native Trinidad, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), several more overtly
political works (see Guerillas, 1975) and a sensitive study of Africa, A Bend in the River
(1979). Also a writer of remarkable travel books, Naipaul has described with compassion
and occasional anger the situation of those who, through political and racial violence, find
themselves homeless and alienated in hostile countries. His The Enigma of Arrival (1987)
was highly praised by the critics. A semi-autobiographical novel, it sketches the arrival in
post-imperial England of a young man from Trinidad and his sense of adjusting to a country
he had previously known only through literature and art.
The younger generation of Caribbean writers have been concerned with cultural identity,
exploitation, and settlement. The best known representatives are David Dabydeen, Caryl
Phillips, Fred D'Aguiar, and Grace Nichols. David Dabydeen (born 1956), a poet and nov-
elist educated at Cambridge and at University College London, was born in Guyana and has
dealt with cultural dislocation and deni-
gration in a number of works. Thus his
first novel, The Intended (1991), traces
the life of a clever Guyanese schoolboy
in south London; Disappearance (1993)
is narrated by a West Indian engineer in
a village in Kent, and The Counting
House (1996) brings together themes of
art and slavery. His innovative novel A
Harlot's Progress (1999) borrows its
title from the graphic series by William
Hogarth and examines the role of blacks
in England.63 Fred D'Aguiar (born
1960) shares with Dabydeen the fact
that he is also a poet. Born in London,
he grew up in Guyana and then returned
to school in Britain at the age of 12.
Like Dabydeen, he has been fascinated
Lucian Freud, Naked Portrait with Reflection. with the issue of slavery. D'Aguiar ex-
1980 plores history and racial memory in his
novel The Longest Memory (1994), a
lyrical and brutal evocation of life on an eighteenth-century plantation in Virginia. In
Feeding the Ghosts (1997), which covers the voyage of a slave ship returning from Africa, a
brutal captain who throws his sick slaves overboard is held responsible by a survivor. Caryl
Phillips (born 1958), seen by some critics as Naipaul's successor, has questioned state,
culture, and identity in his plays and novels showing a more universal concern. Phillips was
born in St Kitts and brought up in Britain, where he attended Oxford University. His best
fiction includes Cambridge (1991), set in the West Indies after the abolition of slavery, in
which we hear the voices of an educated plantation slave (Cambridge) and of the English
visitor Emily Cartwright, who is shocked by the brutal world she must face. Phillips's
Crossing the River (1994) presents a multi-layered story linking past and present in a mixed-
63 See also Dabydeen's insightful critical study Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-
Century English Art (Kingston-upon-Thames: Dangaroo Press, 1985).
race love affair during World War II. The themes of persecution, race, and memory are
brought together in his The Nature of Blood (1997), which mainly focuses on the con-
sequences of the persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust. The chorus of British-
Caribbean writers received a female voice with Grace Nichols (born 1950), who is best
known for her poetry (see above). Brought up in Guyana, she moved to London in 1977 and
started a successful career as a travelling poet. Nichols wrote one novel, Whole of a
Morning Sky (1986), which is set in Guyana and sketches the history of the country before
independence.
If any particular phenomena can be discerned in British and Irish fiction published after
200064, they may be described as the waning of literary experimentation and the growing
importance of novelists with multicultural backgrounds. By 2010, it seems clear that the
heyday of metafiction as we saw it from the 1960s to the 1980s is over. This is due to the
fact that some practitioners died (Lawrence Durrell, B. S. Johnson, John Fowles, Angela
Carter, J. G. Ballard) while others have turned silent (e.g., Christine Brooke-Rose) or
changed tack by reducing the metafictional elements in their recent works. This is the case
with Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Peter Ackroyd, and Martin Amis. A defender of French
poststructuralist theory and the nouveau roman and an explorer of the genre boundaries of
the novel, Julian Barnes has never been popular in Britain. At least in narration, the novel
Arthur and George (2005) marks a new turn in his writing towards more traditional forms:
Set around 1900, it focuses on two actual historical figures, George Edalji (1876-1953), a half-
Indian solicitor from the West Midlands wrongfully accused of brutally slashing farm animals,
and the well-known Arthur Conan Doyle, writer of detective fiction. At the time, the sequence
of events made sensational headlines as The Great Wyrley Outrages. Bored with his writing and
depressed after the death of his first wife, Doyle cannot even find pleasure in the arms of his
mistress. Accidentally coming across the case of Edalji, he decides for the first time to enter
into the real world of detective work. The inventor of Sherlock Holmes finally manages to clear
Edalji in a law suit, also largely due to his national reputation as a writer, but along the way he
is confronted with all the prejudices of Victorian England concerning Britishness, race, and the
British colonies.
In a way, Barnes pursues some of his old themes as history and historical writing are juxtaposed
with fictional representation, but he does not experiment anymore with character voice and the
questioning of genres. Instead, he is interested in how characters are shaped over time as well
as in Edalji's race, and the question as to how large a part it played in his wrongful conviction.
Compared to Barnes's previous fiction, this novel pays much more attention to such issues as
guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race; and, finally, thwarted passion.
This veering towards more traditional formal and narrative means is also noticeable in the
recent work of Graham Swift, who used to be praised for the subtlety and unobtrusiveness
of his metafictional devices. In Light of Day (2003), Swift like Barnes in that respect is
still concerned with the reconstruction of history through personal memory and language,
but formal and stylistic experimentation has been reduced. We are faced with a pastiche of
the detective novel, following the narrator, George Webb, a policeman turned private in-
vestigator, through one day of his life. As Webb visits a former client, Sarah Nash, currently
imprisoned for the murder of her husband, his mind returns to past relationships, to his role
64 For recent surveys of contemporary British fiction see Acheson and Ross (2005), Caserio
(2009), Petrie (2004), the volumes of the Oxford Literary History on the twentieth century, and
Rennison (2005), all listed in the bibliographical section of this book.
in Sarah's life, and it flashes ahead to her future release "into the light of day" and his care.
The only remaining postmodern element in the novel is the indeterminacy of the narrative
voice, because Webb is obsessed with the object of his description while pretending, even
believing, that the cause of events (despite his own implicit involvement with criminality)
can be objectively told and rationally explained.
Similarly, the recent work of Peter Ackroyd, once known for his mixing of genres (the
gothic, the thriller, the historical novel), is hardly a step away from historical fiction as he
focuses on the age of Chaucer in The Clerkenwell Tales (2003), the lives of the essayist
Charles Lamb and his sister Mary in The Lambs of London (2004), and turns the archae-
ologist Heinrich Schliemann into an almost mythical figure (called Heinrich Obermann) in a
novel about the discovery of the ancient city of Troy (The Fall of Troy, 2006). In a way that
is telling for his contemporary concerns (Ackroyd has also published biographies of Blake,
Chaucer, Dickens, Shakespeare, and J. M. W. Turner) he uses the fictional form of the novel
in The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008) to recreate the Romantic period while filling
with much imagination some obscure corners in the lives of the major writers (e.g., the
Shelleys).
If Martin Amis, the wild boy among the writers of metafiction, also adopted a more tradi-
tional novelistic form and manner of narration in his more recent fiction, it was also as a
reaction to the mixed reviews he received for his Yellow Dog (2003), perhaps his last flirta-
tion with metafiction:
Yellow Dog still displays the hallmarks of the metafictional novel in many respects we en-
counter characters from low life, multiple points of view, vernacular English, countless (ironi-
cal) allusions to both classical literature and postmodern lowbrow culture, and the pastiche of
writing of all kinds, including the style of tabloid newspapers. Aping the breathless drive of the
action in contemporary middle-brow movies, in detective fiction and science fiction, the plot of
the novel is so complicated that some critics accused Amis of being unable to put the strands
together. It involves a protagonist called Xan (or Alex) Meo, a famous actor and writer who is
also the son of a London gangster. Assaulted in a London bar for mentioning one of his father's
criminal rivals, Joseph Andrews, Meo is robbed of his personality and his life disintegrates. The
name Joseph Andrews is just one of numerous tongue-in-cheek allusions to, and attacks on, the
shallowness of contemporary culture: Joseph Andrews is the hero of Henry Fielding's novel of
the same title. Meanwhile, Cora Susan (one of Andrews's collaborators), working under the
name of a porno actress, also wants to take revenge on Xan for the sins of his father and lures
him to California where he finds out that Joseph Andrews is his biological father. Yet another
plot strand involves the reigning monarch of the time, Henry IX, and his daughter Victoria, who
becomes involved in a scandal when a videotape of her in the nude is released to the press. As a
consequence of the blackmailing organized by Andrews and the king's mistress, Henry and his
daughter abdicate and the monarchy is abolished. A final subplot introduces Clint Smoker, a
reporter with a tabloid newspaper. Smoker (Amis's characters bear names that are as bizarre as
those in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon) is writing a series of articles on a well-known foot-
baller with a history of assaults upon women. Despite his macho image, Smoker is sexually
dysfunctional, and becomes involved in an internet relationship with someone who seems his
fantasy woman. Upon discovering that this is a transsexual, Smoker kills Andrews (whom he
blames for his internet mistake), but is blinded in his fight with the gangland leader. Through-
out the novel, allusions are made to the imminent arrival of a comet, whose passing might
prove dangerous for the earth. It is an apocalyptic leitmotif Amis had used in such previous
novels as Time's Arrow and London Fields.
Representing contemporary British and American culture with some typical voices from the
world of popular entertainment, Yellow Dog can be read as a meditation upon male vio-
lence, a cynical pastiche of popular literary and cinematic forms, and a condemnation of
ethical decline. In its almost naturalistic treatment of subjects such as incest, adultery,
sexual exploitation, and male violence, it offers no hope. It is perhaps telling for the con-
temporary climate in criticism that such a combination of nihilism, formal experimentation
in narration, and especially the holding up of the mirror to the media, was rejected by many
critics. They saw it as a welcome occasion to carry the coffin of metafiction to its grave.
Amis, however, was unrepentant about the novel, calling Yellow Dog "among my best
three". In providing his own explanation for the novel's critical failure, he implicitly
defended metafiction while pointing the finger at those who prefer traditional fiction. In an
interview, he argued that "no one wants to read a difficult literary novel or deal with a prose
style which reminds them how thick they are. There's a push towards egalitarianism, making
writing more chummy and interactive, instead of a higher voice, and that's what I go to
literature for." But Amis seems to have taken the critical voices to heart, abandoning his
favourite subjects as well as most of his metafictional devices in his latest fiction. House of
Meetings (2006) is a short novel about two half-brothers who loved the same woman and
who were incarcerated together in a Soviet concentration camp; and the action of The Preg-
nant Widow (2010), a tragicomedy of manners, takes place during a long, hot summer
holiday in a castle in Italy, where half a dozen young people are confronted with the social
and moral changes of the late 1960s.
It is Jeanette Winterson who keeps the flag of (feminist) metafiction flying with her con-
sistently experimental novels. Believing as she does that the point of fiction is not to mirror
real life but to alter the viewing angles of readers and perhaps even the world they are
viewing, she still champions a combination of magic realism, surrealism and formal experi-
mentation. Thus Lighthousekeeping (2004), a highly intertextual mixture of fables, histori-
cal writing, and visions that could have been inspired by Salvador Dal, presents the story of
the orphan girl Silver. After the death of her mother, she lives in a house carved into a cliff
face in the care of Pew, a blind lighthouse keeper. Pew tells her stories to shed light on the
world Silver must learn to see. When modern technology makes Pew redundant, Silver must
find her own stories to bring meaning to her life.
This concern with the redemption of story telling, the creation of a meta-reality through
fiction, and the intertextual play with the canon of British literature, both highbrow and
popular, also marks Winterson's The Stone Gods (2007). The heroine of the novel is Billie
Crusoe (Robinson Crusoe turned into a woman), a free spirit in a society dedicated to elimi-
nating such spirits. The book travels (travel literature as well as science fiction are among
the genres employed for pastiche effects) from eighteenth-century Easter Island to a hellish
future without farms and books and dominated by all-pervasive technology. We witness an
interspecies romance between a robot and her handler in an environmental apocalypse. The
inhabitants of Orbus (the world) will die because they worship false gods, whether of the
religious or consumerist variety. It is Winterson's highly entertaining engagement with inter-
textuality in the forms, styles, and characters she employs (references are made to Defoe,
Blake, and John Donne) that leavens the rich dough of this playful and impassioned novel.
Among the outstanding writers steering clear of radical narrative experimentation, Ian
McEwan has proved a master of the postmodern novel. His fiction continues to display
some postmodern features, but he sees literary avant-gardism as a dead end, preferring
instead the exploration of states of mind and the society that forms them. Since the publi-
cation of Atonement in 2001, which was filmed, he has been a candidate for the Nobel Prize
in literature. In Saturday (2005), set on the day of a protest march against the invasion of
Iraq, he provides a study of life in the twenty-first century as terrorism and violence result in
uncontrollable fear and existential angst in the life and family of the protagonist, a London
neurosurgeon. The shaping of characters in their social environment as well as changing
sexual attitudes are the main subject of McEwan's brilliant On Chesil Beach (2007). Orga-
nized in five parts alternating between the immediate present, the honeymoon of Edward
Mayhew and Florence Ponting in 1962, and flash-backs to their vastly different childhoods,
the novel traces the way attitudes and opinions created by class differences may destroy a
love relationship.
Two women writers also known for their more traditional narrative forms, Pat Barker and
A. S. Byatt, have added substantial novels to the genre of historically oriented fiction with a
touch of feminism. Barker's Border Crossing (2001) comes close to psychological crime
fiction in the story of a child psychologist who rescues the man sent to prison years ago
upon his testimony. In the course of the plot, Barker skillfully unfolds the secrets of the past
that continue to shape the present of the characters. In Double Vision (2003) she resumed
her former subject the impact of the experience of the violence of warfare on the human
psyche as a war correspondent is assailed by memories of his time in Sarajevo. With Life
Class (2007) Barker returned to her favourite stomping ground, World War I. However, the
central figures here are not soldiers but a group of London art students volunteering and
suffering in the front-line hospitals. In the first part of the novel, the war features merely as
background noise, but it will eventually derail the lives of the young people. Barker con-
jures up the hellish horrors of the war and its fallout with meticulous precision and an un-
sparing clarity that also extends to the less visible scars they leave on the psyches of the
witnesses. A. S. Byatt concluded her epic work of fictional biographies focusing on
Frederica Potter (from A Virgin in the Garden through Still Life and Babel Tower) with A
Whistling Woman (2002). Set in the 1960s, the novel traces the heroine's life on two time
lines as she works in TV and returns to the Yorkshire of her adolescence. With The Bio-
grapher's Tale (2000) Byatt revisited not only the territory of her prize-winning novel
Possession but also the techniques used in that novel. The hero in The Biographer's Tale is
a bored literary scholar, Phineas Nanson. He is introduced to a massive biography of a nine-
teenth-century polymath written by a mysterious author whose writing and identity occupy
Nanson for much of the plot. Byatt is thus able to follow her intertextual play through
pastiche while history writing, biography and in fact writing as such prove to be slippery
ground. Byatt's The Children's Book (2009) is yet another historical novel re-creating with
fanatical detail the years between 1895 and 1919, the Fabian world of the turn of the
century, with an enormous number of characters. Despite the intertextual aspects (allusions
to other fiction and ekphrases, i.e., descriptions of pictures and art exhibitions) of the book
the style of the omniscient narrator is too verbose and there is too much explanation of the
characters' thinking to make it an outstanding example of historical fiction.
Over the last two decades, Scottish fiction65 has emerged as a major strand in British litera-
ture. In the twenty-first century, further impressive novels have been published by some of
the established writers discussed above Gray, Kelman, Welsh, Kennedy, and Banks. The
65 For recent surveys see Petrie (2004) and Brown (2006), listed in the bibliographical section.
Glasgow novel continues to be the concern of Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, each
with their own distinct voice. Gray seems to have suffered from a writer's block in novel
writing and even his Old Men in Love (2007) cannot hide this fact, for he employs some of
the technical tricks used in previous fiction allusions to, and integration of material from,
his former novels, and an ironic condemnation of the novel itself in the afterword by a
fictitious literary critic. The major Glasgow character in this piece is John Tunnock (whose
manuscript Gray pretends to edit), the author of an unfinished trilogy of novels containing
recycled earlier stage and TV drama by Gray. Despite these unoriginal means, the novel
offers a wonderful geographical and linguistic panorama of Glasgow, with some rather odd
characters interfering in Tunnock's life. James Kelman always had a political and linguistic
axe to grind, insisting on the importance of the Scottish (Glaswegian) working class, its cul-
ture, and its language. This insistence has lead to novels that deliberately confound middle-
class readers by not providing neat plot trajectories, psychologically streamlined characters,
or extraordinary events. For Kelman Scots needs to be defended against English, which he
takes to be a tool of anti-working-class repression. Hence his narrators report their stories
(mostly monologues or long tirades with no chapter breaks at all) in Glaswegian Scots. In
You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Brave (2004), such a narrator, the Communist
Jeremiah, visits America and gives us a paranoid, drunken, lament about globalization as
well as American capitalism. But Kelman is also thoughtful enough to create irony and
humour by revealing the personal limitations of his hero. As the aptly named Glaswegian
Jeremiah encounters Americans (and fellow Scots) in bars, and as linguistic varieties clash,
leading to hilarious misunderstandings, we are provided with practical demonstrations of
how ideologies shape people's consciousness. This comic side is, unfortunately, largely
absent from Kelman's Kieron Smith, boy (2008), an uninterrupted monologue in Scots by a
Glaswegian, working-class boy narrating his largely uneventful life.
The focus on the underclass, in character choice and language, is also a remarkable feature
among the writers of the "chemical generation" discussed above. Thus in The Bedroom
Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006), Irvine Welsh, chronicler of both Edinburgh low-life
characters and the language they speak, deals with a young, alcoholic civil servant who
finds himself inadvertently putting a curse on a disagreeable co-worker. The novel marks a
departure for Welsh in that although drugs are mentioned in passing there is little reference
to the dance club scene of most of his other work. Instead, it is alcohol abuse which punc-
tuates the book, along with the themes of identity and romantic love. While Crime (2008)
was yet another departure in setting and genre, as Edinburgh Detective Inspector Ray Len-
nox, recovering from a mental breakdown in Florida, faces a hornet's nest of paedophiles,
Welsh returned to his familiar Edinburgh turf and the earlier lives of characters from Train-
spotting in Scagboys (2009). Like Welsh in Crime, Alan Warner, also associated with the
explosion of Scots working-class writing and the chemical generation, chose a new location
for The Worms Will Carry Me to Heaven (2006). The plot of this novel is set in Spanish
coastal towns (presumably the ones Morvern Callar fled to in Warner's previous fiction) and
the characters, including the narrator, Manolo Follana, are not Scots. Infected with AIDS,
Follana delivers to us a confession of sorts, as Warner conjures up the entirely different
worlds of an upper middle-class Spanish childhood and that of the asylum seeker Ahmed.
Scottish fiction, whether by the chemical generation or authors who might be described as
mainstream, seems to favour a characteristically dark tone and disabled or socially excluded
characters. Among the numerous contemporary writers at work (e.g., Janice Galloway,
Andrew O'Hagan, Alan Spence, Candia McWilliam, and Ian Banks)66 it must suffice to
mention A. L. Kennedy. Always a highly ironic and sometimes bitter blending of realism
and fantasy, her recent fiction has found international acclaim. In Paradise (2004), she
entered a previously male territory in Scottish fiction, as the narrator, Hannah Luckcraft,
delivers a self-lacerating monologue about her alcoholism. Paradise proves to be a descent
into the abyss of Hell the narrator as well as the reader are unable, at times, to distinguish
reality from delirium or hallucination. A similar ironic play with the title is at work in
Kennedy's novel entitled Day (2007). Here the shadowy realm of the psyche is that of
Alfred Day, a shell-shocked (or perhaps just severely depressed) World War II veteran,
former tail gunner in the R.A.F., and prisoner of war in Germany. It is the sad hero's rich
and strange interior life after 1949, when he is hired to work as an extra in a film about a
German internment camp, that interests Kennedy while she traces his way down into mental
darkness.
The considerable acclaim Irish novelists won in the new millennium speaks for the quality
of Hibernian fiction.67 Thus John Banville won the Booker Prize in 2005 for his The Sea.
Filtered through the consciousness of Max Morden, a self-conscious, retired art historian,
the novel returns to Banville's previous concerns metafictional and philosophical writing.
In this case, Banville has chosen the form of a reflective journal, as Morden reconciles
himself to the deaths of people he loved as a child and as an adult. Morden's mind controls
the erratic narration and the setting is in a constant flux between childhood memories, the
months before his wife's death and the present. In 2007, it was Anne Enright's turn to
receive the Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering. Like Banville, she has been trying to
change the boundaries of conventional Irish narrative realism through the use of a baroque
style and magic realism. Set in Ireland and England, The Gathering features a 39-year-old
narrator, Veronica, who comments on her family's troubled history as she explores the
reasons that might have led to the suicide of her alcoholic brother Liam Hegarty. During her
search, she uncovers rather uncomfortable truths about his childhood. After Enright, several
other Irish authors were shortlisted even twice for the Man Booker prize among them
Colm Tibn, Patrick McCabe, discussed above, and Sebastian Barry (born 1955).
Tibn was much praised for his Brooklyn (2009), about an Irish girl emigrating to America;
and McCabe, with Winterwood (2006), produced a disturbing novel about child abuse and
murder in rural Ireland. His The Holy City (2009) features yet another of his mentally de-
ranged characters in a psychiatric ward hallucinating about his life in a Dublin suburb.
Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Wait (2005) deals with the divided loyalties among Irish
soldiers after the Easter Rising in 1916; and his The Secret Scripture (2008) was highly
praised in Britain and Ireland.
Winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, one of the most prestigious English literature
prizes and the oldest prize in England, as well as the Costa Award, it combines family history
and fiction in the story of Roseanne McNulty, a one-hundred year old woman residing in the
Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital. The reader is faced with two versions of her life one
is the autobiography she writes in secret, and the other is the "commonplace book" of the chief
66 For discussions of some of their works published before 2004, see Petrie (2004).
67 Recent discussions of Irish fiction can be found in Mahoney (1998), Peach (2004), Sheffer
(2004), Foster (2006), and Kelleher and O'Leary (2006), all listed in full at the back of this
book.
psychiatrist of the hospital. Two differing stories emerge about her incarceration and adoles-
cence, but what becomes clear in the end is that she fell victim to the religious and political
troubles in Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s.
There are two reasons why, in the twenty-first century, we also find an ever increasing bevy
of younger Irish women writers. They profit from the examples and the works of such
pioneering authors as Maeve Binchy (born 1940), Jennifer Johnston (born 1930), and Edna
O'Brien, discussed above. In addition, ever since the foundation in 1975 of the Arlen House
publishing venture, Ireland's first feminist publisher, it has been much easier for women
writers to get their voices heard. In fact, such novelists as Marian Keyes (born 1960),
Emma Donoghue (born 1969), and Cecelia Ahern (born 1981) have had considerable
commercial success not only in Ireland but also internationally.
Simultaneously, Britain's novelists with a multicultural background also found a much
larger readership. Two examples, the cases of Zadie Smith and Caryl Phillips (both dis-
cussed above), will have to suffice. After her much praised first major novel, White Teeth,
the Jamaican-English author Smith won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006 for her On
Beauty (2005). Smith again draws on her personal experience between cultures as it were in
a novel tracing the lives of a mixed-race family (British and American) in the United States.
Along the way, it addresses with much humour both ethnic and cultural differences in the
old and new worlds, the clash between value systems, and the nature of beauty. Although 17
years older, Phillips has much in common with Smith: both are academics (Smith is a
Cambridge graduate and Phillips went to Oxford and is now a professor at Yale University),
both have a Caribbean background, and both are concerned with the impact of race in con-
temporary Britain, with occasional glances at other English-speaking countries. Unlike
Smith, however, Phillips finds little humour in his subject, as he lambasts the partly terrible
consequences of racism in Britain. With A Distant Shore (2003), he won the 2004 Com-
monwealth Writers' Prize. The book tells the story of a retired English teacher, Dorothy, and
an African refugee, Solomon, in a small English village. Solomon is eventually murdered
by racist thugs. The novel has a sombre tone in its description of the sad work of dis-
placement, loneliness and racism, and the desperate lives of lost souls. It was followed by
Dancing in the Dark (2005), about the tragedies of race and identity in a re-imagination of
the remarkable but little-known life of Bert Williams (1874-1922), the first black American
entertainer to reach fame and fortune. In the true spirit of his inspiring predecessors Richard
Wright and James Baldwin, Phillips has remained true to his major issues in his recent
Foreigners (2007), a hybrid work (three loosely linked tales) between fiction and his
familiar non-fiction; and In the Falling Snow (2009), which traces three generations of
emigrant distress through the story of the central figure, the British-born son of a Black
West Indian.
4.2 The Short Story

In practice and theory the Americans Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe may have
done much for the development of the short story in the nineteenth century, but they did not
invent it. With its roots in the fairy tale, the French "conte" and "fabliau", and the Italian and
Spanish "novella" early prototypes can be found in Boccaccio's Decameron (1349-53),
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1478), the anonymous Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (1486),
the Heptameron (1558-59), Cervantes's Novelas Ejemplares (1613), and La Fontaine's
Contes et Nouvelles (1666-96) the short story has become in the twentieth century one of
the most popular genres of prose fiction.
The writers at the beginning of the century treated it as a minor novelistic form, producing
naturalistic and realistic tales with detailed description, fascinating plots, and moral com-
mentary. Apart from the stories of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, typical examples are
the character studies by Thomas Hardy, Life's Little Ironies (1894) and A Changed Man
(1913), Hugh Walpole's more humorous stories concerned with provincial life, and the tales
of exotic adventure, loneliness, and threat from the pens of Rudyard Kipling, William
Somerset Maugham, and Joseph Conrad.
Both Conrad and Maugham, each from their specific angles, dealt with the problems primi-
tive instincts create for isolated Europeans in the jungles of Africa and the Far East. In
Conrad's "An Outpost of Progress", a story from his Tales of Unrest (1898), two ordinary
white men, Carlier and Kayerts, gradually revert to the level of savages while serving as
superintendents at a trading station in central Africa. The wilderness surrounding them is
mirrored by the wilderness they discover in their own hearts: Kayerts kills his companion
and then hangs himself. In this story, Conrad's nihilistic message is underlined by symbolism
that is at times too obvious to be convincing in the literary context. The use of symbols links
Conrad with Maugham. In "The Force of Circumstance", from The Casuarina Tree (1926),
Maugham presents the tragic story of Doris, who follows her English husband, Guy, into the
jungle of Malaya where Guy has grown up. Doris finds out that her husband had been living
with a Malayan woman and had had children by her. When she decides to leave Guy and to
return to England, it is not so much because of her deception but because of Guy's trans-
gression of the racial limits: Guy takes back his Malayan family, and Maugham presents
this as a sort of punishment.
Whereas Conrad's story suggests that, under stress and in isolation, man's primitive instincts
always prove stronger than his European civilized manners, Maugham's stance borders on
imperialistic racism: Guy must be punished, according to Maugham's underlying ideology,
for taking a black concubine, not for his concubinage.
Modernism in the genre of the short story began with the impressionistic forms and tech-
niques with which the writers of the fin-de-sicle experimented, especially those authors
who contributed to the journals The Yellow Book and The Savoy. The short story as devel-
oped by James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield tends to focus on basic situations and
isolated human problems. It restricts itself to types, rather than launching into full characteri-
zation, and makes use of allusions, multiple meaning, and symbolism while assessing issues
of modern life without providing definite answers. Thus Joyce's fifteen stories in Dubliners
(1914) treat with much psychological insight of children, youths, and adults caught in the
religious, social, and marital conventions of bourgeois Catholic Dublin.
Most of the characters are unable even to recognize their desperate situations; and only a few,
such as the narrators in the first three stories ("The Sisters", "An Encounter", "Araby"), change
their mental state by undergoing the typical Joycean experience of "epiphany". This "recog-
nition of oneself" is expertly handled in the final story, "The Dead", in which the protagonist,
Gabriel Conroy, gradually becomes aware of the illusions governing his life and marriage. In a
long exposition, which mainly serves to characterize the intellectual decline and the growing
paralysis of Dublin society, Joyce sketches a representative group of Dubliners. They gather at
the annual reception of Conroy's aunts and discuss mainly the past and the dead. Later, in their
hotel room, Gabriel and his wife Gretta undergo the typical Joycean "epiphany" as Gretta
confesses that, during her youth in the west of Ireland, she loved a young man who died
because he did not want to live without her. Gabriel realizes that his wife has never truly loved
him the dead rule over the living. Unlike Conrad, Joyce never employs too much symbolism.
"The Dead" impresses because it is both realistic and symbolic and sums up the major themes
of Dubliners. For the reader, all these are stories of self-recognition and revelation which Joyce
presents with a sophisticated technique of changing points of view, casual openings, and open
endings.
Whereas Joyce demonstrated his particular idea of revelation and recognition (epiphany) in
his stories, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) attempted to catch the essential in seemingly
ordinary moments of everyday life. Born in New Zealand, she came to Europe at the age of
14, suffering from a disease of the lungs. Her constant illness may have contributed to the
development of a particular vision that is both ironic and wistful. Like Joyce, she was in-
fluenced by Chekhov. Her stories illustrate significant moments of beauty, pain, and fear in
the lives of women and girls. The best of her short fiction, written in a poetic and symbolic
prose, is collected in Bliss (1920), The Garden Party (1922), The Dove's Nest (1923), and
Something Childish (1924).
Nearly all novelists, with varying success, have tried to exploit the technical possibilities of
the short story, from Virginia Woolf, whose "moments of being" (see her collection A
Haunted House, 1943) share some characteristics with Joyce's "epiphanies", and E. M.
Forster (The Celestial Omnibus, 1911, and The Eternal Moment, 1928) to Elizabeth Bowen
(The Demon Lover, 1945, and Collected Stories, 1980), and Graham Greene (Collected
Stories, 1972). One of the great names often neglected by literary histories is Saki, the
pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916). He was born in Burma and later worked
as a writer in London. His first volume of short stories, Reginald (1904), proved successful
and was followed by Reginald in Russia (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), and other
collections as well as two novels. A selection of his best stories was edited and published by
J. W. Lambert as The Bodley Head Saki in 1963. Saki's stories show a deep interest in
animals that often act as agents of revenge upon men. The stories are presented in a satirical,
macabre, and supernatural framework.
As in his novels, D. H. Lawrence wrote in his short stories of men dominated by Eros, for
example in "Love Among the Haystacks", "The Fox", and "The Horsedealer's Daughter",
which are composed with a traditional narrative technique. Lawrence also wrote stories of
recognition. Thus "Second Best" deals with the development of a girl in love, Frances, com-
paring her with a more nave character, Anne.
Until the end of World War II, H(erbert) E(rnest) Bates (1905-74) proved an able writer in
the tradition of Joyce and Chekhov (see Bates's Country Tales, 1974), and Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963) also showed his satiric talent in many of his stories collected and published in
1956. Among the post-war authors, outstanding writers of short stories include the novelists
Evelyn Waugh and Angus Wilson (see Wilson's The Wrong Set, 1949, and Such Darling
Dodos, 1950), as well as V(ictor) S(awdon) Pritchett (1900-1997; Collected Stories, 1982)
and Roald Dahl (1916-90; Collected Stories, 1991), who were mainly short story writers.
Pritchett's short fiction is distinguished by its wide social range, its detailed observation of
human oddity, and sympathetic irony. Dahl was a fighter pilot in the war; this experience
may to some extent explain his preference for a mixture of the sublime/beautiful and the
horrible, especially in his stories for children.
A change in short story writing came with the arrival

of postmodernism in the 1960s. To begin with, there
was a new interest in shorter fiction, as magazines
published the works of younger authors and pub-
lishers marketed anthologies.68 The 1980s saw the
emergence of new subgenres as short fiction by fem-
inists, women and lesbians/gays secured special sec-
tions of the reading public.69 In addition to the fe-
male perspective, and again in unison with the nov-
el, regional views e.g., Scottish, Irish, and Welsh
also found expression in short fiction. The great
majority of British short stories of the postmodern
period were, by and large, more traditional and far
less experimental than those published in America.
The experimental authors especially the postmod-
ernist novelists found their audience mainly among
the academics while the general reading public pre-
ferred a more realistic approach in fiction. French
post-structuralism and the example of the expatriate
Irishman Samuel Beckett (1906-89) were the major
Ren Magritte, Tentation
de l'impossible. 1928
inspirations for the innovators in the short story.
Beckett's reductive handling of language and fiction
reveals itself in his early More Pricks than Kicks (1934); it was to effect the British
experimental writers as they searched for new forms of expression in the 1970s. One of
them was B(ryan) S(tanley) Johnson (1933-73). Equipped with a Sternian wit, he married
Sterne's technique in Tristram Shandy with the principles of the avant-garde: open endings,
the inclusion of the reader, and the breaking of readerly illusion. In his story "Instructions for
the Use of Women or Here You've Been Done" (1971), he addresses the reader at various
instances, inquiring about the reader's satisfaction with the degree of suspense and sex in the
story; in "Broad Thoughts from a Home", he offers no less than eighteen different and
mutually exclusive endings; and in "Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your
Memoirs?" (1973), the narrator asks the reader to compose the ending herself or to restruc-
ture the story at random. Similarly, Gabriel Josipovici (born 1940) experimented with
narration in his metafictional reductions of the 1970s that ask serious questions about
understanding the world (see his stories "He", "Mbius the Stripper", and "The Reconstruc-
tion"). John Fowles (born 1926) was less radical in his short stories than in his novels his
short fiction has been described as "domesticated postmodernism" in which realism and
innovative ways of breaking traditional literary genres and narrative modes are blended (see
Fowles's "The Enigma" and the stories and novellas collected in The Ebony Tower, 1974).
68 See, for instance, The Penguin Book of English Short Stories and The Second Penguin Book of
English Short Stories, both edited by Christopher Dolley (1967, 1972) and reprinted into the
late 1980s; The Penguin Book of Irish Short Stories, ed. Benedict Kiely (1981); and The Pen-
guin Book of Modern British Short Stories, edited by the late Malcolm Bradbury (1987).
69 Examples are The Secret Self. Short Stories by Women, ed. H. Lee (1985); and Angela Carter's
edition of Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (1986). Also see A. Mars-Jones, ed. Mae West is
Dead. Recent Lesbian and Gay Fiction (1983).
Ian McEwan (born 1948) and Julian Barnes (born 1946; see Cross Channel, 1996) also
straddle this border between classic realism and innovative postmodernism. In some of his
urban gothic fiction (see "Psychopolis", about Los Angeles), McEwan comes close to
macabre fantasy, while in "Solid Geometry" and "Reflections of a Kept Ape" he reaches
metafictional levels in his concern with the process of writing (see his collections First Love,
Last Rites, 1975; and In Between the Sheets, 1977). Like McEwan, Clive Sinclair (born
1948) has written short fiction that is not exclusively postmodernist, encompassing as it does
the surreal, the symbolic, and the realistic. Sinclair's experimental short stories include
"Genesis" and some of his Smolinsky stories (see Hearts of Gold, 1977; and Bedbugs, 1982).
Angela Carter's (1940-92) contribution to short experimental fiction consisted in the
transformation of fairy-tales and the subtle mixture of gender issues and traditional narrative
(see The Bloody Chamber, 1979, and Black Venus, 1985). Younger representatives of
postmodernism have continued the experimental tradition that first flowered in the 1970s.
Thus the stories of Ronald Frame (born 1953) were obviously written under the influence of
High Modernism (stream-of-consciousness) and the nouveau roman (see A Long Weekend
with Marcel Proust, 1986), while Patrick McGrath (born 1950; see Blood and Water, 1988)
and Martin Amis (born 1949; see Einstein's Monsters, 1987, five stories concerned with
nuclear annihiliation) have revived particular versions of the gothic and the apocalyptic in
their playful engagements with traditions of telling and writing. One of the most fascinating
experimental short-story writers is J. G. Ballard (1930-2009). Like his novels, his short
fiction often treads the line between genres the dystopian science fiction tale, the detective
story, and the psychological thriller. Ballard published his first stories ("Prima Belladonna"
and "Escapement" in Science Fantasy and New Worlds) as early as 1956. In the introduction
to his Complete Short Stories (2001), he points out that from the very beginning readers
"loudly complained that they [his stories] weren't science fiction at all" and that he was
"interested in the real future that I could see approaching". Ballard's collections of stories
(see, for instance, The Disaster Area, 1967; Vermilion Sands, 1971; The Venus Hunters,
1980; and War Fever, 1990) contain marvellous examples of genre benders, stories that do
not fit in any traditional category precisely because they are a result of his postmodernist at-
tempt to create something new by breaking or mixing older forms. This is one of the reasons
why Ballard is viewed increasingly as an important figure in the literary mainstream.
Parallel with this experimental short fiction, the realistic short story always had its market,
from the stories written by the "Angry Young Men" see, for instance, Alan Sillitoe's (born
1928) The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, 1959; and Men, Women and Children,
1973; and Sir Kingsley Amis's (1922-95) Mr Barrett's Secret (1993) to those of Muriel
Spark, Penelope Lively, and Beryl Bainbridge. Dame Muriel Spark, ne Camberg (1918-
2006), spent some years in central Africa, which provides the setting of several of her
stories collected in The Go-Away Bird (1958; see also her collected stories, 1986). Like her
novels, Penelope Lively's (born 1933) short fiction is often concerned with English middle-
class values and the problems of lonely women (see Pack of Cards, 1986), while Dame
Beryl Bainbridge (born 1934) has become known for her laconic style and the black
humour that dominate in her stories (see Mum and Mr Armitage, 1985, and her collected
short fiction, 1994). Problems created by the British class society and what the writers seem
to experience as a declining Britain have been the subject of short stories written by James
Lasdun, who grew up in England and now lives in upstate New York (see The Silver Age,
1985; Delirium Eclipse, 1986; Three Evenings and Other Stories, 1992; and Besieged,
2000), and Dame A(ntonia) S(usan) Byatt (born 1936; see Sugar and Other Stories,
1987), who also has a strong penchant for ekphrasis, the verbal (literary) treatment of visual
representations, as in her The Matisse Stories (1993), a sequence of three stories linked to
paintings by Henri Matisse (1869-1954).
The feminist and female view of life emerges in the stories of Fay Weldon (born 1933),
often concerned with the plight of suffering wives (see Watching Me Watching You, 1987),
Angela Carter's mixture of magic realism and feminist issues, mentioned above, Rose
Tremain's (born 1943) militant feminist short fiction (see The Colonel's Daughter, 1984;
The Garden of the Villa Mollini, 1987; and Evangelista's Fan, 1994), and Kathy Page's
(born 1958) writings (see As in Music, 1990). The stories of Helen Dunmore (born 1952),
like her novels, focus on mysterious events, betrayals, and the experience of sex (see Love
of Fat Men, 1997).
The Celtic fringe in Scotland and Ireland has also excelled in the short prose narrative. The
older generation of twentieth-century Scottish writers of note includes Naomi Mitchinson
(1897-1999), Eric Linklater (1899-1974), and Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), who is
also a poet and artist. Among the younger writers, one finds a chorus of very different
voices. Thus William Boyd's (born 1952) short fiction, international in its outlook and
traditional in narrative technique, ranges from America to Africa (see On the Yankee
Station, 1981). Truly Scottish settings can be found in the stories of the idiosyncratic
Alasdair Gray (born 1934) as well as in the short fiction of James Kelman (born 1946)
and Gordon Legge (born 1961). Marked by his surrealist and acerbic fantasy, a savage
humour and unconventional forms, Gray's tales include Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983),
Lean Tales (1985), which he wrote with James Kelman and Agnes Owen, Ten Tales Tall
and True (1993), and his superb Mavis Belfrage (1996), a series of six stories linked by
themes of alienation and loss of identiy and held in Scottish English. Kelman and Legge
deal with the underprivileged and the working-class poor, the former in his typical natural-
istic Glaswegian dialect (see Kelman's Not Not While the Giro, 1983; and The Burn, 1991)
and the latter in a more conventional narrative technique (see Legge's In Between Talking
about the Football, 1991). The "Chemical Generation" have focused on the lives of young
people and the mores of 1990s club culture, with Irvine Welsh's (born 1957) collections of
stories (The Acid House, 1994, and Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance, 1996) as
the best examples. Among the Scottish women authors who have produced remarkable short
fiction Janice Galloway (born 1956) and A(lison) L(ouise) Kennedy (born 1965) have
reached international recognition. Galloway's stories, collected in Blood (1991) and Where
You'll Find It (1996), provide sharp observations of urban life, with a touch of the uncanny
and a thoughtful exploration of the inner states of characters. Written in a style that strikes
one as melancholic and sadly humorous, Kennedy's stories are not different from her longer
fiction one finds rich, poetic observations of human behaviour and characters who are
often destabilized and obsessed (see Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, 1990;
Now That You Are Back, 1994; So I Am Glad, 1995; and Original Bliss, 1997). Jackie Kay
(born 1961) has explored her African origin (she was born in Nigeria) and life in Scotland
in short fiction concerned with racial and sexual identity and with class and Scottishness
(see The Adoption Papers, 1991; and Other Lovers, 1993).
Apart from the expatriates James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Irish short-story writers70 of
great skill were, among the older generation, the singers of Ireland's beauty and magic,
Liam O'Flaherty (1877-1984; Two Lovely Beasts, 1948) and Sean O'Faolain (1900-91;
Teresa, 1947, and Collected Stories, 1981).
Thus O'Faolain's "Lovers of the Lake" is set at Lough Derg, Co. Galway, almost a holy place for
the Irish. Concerned with what his generation considered central human problems adultery,
love, religious belief, and penitence it is the story of two lovers, a woman from Dublin, Jenny,
and her lover, the surgeon Bobby Flannery. As he drives his lover to Lough Derg for a pilgrim-
age, moral and religious conflicts arise as the atheist doctor is confronted with pious pilgrims.
O'Faolain does not provide a happy ending for this tale.
Frank O'Connor (1903-66), whose real name was Michael O'Donovan, wrote short fiction
that combines the moving and the comic and still appeals to a large reading audience (see
Domestic Relations, 1957). Some of his stories deal with the problem of Irish identity.
O'Connor's "Guests of the Nation" (1931) tells of IRA men guarding two English prisoners.
They all become friends, but eventually the Irish are ordered to shoot their hostages. Wil-
liam Trevor (born 1928) has produced short fiction that poignantly evokes rural Ireland
(see his collection The Ballroom of Romance, 1972) and stories set in England and focusing
on middle-class values and mores (see Lovers of Their Time, 1978; and his collected stories
published in 1983). Brian Friel (born 1929) and Edna O'Brien (born 1932) also belong to
this generation of writers. Better known today as an outstanding playwright, Friel began as a
short-story writer as he explored the gulf between private experience and the public world
(see Selected Stories, 1994). His story "Mr Singh My Heart's Delight" illustrates his con-
cerns in a combination of Irish setting, childhood memories, and the colonial situation.
The narrator in this story remembers his childhood in Ireland, especially the long summers he
spent at his granny's house in Co. Donegal. The colonial and political background is subtly
introduced in the description of poverty and the long absence of his grandfather earning money
in Scotland. The lyrical aspects of the story include marvellous descriptions of the Irish land-
scape and seascape and the survival of Gaelic culture in the language. The plot of the story in-
volves an Indian, Mr Singh, who arrives at the house in bad weather. Offered a shelter and food
by the narrator's grandmother, he wants to sell her some nice clothes. But since she has no
money, Mr Singh leaves after giving her a beautiful ring. This episode reinforces the colonial
theme, as Mr Singh's culture can be compared to the Gaelic culture both were invaded and to
some extent suppressed by the British. Friel was to resume these issues in some of his plays.
Known for her lyrical descriptive power, O'Brien has written about Irish nostalgia, female
sensuality, and the wish to enjoy the good life (see her collections A Scandalous Woman,
1974; Mrs Reinhardt, 1978; Returning, 1982; and Lantern Slides, 1990). Younger Irish
short-story writers include Bernard McLaverty (born 1942), Neil Jordan (born 1951) and
Moy McCrory (born 1953). McLaverty was born in Belfast and later moved to Scotland.
His Irish background and such Irish themes as the "Troubles" and Catholicism emerge in
70 For collections, see William Trevor, ed. The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989); and D.
Marcus, ed. State of the Art: Short Stories by the New Irish Writers (London: Sceptre, 1992).
Heinz Kosok ("Be Pepared: Die anglo-irische Kurzgeschichte", in anglistik & englischunter-
richt 52; 1994: 175) lists thirty canonical Irish short-story writers in his survey from George
Moore (1852-1933) to Anne Enright (born 1962). Not all of these can be discussed here, but
among the younger writers, one should take notice of Anne Devlin (born 1951) and Desmond
Hogan (born 1950).
many of his stories collected in The Great Profundo (1987) and Walking the Dog (1994).
Jordan is today known as a film-maker; his stories (Night in Tunisia, 1976) are less distin-
guished by their Irish settings than by gender issues and the workings of basic human
drives. McCrory was born in Liverpool. In her earlier stories she is concerned with the Irish
Catholic working class. Subsequently, she has described from a female perspective the an-
xieties produced in women by an Ireland in the grip of Catholic priests and Catholic dogma
(see The Fading Shrine, 1992).
Finally, there are also the voices announcing a "New Britishness" in short fiction as well as in
the novel. While the Nigerian writer Ben Okri (born 1959), who lives in London, has written
exclusively about blacks in Africa (see Stars of the New Curfew, 1988), some of the Anglo-
African, Anglo-Asian, and Anglo-Caribbean novelists discussed above have also published
short stories dealing with the experience of two cultures in a postmodern Britain witnessing
the gradual dissolution of the Empire. In this context, mention must be made of V(idiadhar)
S(urajprasad) Naipaul's (born 1932) A Flag on the Island (1967) and In a Free State (1971);
Salman Rushdie's (born 1947) East, West (1994); and Hanif Kureishi's (born 1954) Love in
a Blue Time (1997).
In the new millennium, short-story publication in Britain and Ireland71 reflects the great
diversity of the literary scene. Outstanding and prize-winning writers of the short story have
continued contributing to a rich field in contemporary fiction two examples are William
Trevor (see his Cheating at Canasta, 2007) and Anne Enright (see her Taking Pictures,
2008, and the 31 stories collected in Yesterday's Weather, 2009). In addition to the in-
creasing number of women writers (to those mentioned above one may add the names of
Julia Darling, Hilary Mantel, Penelope Fitzgerald, Shena Mackay, and Candia McWilliam),
the postcolonial voice is as strongly represented as that of the Celtic fringe. Two collections
are typical in this context. In 2008, Zadie Smith selected and edited The Book of Other
People, which contains 23 stories by contemporary English-speaking authors, among them
Nick Hornby, Colm Tibn, Toby Litt, A. L. Kennedy, Andrew O'Hagan as well as Smith
herself. A year later, Jeanette Winterson edited a collection of short fiction by contem-
porary writers inspired by opera Midsummer Nights is concerned with music, but also
with a re-working of myth as treated in literature; thus the book features stories by Ali
Smith on Fidelio, Anne Enright on Rusalka, Kate Atkinson on La Traviata, Marina Warner
on Dido and Aeneas, and Sebastian Barry on Natoma. Scottish short fiction now reaches
beyond the national border and traditional genres. Irvine Welsh's latest collections are
therefore not unique in this respect: If You Liked School, You'll Love Work... (2007) contains
a novella with a Scottish background ("The Kingdom of Fife") but also tales set in America
("Rattlesnakes" and "The Dogs of Lincoln Park") and Spain (the title story of the book), and
his Reheated Cabbage (2009) combines a science fiction story and shorter fiction with
familiar characters from his novel Trainspotting. Finally, experimental or metafiction is also
still alive in the writing of Julian Barnes (The Lemon Table, 2004), Martin Amis (Vintage
Amis, 2004), and Gabriel Josipovici. Josipovici's best known experimental stories date
from the 1970s, but in 2006 he returned to the scene with Everything Passes (2006), a
71 For a collection of short fiction at the turn of the century, see Shorts: New Writing from Granta
Books (London: Granta, 1998); recent studies of the short story in Britain and Ireland can be
found in Korte (2003), Lffler and Spth (2005), and Hunter (2007), listed in the bibliography
of this book.
genre-bending book between novel, novella, and story-collection that presents seven in-
terlinked scenes reminding one of the narrative voices used by Beckett.
5. Children's Literature
Books specifically aiming at children were marketed as early as the eighteenth century (by
John Newbury, for instance). In the twentieth century, children became an important
reading public, and a much contested economic market for publishers. In order to under-
stand British culture and literature it is essential to realize that some books for children, and
their authors, have become part and parcel of the cultural heritage72 and are considered as
influential as Alice in Wonderland. Thus Beatrix Potter's (1866-1943) The Tale of Peter
Rabbit (1902) started off a series of stories, many of them beautifully illustrated, in which
animals are dressed up and talk like late
Victorian people. At the beginning of the
century, children's books could be decid-
edly conservative and strongly bour-
geois. This is also the case with another
classic, Peter Pan (1904). Written by the
Scotsman J(ames) M(atthew) Barrie
(1860-1937), this was actually first
conceived and performed as a play under
the title Peter Pan, or, The Boy Who
Would Not Grow Up; it was first pub-
lished in book form in 1911. The story
takes the eternal boy-hero from his Lon-
don nursery to Never Never Land with
Wendy, John, and Michael Darling,
where Wendy becomes a mother to Pe-
ter's group of Lost Boys. The enduring
appeal of the work lies, to some extent,
in its escapist aspects (Peter is sexless,
and there are exotic scenery and adven-
tures galore), but it also has an inter- Illustration for Peter Rabbit
esting subtext of jealousy, possessive-
ness and family conflict. Potter's occasionally naughty Peter Rabbit was joined in 1908 by
the animals in Kenneth Grahame's (1859-1932) The Wind in the Willows, in which Rat,
Mole, and Badger have to deal with the irresponsible Toad of Toad Hall. In the 1920s,
A(lan) A(lexander) Milne's (1882-1956) books were the rage of the day. Milne equipped
his animals with human characteristics. His Pooh Bear is still as popular today as it was
when the book Winnie-the-Pooh first came out in 1926. It was followed by The House at
Pooh Corner (1928). These books were escapist attempts to produce a golden age of
childhood that knows next to nothing of the cruelty children are able to inflict nor of the real
world in which they must live. In the first half of the century, Enid Blyton (1897-1968)
72 On the history of children's literature, from Romanticism to postmodern fairy tales, see Deborah
Cogan Thacker, Introducing Children's Literature (London: Routledge, 2002).
became one of the most popular children's authors who wrote for middle-class readers.
Blyton produced two kinds of books for very young readers she wrote tales featuring
Noddy and his friend Big Ears in Toyland (in the early 1950s); and for school-children she
provided idyllic adventure stories about the Famous Five and later the Secret Seven. These
stories are read even in the new millennium, though postmodern readers find it increasingly
difficult to accept the underlying class ethos and the prejudices of these books. Similar
fiction was written by Arthur Ransom (1884-1967), who started an enduring fashion for
holiday adventures, while Richmal Crompton (1890-1969) has remained in print with a
series of books about her schoolboy hero William, from Just William (1922) to William and
the Pop Singers (1965). Other classics still being read today are C(live) S(taples) Lewis's
(1898-1963) "Narnia stories" for children, a series of seven fantasy books that started with
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950).
Children's books flowered again after the Second World War, with fiction focusing on hist-
orical or mythological events by Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92) and Alan Garner (born
1934; see Red Shift, 1973), and historical melodrama by Joan Aiken (1924-2004) and Leon
Garfield (1921-96). The outstanding writer, however, was Roald Dahl (1916-1980) who
brought both psychological realism and a shot of surrealism to his punchy and vastly enter-
taining works concerned with children who can be both cruel and nasty. He had an interna-
tional success with many of his books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964),
George's Marvellous Medicine (1981), Revolting Rhymes (1982), and The Witches (1983).
Combining the unspeakable and unusual with the everyday experience of children, Dahl's
stories were dramatized for television, and subsequently republished. The last two decades
of the twentieth century have seen a reversion in children's literature to an older tradition
(reaching back to Puritan times in the 17th century) of reflecting the readers' backgrounds;
nowadays these include drug consumption, illicit adolescent sex, child abuse, dysfunctional
families, and war. But the great majority of younger readers prefer horror stories and fan-
tasy. This explains the huge success at the end of the century of J(oanne) K(athleen) Row-
ling's (born 1965) books featuring the schoolboy wizard Harry Potter. If her series of seven
novels (see, for instance, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2000), which takes the
orphaned hero from the age of eleven to seventeen, has seen a world-wide success, turning
the former unemployed single mother into a multi-millionaire, it is because Rowling was
capable of mixing elements from various popular writers (e.g., Charles Dickens to Roald
Dahl) and genres (e.g., fantasy novels, fairy tales, detective fiction, and the schoolboy
story). This mixture of adventure, sentiment, and fantasy seems to find a reading audience
from the age of seven to seventy. There was a controversy in 2000, when Rowling's Harry
Potter and the Goblet of Fire nearly won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award the first
year that this prize considered children's literature. Two years later, Philip Pullman's (born
1946) The Amber Spyglass (2000) became the first children's book ever to be awarded the
prize, thus reigniting discussion about the nature and merits of children's literature. Pull-
man's book is the last of a fantasy trilogy entitled His Dark Materials (consisting of North-
ern Lights, 1995; The Subtle Knife, 1997; and The Amber Spyglass, 2000). Like Rowling's
books, they are avidly read by adults and children alike and they have been compared to the
classics of children's literature, including Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Pullman's trilogy proves
once again that children's literature is sometimes difficult to separate from fantasy fiction for
adults. In fact, His Dark Materials could be described as adult books written for children
since they contain elements that are not normally found in children's books. Thus Pullman
uses mythology to demolish tradition; and although we get the ingredients of fantasy (such
as alternative worlds), the books question and criticise institutionalised religion and the sim-
plistic moral universe that comes with it. More thought-provoking than Rowling's Harry
Potter books, Pullman's trilogy is complex with an intertextual dimension that may escape
children. But the literary aspect appeals to the educated adult reader as the author develops a
pattern of allusions to William Blake, John Milton, and Heinrich von Kleist.
Finally, comic books are as popular in Britain today as they are in the United States. In fact,
most British adolescents will probably be familiar with the American comic book heroes
and, more recently, heroines. An interesting phenomenon in this mass market of popular
literature also read by adults is the creation of "Tank Girl", one of the several predecessors
of the internationally known "Lara Croft", who conquered the world in her computer-gen-
erated form in the late 1990s.
Developed in 1988 by two British comic book experts, Jamie Hewlett (the artist) and Alan
Martin in the British underground comic magazine Deadline, Tank Girl embodies the punk girl
image of the bad girl (see the edition published by Penguin in 1995).The setting of the series is
the Australian outback, peopled by bizarre hybrid creatures and outcasts of a society that is both
ancient and futuristic. Fighting a corrupt government and a brutal military, Tank Girl virtually
lives in a tank she has made her home, and she forms alliances with whomever she recognizes
as a helper in different situations. A pseudo-punk and an orphan whose "outfit" if not behaviour
was adopted by adolescents all over Europe (cf. the tank top worn by girls), Tank Girl smokes,
drinks, and fights, and has an aggressive physical presence in the cartoon series. Combining
phallic and military elements (her weapons) with feminine qualities (her breasts are "over-
stated") and a (popular) bad-girl image, she apparently attracts readers of both sexes. One of her
creators, Jamie Hewlett, has described her as "a guy's wet dream in combat boots" while for
girls "she's an icon of post-feminism."
6. Popular Fiction
6.1 Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Hyperfiction

Science Fiction (SF) is one of the most popular genres in contemporary literature. Its origins
can be traced back as far as the Biblical Apocalypse and Roman and Greek literature. SF
draws on the journeys and adventures of mythical heroes, the marvellous and exotic aspects
of true and false travel reports, Medieval romances, the voyages imaginaires of the Renais-
sance, and the Gothic fiction of the Romantic period.73 Recent additions to this mixture are
film noir and the virtual reality created with the help of computers. Since SF is indebted to
the Gothic novel and older apocalyptic writing, its dystopian variety often contains elements
of horror fiction.74 With such a mixed and colourful parentage, it is obivous that SF is
73 For a discussion of selected nineteenth-century examples (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Twain's

A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court; and Wells's The Time Machine), see Paul K. Alkon,
Science Fiction Before 1900 (London: Routledge, 2002); for analyses of twentieth-century SF, see
Brooks Landon, Science Fiction After 1900 (London: Routledge, 2002).
74 On noir thrillers (mainly from the 1940s), both films and fiction, see Martin Compart, ed. Noir
2000 (Cologne: DuMont, 2000); and on the latest versions of Gothic fiction see Joseph Grixti,
Terrors of Uncertainty. The Cultural Context of Horror Fiction (London: Routledge, 1989).
difficult to define in terms of genre75 as the borders (if borders they are) with fantasy and
horror fiction are often fluid. Generally, one could argue that SF is a branch of (mostly
popular) literature that deals realistically or satirically with the human response to changes
in science and technology. A distinction has been made between "hard" and "soft" SF, the
former denoting fiction that stresses the scientific background whereas the latter designates
works in which psychological or social aspects dominate. There are numerous sub-genres of
SF, which features ecological, dystopian, and feminist varities as well as others concerned
with time travel, parallel worlds, and SF for children.
The literary quality of SF is extremely variable, ranging from cartoons in sensational mag-
azines to the more literary and demanding novels of the Pole Stanislaw Lem and some of
Anthony Burgess's fiction. In 1973, when Eastern (Marxist) and Western (mostly escapist
American) varieties of SF had already developed, Lem attacked American SF from a
Marxist viewpoint as "idiocy" and "cultural cancer", arguing that "most Science Fiction is to
authentic scientific, philosophical, or theological knowledge as pornography is to love." He
thus implicitly pointed out the fact that much of Western SF was written not for serious
engagements with social and political issues but for mass consumption and entertainment.76
There is, however, no shortage of good SF even in the West. With A Clockwork Orange
(1962), discussed above, Burgess wrote one of the most powerful dystopian novels of the
second half of the last century while proving along the way that SF and good literature must
not necessarily be opposites. Burgess's The End of the World News (1982) takes its punning
title from a BBC radio programme and offers a literary pastiche with a strong SF element. A
comic novel, it combines a biography of Freud, a science fiction tale about the end of the
planet Earth, and a Broadway musical about Leon Trotsky living in New York in 1917.
While it is true that SF can be stereotyped and schematic, several authors have produced
works of literary merit. Thus Olaf Stapledon's (1886-1950) novels Last and First Men
(1930) and Star-Maker (1937) are often said to transcend the SF genre. In addition to a
number of works by Burgess and the later novels of Doris Lessing, mention should be made
of C(live) S(taples) Lewis (1898-1963), a literary scholar, critic, and novelist who taught at
Oxford and Cambridge. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet (1938) was the first novel in what
came to be known as his "Ransom" or "space" trilogy (see Perelandra, 1943; and That
Hidden Strength, 1945). With their Christian flavour and indebtedness to the spirit of Tol-
kien's fantasy novels, Lewis's novels are concerned with interplanetary voyages only on the
surface; what really inspires them is the wish to defend the Christian image of mankind that
was coming under attack by psychologists and natural scientists. A fragmentary sequel to
Out of the Silent Planet was published in 1977 under the title The Dark Tower.
After 2000, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain a difference between British and
American varieties of SF. But the fact that British SF has developed a serious dystopian
branch whereas American SF has been more utopian and optimistic, with the exception of
recent American cyberpunk, justifies a separate discussion of the two national varieties.
British SF started toward the end of the nineteenth century, but there were some important
75 See Dirk Vanderbeke, "Science Fiction: bersicht ber ein unbersichtliches Genre", Fremd-
sprachenunterricht 1 (2001): 4-14; 63-67.
76 For a survey of the many sub-genres of SF see Vanderbeke, "Science Fiction" (quoted above),
and Ursula LeGuin and Brian Attebery, The Norton Book of Science Fiction (New York:
Norton, 1993).
precursors Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), both
discussed above. The Frenchman Jules Verne (1828-1905) and H. G. Wells must be cred-
ited with the popularization of the major themes (which had been introduced in literature
much earlier): voyages to other planets, invasions from outer space, biological changes and
atomic catastrophes, and time travel.
Generally, one distinguishes five eras of SF. The first saw the rise of the genre as such to-
wards the end of the nineteenth century, with English dystopian examples (see the discus-
sion in the relevant chapter above of H. G. Wells, Time Machine, 1895; The War of the
Worlds, 1898; The Island of Dr Moreau, 1896) and American utopian examples. The second
era was the early part of the twentieth century, with the novels of Stapledon and C. S. Lewis,
mentioned above, and Aldous Huxley standing out (see Brave New World, 1932). The "Gol-
den Age" of SF, the third era, was between the 1930s and early 1960s, when America
swamped the market with magazines and pulp fiction (e.g., Astounding, edited by John
Campbell). As SF author Thomas Disch critically observed, most of this SF was written to
provide a semi-literate audience with compensatory fantasies. A new age and a "New Wave"
for SF in Britain started in 1964 when the rather tame British SF magazine New Worlds was
taken over by the SF author Michael Moorcock (born 1939) who transformed it into a
spearhead of exciting and demanding SF literature. In retrospect, it is hardly surprising that
the 1960s and 1970s saw a new flowering of SF. During this period, the genre reached a
level of popularity among intellectuals as well as the general public that, at least in Europe,
it has since lost. The reasons behind what eventually created the "New Wave SF" of the
1960s are manifold and reach from the existence of a high-brow variety in Eastern European
countries (e.g., fiction by Stanislaw Lem), efforts of NASA in space travel, increased scien-
tific and military experimenting to the opening of new literary fields. The names that stand
out in this new wave include some authors of long standing, such as Arthur C. Clarke
(1917-2003) whose prolific writings are based on great expertise in aeronautics and astro-
nautics. They include The Nine Billion Names of God (1967) and 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968), which Stanley Kubrick made into an equally excellent film. The actual New Wave
writers were Moorcock himself (see The English Assassin, 1972), Brian Aldiss (born 1925,
Enemies of the System, 1978), and John Brunner (1934-95), who has described a horrible,
totally computerized America in The Shockwave Rider (1976). The strong dystopian streak
in the British SF of the "New Wave" is perhaps best exemplified in two outstanding novels
by John Brunner which have literary qualities, Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Sheep
Look Up (1972). Both novels express their literary ambition through a collage and montage
technique borrowed from John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (1930-36), as Brunner uses a
variety of documents (advertisements, radio announcements, quotations) to write a chronicle
of the twenty-first century in Stand on Zanzibar. The novel portrays a depressing future
world controlled by globalized capitalism and multinational companies buying poor African
countries (Benin). It is a world suffering from shortage, overpopulation, racial conflicts,
wars, drug consumption, terrorist attacks, and genetic manipulation. This bleak vision of our
future also dominates in The Sheep Look Up, an example of ecological SF attacking the
present pollution of our environment by projecting it into a world that has totally destroyed
its air, water, and soil. Towards the end of the book, the United States the greatest en-
vironmental sinner on earth goes up in flames, but there seems no hope left for the rest of
the world. Aldiss's works are often highly intertextual as he engages with H. G. Wells in
Moreau's Other Island (1980) and with Bram Stoker in Dracula Unbound (1991; see also
his "Helliconia" trilogy published between 1982-85). Clarke and Moorcock have also done
much to invest the genre with literary aspects and so has J(ames) G(raham) Ballard
(1930-2009), perhaps the most gifted among the contemporary SF authors and certainly the
writer with the highest literary ambitions.
Ballard is already a representative of the fifth era, postmodernist SF. Like postmodernism in
literature generally, postmodernist SF is distinguished by the fact that it is opposed to ideas
of litist writing and the "high", bourgeois, culture of modernism. It also adopts, under-
mines, and parodies established literary genres, producing heterogeneous texts that are often
self-reflexive (or metafictional) and rich in allusions, quotations, and motifs. Ballard is
probably best known for his Empire of the Sun (1984, filmed in 1988), which is not an SF
novel but provides a surrealist view of hell on earth through the eyes of a child in a Japanese
prison camp in China. Ballard was born in Shanghai and educated at Cambridge, but Eng-
land never really became a home for him. Interested in a variety of themes, such as urban
and ecological nightmare, childhood memories, and taboo areas such as psychopathology
and sexual aberration, Ballard is never really content with the treatment of his subjects as
such, he also explores the possibilities of the genres in which he writes. Thus Crash (1973,
also made into a movie) caused a sensation through its sadistic aspects and postmodern
combination of eroticism and death in car accidents. Ballard's SF novels proper (see High
Rise, 1975) often start in a world we seem to know and can identify with, but he then takes
us into horrible nightmares that indicate how quickly the everyday can turn into the uncom-
mon and the disastrous. Thus Rushing to Paradise (1994) is a dystopian contemporary fable
about eco-fanaticism in which the ecologists are ready to kill for their aims. Ballard has also
turned the searchlight on our super-capitalist dreams of utopia in leisure-orientied or high-
tech communities that prove little better than hell. In Cocaine Nights (1996), a mystery with
dystopian elements set in the Spanish resort of Estrella de Mar, Ballard gives us a vision of
a society coming to terms with a life of unlimited leisure. In the dystopian Super-Cannes
(2000), set in Eden-Olympia, he goes one step further.
Set in a fictional high-tech business park above Cannes, in the south of France, the novel is
narrated by Paul Sinclair, an aviator in his late 40s just recovering from an accident. Paul has
recently married Jane, a young English physician and drives her to Cannes. Taking up a new
post as paediatrician-researcher in the business park, Jane quickly adapts to the artificial world
of Super-Cannes while Paul, the narrator, remains suspicious because Jane's predecessor, David
Greenwood, massacred seven executives just a few months before their arrival. As the newly
married couple are gradually pushed into roles they don't really want to play (Jane becomes a
drug-addict and is manipulated by her superiors while Paul finds himself in the tracks of David
Greenwood), Ballard goes to the heart of a new kind of social pathology. The narrator gradually
discovers that the business park is kept functioning by a psychiatrist, Wilder Penrose, whose
therapy for over-worked executives is criminal activity. At the psychiatrist's advice, they plan
and carry out raids and attacks on the poor immigrants in Cannes that involve rape, assault, and
finally manslaughter. Paul discovers that Penrose had pushed David Greenwood into child-
abuse and that the murders committed by Greenwood were an act of self-disgust. The novel
ends with Paul and Jane saved by a security guard, Halder, who is as disgusted as the narrator
while Paul, equipped with a gun and on his way to Super-Cannes, announces to the reader that
he will "finish the task that David Greenwood had begun".
The novel is remarkable in several respects. To begin with, it is not pure SF, mingling as it does
elements of the thriller, the realistic novel, and dystopian fiction. Never far from reality
(science parks as described in Super-Cannes exist in several countries and so do the problems
of executives relating to leisure and work), Ballard's novel is disquieting precisely because it
touches a nerve in our society. In addition, it contains an intertextual play with Lewis Carroll's
Alice in Wonderland, including the biographical background of the author (who loved the
company of little girls), which becomes a key-text as Paul investigates the child-abuse in
Cannes, discovering that David Greenwood had used Alice as a pretext in the double sense of
the term. Super-Cannes is, despite its gothic theme and occasional exaggeration, SF at its best.
Like Ballard, the Scottish novelist Iain Banks (born
1954), who came to prominence with his macabre
tale of teenage fantasies of death and destruction in
The Wasp Factory (1984), has used SF elements in
some of his controversial prose; under the name Iain
M. Banks he is also the author of several "pure" SF
novels, such as Excession (1996) and Inversions
(1998). In Look to Windward (2001) he has the reader
revisit the utopian but ruthless interstellar culture
first introduced in Consider Phlebas (1988). In the
new millennium, there does not seem to be a British
answer to the highly inventive American cyberpunk
author William Gibson, but there are some gifted
younger writers who use the genre of SF with great
bravado. One of them is Paul J. McAuley (born
1955), a former botanist and researcher at the uni-
versities of Oxford and UCLA.
His novel Fairyland (1995) won the Arthur C. Clark
Award, a prestigious prize in SF, and another award
for best novel in 1996. It is an example of recent
cyberpunk SF created by William Gibson (see the
Jacket cover illustration for
section on American SF below). The postmodernist, Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory. 1984
cypberpunk77 sub-genre of SF draws on the recent
computer culture while integrating positive aspects
(e.g., inventions) and a subversive, critical attitude regarding the social consequences of recent
technological developments which are always seen as part of the threatening, inhuman, capi-
talist, and corporate background. Cyberpunk SF uses classical forms and motifs of SF and a
playful, postmodernist, style of presentation that borrows from crime fiction, noir thrillers78 in
film and fiction and Western movies, the Japanese Samurai tradition, fantasy, videos, and drug
culture. Cyberpunk SF thus often strikes an uneasy balance between the utopian and dystopian
elements it attempts to integrate a fascination with technological revolutions and a simultan-
eous fear of the consequences for the human race of rapid scientific advancement. Thus
McAuley's Fairyland is set in a twenty-first century Europe ravaged by the changes of war and
technology. It describes a cyberpunk future replete with gene-hacking, instant designer drugs,
and mind-warping viruses. Essentially a near future thriller, Fairyland features a hero, Alex
Sharkey, who is a drug designer and a mere step ahead of the police and the Triads. Alex be-
comes involved with a hyper-intelligent but dangerous little girl, Milena, and unwittingly helps
her turn a genetically-engineered doll into a new, self-aware, species.
77 For a definition of cyberpunk in culture generally, see the Glossary of Literary Terms.
78 See Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller (London: Macmillan, 2001).
Douglas Adams (1952-2001) carved out for himself a special niche between SF and fantasy
with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1988), in which the unremarkable Arthur Dent
survives the destruction of the planet Earth and hitches a lift with a green bug-eyed monster,
with the help of the wily prefect. In this book and those that followed The Restaurant at
the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; and So Long, and Thanks for All
the Fish, posthumously published in one volume in 2002 the hapless Arthur travels
through space in total confusion and much to the reader's delight.
An example of metafictional SF is Charles Oberndorf's Foragers (1996), in which several
contradictory reports about a strange world are presented without any attempt to give pref-
erence to a special view. History thus appears to be a construct the very idea we also find
in mainstream postmodernist literature.
Related to SF is Tolkien's alternative world of fantasy79 and myth. From 1945-59 J(ohn)
R(onald) R(euel) Tolkien (1892-1973) worked as professor of English language and liter-
ature at Merton College, Oxford. He became internationally known for two books that
combine elements of the fairy tale, the epic, the saga, and myths in a fantastic imaginary
world peopled with strange beings that have their own languages, history, culture, and
mythology. The Hobbit (1937), the story of the reluctant dwarf-adventurer Bilbo Baggins,
and its longer sequel, the trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), have sold several million
copies. With their magic and closed world of elves and dwarfs, dragons and wicked rulers,
beautiful landscapes and strange adventures, the novels continue to fascinate readers all
over the world. In his books, Tolkien made no overt allusions to politics and the social order
of the twentieth century. He has been attacked as an "escapist" and as a writer who seems to
be in favour of a male sexist order. Against this accusation can be held Tolkien's powerful
statement about the force and influence of evil, and his books' epic qualities and fantastic
atmosphere that make up for his occasional glorification of traditional values and his re-
jection of everything modern. Tolkien has found a successor, though of inferior talent, in the
American Stephen Donaldson (born 1947; see the sequence entitled Chronicles of Thomas
Covenant, begun in 1977) and some British writers. The latter include David Eddings (born
1931), with his "Belgariad", "Malloreon", and "Elenium" sequences started in 1982, 1987,
and 1989 respectively, and Michael Scott Rohan (born 1951), with his Winter of the World
trilogy (1986-88). Even more than SF, fantasy literature tries to provide an alternative world
for the mundanity of everyday life in a post-capitalist, mostly urban, society mainly con-
cerned with making and spending money. The yearning not only for a more adventurous
life, but also for more natural and colourful environments, is often voiced in fantasy fiction,
as for instance in Robert Holdstock's (born 1948) Mythago Wood sequence. The genre has
even developed a comic dimension best exemplified by the fantasy books of Terry Prat-
chett (born 1948) that are apparently intended for young and old alike. Opposed to so-
phisticated scientific and technological systems and the complicated world of mathematics
and quantum physics, Pratchett like Rowling has become a multi-millionaire with the
almost 30 books published in his The Discworld series. From the first volume, The Colour
of Magic (1983), down to the latest (see, for instance, Thief of Time, 2001), the series has
developed an alternative world (the discworld) carried on the back of a giant tortoise. Con-
cepts such as time and space are personified while the cognoscenti among the readers are
79 On this genre, see Richard Mathews, Fantasy. The Liberation of Imagination (London: Rout-
ledge, 2002).
entertained with parodies of science fiction and fantasy writers such as H. P. Lovecraft
(1890-1937) and Tolkien. Only very rarely has fantasy fiction dealt with contemporary
political or social problems (see, for instance, T. H. White's Arthurian fantasy, The Once
and Future King, written between 1938-41 and clearly an antidote to war). Unlike the realist
or postmodern novel, fantasy fiction never challenges the taste of the mass audience for
which it is written for it has itself created that taste.
It is precisely because of this fact that, in the fin-de-sicle of the 20th century, a group of
mostly British writers now denominated the "New Weird"80 wanted to move beyond the
clichs of the fantasy genre. What began as an avant-garde literary movement challenging
genre boundaries as well as the apolitical stance of traditional fantasy culminated in a series
of remarkable novels published in the new millennium. New Weird can be described as a
new type of dystopian fiction with urban settings, and realistic and complex real-world
models that integrate elements of both science fiction and fantasy. Drawing on such fore-
bears as Mervyn Peake and the English and French decadent writers of the late nineteenth
century, it uses horror and surrealism and is decidedly (if not always overtly) political. One
of its hallmarks is the employment of postmodern techniques that do not undermine the
surface reality of the text. The roots of the genre also derive from the "weird" tales of pulp
horror author H. P. Lovecraft and Michael de Larrabeiti's Borribles Trilogy (1976-86) that
mixes realist and fantasy genres with children's fiction and features streetwise wild children
in an anarchic London.
The signature figure of the New Weird genre is beyond doubt China Miville (born 1972).
His first novel King Rat (1998), a horror tale evoking an alternative London, already em-
bodied most of the features of the genre: a half-rat hero leads a revolution of the city's rats
against King Rat and the Pied Piper of Hamelin as political dimensions are developed that
attest to the author's Marxism. In Perdido Street Station (2000) Miville gives us a full-
blown "other" world, Bas-Lag, with detailed and dense spaces (such as the city New Crobu-
zon) that are grounded in a palpable material reality. Technological and magical powers are
shown at work as well as repressive police agents. The fantasy elements include multi-
species groups and inter-species love, and multiple dimensions of reality. This novel
demonstrates Miville's refusal to follow traditional fantasy roads in the re-making of a
technical world as we know it. His production of fantasy is dystopian in itself and does not
shy away from political messages that become even more obvious in the sequels to Perdido
Street Station: The Scar (2002) and Iron Council (2004) dramatize the remaking of the new
worlds in terms of violent socio-political rebellions against the existing anti-egalitarian eco-
nomic order. Violence appears as an allegory of the coercion inherent in the capitalist
system. Miville's The City & the City (2009) seems to start out as a fantasy thriller, with
Inspector Tyador Borlu, based in the European city-state of Beszel, investigating a brutal
murder. But it soon becomes clear that the murder mystery and fantasy elements (two dif-
ferent cities occupying the same geographical space) lead us to questions about the creation
of class distinctions, ideological difference, and the fear of otherness.
80 See the anthology The New Weird, edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer (2008). Apart from the
leading figure, China Miville, writers working in this genre include M. John Harrison, Ian R.
Macleod, Mary Gentle, and Justina Robinson. There is some debate about whether New Weird
is a movement of like-minded authors, or just a label applied to them to describe common
features of their fiction. Some of the authors associated with the "movement" have disavowed
belonging to it.
Hyperfiction81 or electronic fiction is the latest child of the computer age. During the final
decades of the last century, the computerisation of writing radically changed everyday
communication, which is increasingly conducted through e-mail and cellular phones, while
making a deep impact on the forms and narrative patterns of fiction. Thus some recent
novels are constructed along the patterns of e-mail exchanges. The English writer Matthew
Beaumont's (born 1961) novel e (2000), for example, consists entirely of fictitious e-mails
exchanged in a hapless advertising agency (see also Exegesis, 1997, by the American author
Astro Teller, discussed in the section on American Literature). Hyperfiction or hypertext
seems to be the child of the marriage between electronic technology and poststructuralist
ideas, especially ideas concerning the openness of the art work, the ambiguity of the sign,
and the importance of the reader in the creation of meaning. The term "hypertext" (HT) was
coined by Theodor H. Nelson in the 1960s, designating "nonsequential writing text that
branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen" (Landow, p. 4).
As part of interactive fiction HT is produced with the help of a computer and encompasses a
range of experimental approaches to both fictional form and the process of writing and
making meaning. The forms range from text-based games to much more complex HT novels
which offer no traditional narrative lines but rather a maze of possibilities. Whereas in
traditional fiction, the author determines the line and direction of narrative, HT is dehierar-
chised and nonsequential; narrative and meaning depend on the way the user progresses in
the text he produces with the help of a personal computer. Thus hyperfiction is a practical
form of deconstruction82, for the reader literally determines the sequence of plot, ending,
meaning etc. Reader and machine communicate in the reading or deciphering process. As
early as the 1960s, poststructuralist theorists anticipated such a development. Roland Barthes,
for instance, wrote about the text as something that is woven by the reader who produces
meaning; and Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, demonstrated the possibilities of
deconstruction both theoretically and practically (see the layout of the pages in his work Glas,
1974).
HT creates the impression of being a huge system of interconnected footnotes with no hier-
archy whatsoever. It is the reader who creates advancement and progress in all sorts of di-
rections on several levels. In addition, some hyperfictions integrate other media, such as
visual or musical representations, thus gaining an intermedial dimension that makes them
more attractive to a younger audience. HT may easily lead one (in)to hypermedia or virtual
reality. A product of the fin-de-sicle, HT seems to constitute the third literary revolution,
after the transition from the pictograph to the phonetic alphabet and the advent of Guten-
berg's and Caxton's printing presses. Unlike SF, HT fiction does not seem to have formed
any national varieties and the major authors are Americans (see the discussion of the works
of Stuart Moulthrop and Michael Joyce in the chapter on twentieth-century American
literature below). With the development of the MOO (Multiple User Dungeons, Object-
Oriented), a computer-based technology, a new era for users began they could now create
81 See George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and
Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1992); Hilmar Schmundt, "Autor ex Ma-
china: Electronic Hyperfictions: Utopian Poststructuralism and the Romanticism of the Com-
puter Age", Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 19:2 (1994): 223-46; Stuart Moulthrop,
"Pushing Back", Modern Fiction Studies 43 (1997); and Peter Paul Schnierer and Thomas
Rommel, eds. Literarische Hypertexte (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 2003).
82 See the Glossary of Literary Terms.
A page from
J. Derrida's Glas
imaginary spaces, roles, and characters, thus assuming even more of an author-function.
Virtual writing communities have been created aspiring to the production of authorless texts
and the deliberate blurring of the boundaries between editor, writer, reader, and critic.83
Hyperfiction aims not only to tear down the opposition between reader and writer, it also
attempts to obliterate the essential difference between world and word as an illusion of
presence and control is being produced. For the impression of absolute freedom is of course
an illusion since all details, even the possibilities of advancement (or return), have been pro-
grammed and thus anticipated. The simulation of immediacy and never ending choice
entails some interesting psychological dimensions for the reader/user that have hardly been
explored (e.g., dimensions concerning emotion, addiction, eroticism, and the experience of
non-verbal, visual or musical stimuli). Perhaps we are in the romantic period of the com-
puter age, and like the first age of romanticism it probably also contains both the sublime
and the horrible.
6.2 Crime Fiction

Crime fiction is a general term for a variety of prose fiction covering mystery, the detective
novel, and the spy novel. Tales of crime, terror, and mystery, whether factual reports or
fictional narratives, have been popular for several centuries. In the late seventeenth and
83 One example can be found at Lingua MOO (1995), created by Cynthia Haynes and Jan R.
Holmevik at the University of Texas, Dallas [http://english.ttu.edu/KAIROS/1.2/coverweb/
HandH/start.html].
throughout the eighteenth centuries, the chaplains of Newgate Prison in London published
with great success reports on the careers of English criminals entitled The Newgate Cal-
endar; it was soon imitated and surpassed by rival publications. Defoe, in his Moll Flanders
(1722) and Roxana (1724), drew on this crime literature as did Fielding in Jonathan Wild
(1743). With popular and polite crime fiction as a background, the English painter and en-
graver William Hogarth extended the genre into graphic art in such enormously influential
series as A Harlot's Progress (1732), Industry and Idleness (1747), and The Four Stages of
Cruelty (1751). Another source for crime fiction is the Romantic tale of terror as produced
by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, and Matthew Lewis and the novels
of the Irishman J(oseph) S(heridan) Le Fanu (1814-73), Uncle Silas (1864) and Check-
mate (1871).
The modern detective novel is greatly indebted to the autobiography of Eugne Franois
Vidocq (1775-1857), a former criminal who became a police spy and, in 1811, chief of the
Paris "Sret". Vidocq published his memoirs from 1828 on, and these accounts of his
sensational exploits in hunting down criminals single-handedly were immediately translated
into English and became a source of inspiration, first for the French novelist Honor de
Balzac (1799-1850), and subsequently for writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Conan Doyle,
Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, and Agatha Christie. These authors created incredibly clever
detectives who, like Vidocq, are often more efficient than the police.
Drawing on Vidocq's memoirs as well as on Poe's Dupin and Wilkie Collins's novel The
Moonstone (1868), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) created the first modern detec-
tive. Few characters in fiction have been so widely accepted, sometimes as if they were
living celebrities, as the eccentric and often anti-social Sherlock Holmes and his friend and
chronicler Dr Watson. Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance in A Study in Scarlet
(1888). This was followed by the very popular detective stories Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes (1891-92). When Doyle had Holmes killed in a fatal struggle with the arch-enemy,
Professor Moriarty, in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), there was a public outcry,
and Doyle reluctantly revived his detective in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-2), The
Valley of Fear (1915), and numerous short stories.
Embodying the characteristics of his most notable predecessors intellectual brilliance, an
excellent social and cultural background, and "scientific" knowledge Holmes was admired
by Doyle's international reading public and became the ancestor of several detective heroes
in English fiction. Thus Dr R. Austin Freeman (1862-1943) invented a scientist, Dr Thorn-
dyke, who was modelled on Sherlock Holmes and, in such novels as John Thorndyke's
Cases (1909) and The Singing Bone (1912), specialized in chemical analysis. G(ilbert)
K(eith) Chesterton (1874-1936) gave Holmes's intuition and psychological flair to his
Father Brown, a little Catholic priest whose skill lies in his understanding of human nature
(see The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911, The Wisdom of Father Brown, 1914, and The
Scandal of Father Brown, 1935). Father Brown is less interested in justice than in confes-
sion and atonement, and his friend, the former criminal Flambeau, is once again a figure in-
spired by Vidocq. Similarly, Alfred Edward Woodly Mason (1865-1948) drew on Doyle's
hero for his French Inspector Hanaud in At the Villa Rose (1910), The House of the Arrow
(1924), and The Prisoner of Opal (1929); and so did Agatha Christie (1890-1976) for her
little Belgian detective Poirot, and Dorothy Sayers for her aristocratic Lord Peter Wimsey.
Together with Margery Allingham (1904-66) and Ngaio Marsh (1899-1982), Christie and
Sayers inaugurated the Golden Age of detective fiction. Allingham's detective, Albert Cam-
pion, arrived in her third novel, The Crime at Black Dudley (1929; see also Flowers for the
Judge, 1936), while Marsh has been remembered for the creation of Chief Detective In-
spector Roderick Alleyn first featured in A Man Lay Dead (1934). Marsh's Artists in Crime
(1938) contains an additional twist in that the victim, a nubile artist's model, is killed while
posing as a murder victim while the inspector faces the moral dilemma that he is in love
with one of the suspects, Agatha Troy. Agatha Christie was one of the most prolific writers
among them. She introduced her Hercule Poirot in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
and wrote at least one best-seller a year. Perhaps the best-known of the Poirot novels are
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), which is narrated by a suspect, and Dead Man's Folly
(1956). Christie also made a remarkable addition to women detectives in her small and
gentle Miss Marple, whose most entertaining cases are recorded in A Murder Is Announced
(1950) and The 4.50 from Paddington (1957). Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) first pres-
ented her hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, in Whose Body (1923) and displayed his skill in a long
series of novels and short stories in which Wimsey, at first the type of the "silly ass"
detective, becomes an ardent suitor. Her best works are Strong Poison (1930), Murder Must
Advertise (1933), and The Nine Tailors (1934). An interesting aspect of Strong Poison is the
fact that the plot centres around social constructions of gender and male-female relations as
the novel foregrounds the repressions of the Victorian marriage.
In comparison with these four "ladies of crime"84, other writers between the wars seem to
pale, for the best works of Christie and Sayers are far superior to the hastily written works of
the very productive Edgar Wallace (1875-1932). Leslie Charteris (1907-1993; an Ameri-
can writer born in Singapore and educated in England) presented another modern rogue-hero
with Simon Templar ("The Saint") whose career began with Enter the Saint (1930) and con-
tinued into the 1990s, even on TV. A number of writers have aimed at crime fiction that is
supposed to be more highbrow and literary. Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893-1971) assumed
the pseudonym Francis Iles and produced several excellent studies of criminal psychology
in Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1932). Similarly Nicolas Blake (i.e.,
the poet Cecil Day Lewis) developed sophisticated characters and displayed a masterful
handling of suspense in A Question of Proof (1935), which introduces his detective Nigel
Strangeways, The Best Must Die (1938), Malice in Wonderland (1940), and The Whisper in
the Gloom (1954). After World War II, authors like Julian Symons (1921-94) and John
Bingham tried new forms in which the police are largely non-existent (see Symons's The
Narrowing Circle, 1954, and The Colour of Murder, 1957; and Bingham's My Name is
Michael Sibley, 1952). Equally interesting from this period are some of the later novels of
Josephine Tey, the pen-name of the Scottish writer Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896-1952).
Her novels feature Inspector Alan Grant (see The Daughter of Time, 1951; and The Singing
Sands, 1952). Many critics agree that Tey's earlier The Franchise Affair (1948) is one of the
best detective novels ever written; it returns to a "cause clbre" from the eighteenth century
in which two sisters are falsely accused of abduction.
Three women writers P. D. James, Patricia Highsmith, and Ruth Rendell who
emerged in the 1960s and 1970s re-established the English detective novel or rather the
detective novel in English, since Highsmith was American by birth. P(hyllis) D(orothy)
James (born 1920) was made a life peer in 1991 and is now called Baroness James of
84 See Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell. British Women Writers in Detective
and Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 2001).
Holland Park. She has worked in the Home Office and became involved with forensic in-
vestigations in the police department, in which she rose to a senior rank. Hence her fiction is
marked by strong factual detail. One of her heroes is Adam Dalgliesh, who is both a police
detective and a romantic published poet and has appeared in a series of novels of which the
first is Cover Her Face (1962; see also Unnatural Causes, 1967; The Black Tower, 1975;
and Devices and Desires, 1989). Dalgliesh also makes an appearance in Original Sin (1994),
set in a well-known but now ailing publishing house, and in A Certain Justice (1997). The
latter shows James's limitations (when compared to, say, Ruth Rendell) as a novelist in that
working mothers are implicity criticized while the book as such comes close to a reactionary
feminism. With her other main character, Cordelia Gray, James continued the tradition of
Christie's Miss Marple while creating a prototype of the modern, independent, woman
sleuth who became a literary fashion in the last decades of the twentieth century (see The
Skull Beneath the Skin, 1982). The American Patricia Highsmith (1921-95) spent a great
part of her life in Europe. The hero of some of Highsmith's novels, the amoral and leisure-
loving amateur villain Tom Ripley, seems to be the typical modern substitute for the former
detective. Ripley is an ex-criminal, now married and leading a comfortable life with his
French wife in Paris; but when necessary he can slip into his second skin and kill. Patricia
Highsmith's novels, such as Ripley Underground (1971) and Ripley's Game (1974) she
has also published novels in which Ripley does not appear are stylishly written and have a
distinctive black humour. Like Baroness James, Ruth Rendell (born 1930), ennobled in
1997 and now called Baroness Rendell of Babergh, has written whodunits and psychological
thrillers with realistic details. Many of her works have been adapted for television. Her
output can be divided into three main sections, the Wexford novels with their ultimately
reassuring detective Wexford; crime thrillers lacking the secure moral focus of the first, and
since 1986 under the pseudonym Barbara Vine literary, psychologically searching
crime-rooted novels. The most popular focus on Detective Chief Inspector Reginald
Wexford and his colleague Mike Burden working in the fictional Kingsmarkham (see, for
instance, The Speaker of Mandarin, 1983; Road Rage, 1997; and Harm Done, 1999). In her
psychological thrillers Rendell/Vine explores aberrant characters, as in The Crocodile Bird
(1993) and No Night is Too Long (1994; also see A Sight for Sore Eyes, 1998; and The
Blood Doctor, 2002, a crime thriller about Henry Nanther, one of Queen Victoria's phys-
icians). Rendell's crime fiction is also interesting for its social setting and the issues that
emerge as contemporary problems. Thus An Unkindness of Ravens (1985), another Wexford
novel, is concerned with the clash between 1980s British militant feminism and traditional
feminine stereotypes shown to be oppressive and leaving profound psychological damage.
Racial tension in Britain provides the background for Simisola (1994), in which the plot
indicts middle-class white Englishness as Rendell's Wexford must discover that violence
against blacks exists in a continuum that includes his own (racist) attitudes as well as those
of his colleague Burden. If James, Highsmith, and Rendell have taken the crime novel to
new heights of psychological and social observation, other "ladies of crime" may not be as
persuasive, but Margaret Yorke (born 1924; see A Small Deceit, 1991), Joan Smith (born
1953), and Minette Walters (born 1949) clearly rise above the constraints of the genre. So
does the crime fiction of the American writer Elizabeth George whose novels are exclu-
sively set in England and deal rather expertly with a variety of social problems, including
racial relations in late twentieth-century Britain (see A Great Deliverance, 1988; Deception
on his Mind, 1997; With No One As Witness, 2005; What Came Before He Shot Her, 2006).
George was educated at the University of California, Riverside, and worked as a teacher and
college lecturer before becoming a full-time writer. She lives in California and London,
England. Her A Traitor to Memory (2001), again an international best-seller, features
Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, familiar to many readers from the previous Lynley
novels. In this book, Lynley, together with his longtime partners Barbara Havers (the
heroine in other novels) and Winston Nkata, investigates the murder of a woman while
untangling the dark secrets of a family whose history conceals the truth behind a horrific
crime. Since crime fiction caters to the popular taste and, unlike innovative literary works,
does not normally aim at disappointing the readers' attitudes, it is always in danger of using
stereotyped characters, clichs, and plots that are driven less by psychology than by the dic-
tates of suspense.
If any change in crime fiction can be detected in the 1990s, it is a movement toward more
realism, sometimes grounded in a strong regionalism as American crime fiction, both
through television and successful crime novels, made an impact on British writers. Ex-
amples can be found in the fiction of Reginald Hill (born 1936) featuring the Yorkshire
detective duo Pascoe and Dalziel (see Pictures of Perfection, 1994), and in the whodunit
series by the master of Scottish ("Tartan") noir85, Ian Rankin (born 1960), about Detective
Sergeant John Rebus investigating in Edinburgh (see Knots and Crosses, 1987, an exercise
in Scottish gothic; Set in Darkness, 2000; and The Falls, 2001). Around the fin-de-sicle, a
strong element of such local (English or British) colour marks the works of most crime
writers who have established themselves as leading figures in the genre. This is the case
with Rankin's fellow Scot Val McDermid (born 1947; see A Place of Execution, 1999; and
Killing the Shadows, 2000), with some of Christopher Brookmyre's (born 1968) thrillers
about the Glaswegian detective Jack Parlabane (see Country of the Blind, 1997; and Boiling
a Frog, 2000), and with Colin Dexter's (born 1930) successful novels featuring Inspector
Morse occasionally investigating in Oxford (see Morse's Greatest Mystery, 1995; and The
Remorseful Day, 2000). With Philip Kerr (born 1956) Scotland has yet another crime
writer of international stature. Interestingly, Kerr's hero is not a Scots detective but a Ger-
man private eye and former police officer called Bernhard Gunther. In 2009 Kerr received
one of the most prestigious prizes in crime fiction (the RBA-Prize) for If the Dead Rise Not
(2009). Set in Berlin during the Nazi rule, the novel recounts the adventures of Bernie
Gunther, much in the same way the earlier novels had covered other decades of Gunther's
life up to the 1950s (e.g., A Quiet Flame, 2008).
Finally, the "post-colonial detective"86 has also made an appearance in Britain with the
crime novels of the Englishman H(enry) R(eymond) F(itzwalter) Keating (born 1926).
Keating's detective is a true-blue Hindu working in a Bombay police force (the CID)
modeled on Scotland Yard. Inspector Gothe solved his first case in The Perfect Murder
(1964) and has been at work in numerous novels ever since (see the recent Breaking and
Entering, 2000). What is remarkable about Keating's crime fiction is that he wrote nine
Ghote novels before even visiting India; but all critics agree that the books are culturally
accurate, not only as far as the geographical locales are concerned but also in view of the
different varieties of English spoken in India, which differ according to region, caste, and
profession. Keating's novels represent these and many other issues (e.g., taboos) in a manner
that is both varied and precise. At the same time, he also manages to spoof the conventions
85 On the genre of "noir" fiction, see Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller (London: Macmillan, 2001).
86 See Ed Christian, ed. The Post-Colonial Detective (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
of detective fiction, perhaps most convincingly in The Body in the Billiard Room (1987) in
which Ghote faces an exasperating Indian fan (Surinder Mehta) of British mystery novels as
fiction and reality begin to overlap.
Especially after World War II, the detective novel began to face strong competition from
crime fiction concerned with espionage. Early examples of the spy novel are John Buchan's
(1875-1940) "Richard Hannay novels" The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle (1916),
and Mr. Standfast (1918), with the detective replaced by an intelligence officer and enemy
spies substituted for criminals, and The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erskine Childers
(1870-1922), in which two Englishmen on a sailing tour discover German plans for an inva-
sion of England. A similar type of popular fiction were the tales starring "Bulldog Drum-
mond" (an early James Bond), written by Sapper (H. C. McNeile, 1888-1937), which ap-
peared between 1920 and 1937 (see, for instance, Bulldog Drummond, 1920, and The Black
Gang, 1922), and the more than 110 novels published between 1903 and 1946 by Edward
Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946), who manipulated with ingenuity and occasional humour
a set of stereotypes and clichs in an improbable world of diplomatic salons, expensive
hotels, and mysterious intrigue.
The realistic spy novel began with two works that appeared in 1928 and were written by in-
siders who had served in intelligence: W(illiam) Somerset Maugham's (1874-1965)
Ashenden and Compton Mackenzie's (1883-1972) Extremes Meet. They are both concerned
with espionage in World War I and convincing novels in their own right. Mackenzie's The
Three Couriers, on the same theme, followed in 1929. Important spy novels of literary value
written in the 1930s and '40s are Graham Greene's (1904-91) A Gun for Sale (1936), in
which the murderer Craven appears as a perverted type of the English secret agent, The Con-
fidential Agent (1939), which owes more than its title to Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent
(1907), and The Ministry of Fear (1943). After World War II, Greene produced two more
novels, Our Man in Havana (1958) and The Human Factor (1978), which are concerned
with duplicity and treachery and qualify as literature and crime fiction. Michael Innes (i.e.,
J. I. M. Stewart, 1906-94) wrote for a highbrow audience and combined detective fiction
with the spy novel.
In the genre of the spy novel proper, several writers have achieved international popularity.
Starting in the 1930s Eric Ambler (1909-98) produced a series of thrillers on espionage
that are distinguished by their realism and, more often than not, innocent protagonists
caught up in the machinations of capitalist criminals. His best works from the 1930s are The
Dark Frontier (1936) and Epitaph for a Spy (1938). He retained his vigour as a writer in
such post-war novels as The Light of Day (1962), The Intercom Conspiracy (1970), and
Send No More Roses (1977). Len Deighton (born 1929) has continued this realism and has
applied his knowledge of military history in the "Harry Palmer" books based on the name
given to the character in the movies made from some of these books The Ipcress File
(1962), Horse Under Water (1963), Funeral in Berlin (1964), and Billion-Dollar Brain
(1966). Equally gripping are Deighton's An Expensive Place to Die (1967) and his "Bernard
Samson" trilogies; the first was made into a TV series (Berlin Game, 1983; Mexico Set,
1984; London Match, 1985), and the second a sort of "prequel" exploiting the success of the
first (Spy Hook, 1988; Spy Line; 1989; Spy Sinker, 1990). Deighton ran into problems with
the second trilogy as the Berlin Wall, and Communism with it, fell in 1989, leaving him and
other writers of spy fiction (e.g., John Le Carr) without a real enemy. Thus Spy Sinker is
already a rather different book held in the third person and retelling much of the story from
Fiona Samson's point of view. Deighton returned to spy fiction with his third Bernard
Samson trilogy of the 1990s Faith (1994), Hope (1995), and Charity (1996).
Realism, with a touch of Graham Greene's moral concern (see his Our Man in Havana,
1958), also dominates the work of John Le Carr (David Cornwell, born 1931) who had
worked for British intelligence and could draw on his experience. Le Carr has written on
the seedy world of ugly violence in which it is difficult to find one's moral bearings.
Successfully combining elements of the thriller and the psychological novel, Le Carr has
created in George Smiley a figure that is pained by scruples and appeals to the modern
reader. His best novels are The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), The Looking-Glass
War (1965), A Small Town in Germany (1968), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The
Honourable Schoo1 Boy (1977), and Smiley's People (1980), all concerned with espionage
and mostly pitting Smiley against the Russian intelligence officer Karla and his helpmates
in England. The Little Drummer Girl (1983) deals with the Israeli-Palestine conflict. With
the end of Communism in the East, Le Carr lost his major subject and, in his novels of the
1990s, turned to the exploration of evil and espionage in the secret arms trade (The Secret
Pilgrim, 1991; The Night Manager, 1993), political upheavals in Latin America (The Tailor
of Panama, 1996), and the malign world of global pharmaceuticals (The Constant
Gardener, 2001).
The Constant Gardener is vintage Le Carr. The hero, Justin Quayle, is the usual unsuspecting
British subject one encounters in some of his recent novels, in this case a career diplomat and
amateur gardener, who is drawn into an evil world he cannot quite fathom. When Quayle's wife
Tessa is horribly murdered on the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya, which together with Sudan
provides a large part of the setting of the novel, Justin Quayle sets out on a personal odyssey in
pursuit of the killers and their motive. As his quest takes him to the Foreign Office in London,
across Europe and Canada and back to Africa (Le Carr obviously thinks of the filming of his
novels as he writes them), he is led into a murky web of exploitation involving Kenyan greed
and a major pharmaceutical company eager to promote a "wonder" cure for tuberculosis. Justin
Quayle discovers the evils of globalization, a Kenya in the grip of AIDS and its selfish political
leaders, and a wife who knew most of this already and whom he barely had time to love. While
the novel is distinguished by a steady accumulation of tension and offers some interesting
examples of characterization, it is also disappointing (as most previous works by Le Carr) in
quite a few respects which are typical of this genre. Thus one finds obvious, and eventually tir-
ing, borrowings from Graham Greene's moral vision as the dispossessed protagonist is trying to
survive in the sultry corruption of foreign climates and English arrogance; foreign powers are
evil and maintain a status quo; other clichs abound (e.g., the Hemingway vision of man as
someone who can be "defeated but not destroyed"); and there is much sentiment which the
Hollywood movie version will undoubtedly use to produce a tear jerker. One wonders whether
Le Carr cannot or does not want to produce less sentimental fiction but in view of the mass
market he caters for this is probably an idle question.
Frederick Forsyth (born 1938) has carried to an extreme the factual realism of Ambler and
Deighton in The Day of the Jackal (1971), in which the minute details and preparations for a
plan to murder General de Gaulle are recorded, and The Odessa File (1972). With The
Fourth Protocol (1984) and The Fist of God (1994) he produced spy novels on a global
scale in which cool male heroes save the world from various kinds of disaster. Ken Follett
(born 1949) has followed the steps of Le Carr and Forsyth in such best-selling novels as
Eye of the Needle (1978) and The Man from St. Petersburg (1982). Anthony Price (born
1928) has linked modern espionage with aspects of historical research in novels addressed
to the highbrow market (October Men, 1973; Our Man in Camelot, 1975; Soldier No More,
1981). Half-way between this more realistic fiction and the escapist spy novel lie the novels
of William Haggard, pseudonym of Richard Henry Michael Clayton, 1907-93 (Slow
Burner, 1958; The Antagonists, 1964).
Ever since the 1960s, when the first films with "her Majesty's servant", agent 007, appeared,
spy fiction has been connected with the name of James Bond (and such actors as Sean Con-
nery, Roger Moore, and Pierce Brosnan). Bond was the brain-child of Ian Fleming (1908-
1964). Though technically no improvement on the novels of earlier decades, Fleming's
books, such as Live and Let Die (1954), From Russia with Love (1957), Goldfinger (1959),
and You Only Live Twice (1964), have seen a steady success. The super-hero James Bond,
secret agent 007 and counterspy, is a latter-day Sherlock Holmes, Bulldog Drummond, and
Richard Hannay rolled into one, with a touch of the lonely heroes of Hammett and Chandler
and an active sex life that proved an innovation to the spy novel. Like Superman, James
Bond appealed to the myths of success, wealth, and power in a time without ideals.
After the end of the Cold War and with the collapse of Eastern Communism in 1989, the
future of spy fiction, a hybrid genre that includes crime and romance to varying degrees,
seems to lie in the exploration of international crime, ethnic conflicts, the wars against
drugs, and the dangers of religious and ideological fundamentalism. Representative ex-
amples are John Le Carr's latest novels. His The Mission Song (2006), which presents his
typical mixture of thriller, espionage, love story, and moral condemnation, is set against the
background of racial tension in the Eastern Congo. It involves the planning of a coup in a
province as witnessed by the African-English translator, Salvo. While drawing attention to
the apathy of the British press about the atrocities in the Congo, the novel highlights the
greed and amorality of local Africans and visiting Westerners alike. A Most Wanted Man
(2008), also an espionage thriller, is set in Hamburg and turns to the international war on
terror and money laundering in the story of a young Chechen ex-prisoner with a claim to a
(dirty) fortune held in a private bank.
7. Nonfiction
Travel literature is the genre in nonfiction that comes closest to prose fiction, especially in
the twentieth century87 which saw a new development with the introduction of magic realism
and the deliberate mixing of reverie, confession, and fact by Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan
Raban. In a way, one might say that late twentieth-century travel literature returned to the
recipes tried centuries ago by Sir John Mandeville.
Again, it was the Middle East and Africa which fascinated British writers. Thus Freya
Stark (1893-1993), who spent her childhood between Devon and Italy, reported on her travels
in Iran, Iraq, southern Arabia, and Turkey in such books as The Valleys of the Assassins
(1934), The Southern Gates of Arabia (1936), and The Lycian Shore (1956). Though occa-
sionally sententious, her books are charming and illustrated with portraits of human and
architectural oddities. Similarly, Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003), an explorer and soldier,
left us illustrated accounts of his visits and his long periods of living with African and Arab
87 For recent discussions of 20th-century travel writers read in Britain (e.g., Graham Greene, V.S.
Naipaul, and Bruce Chatwin), see Casey Blanton, Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 2002).
nomads and swamp-dwellers see, for instance, his Arabian Sands (1959), The Marsh
Arabs (1964), and Danakil Diary (1998). Practitioners who have published such travel
reports in the second half of the last century include Norman Lewis's (1908-2003) writings
about Indo-China (e.g., A Dragon Apparent, 1951; Golden Earth, 1952), Jan (formerly
James) Morris's (born 1926) writings on the Orient (see the Pax Britannica trilogy, 1968-
73), Eric Newby's (1919-2006) works based round the Mediterranean, and Gavin Young's
enchanting descriptions of his time in Arab and Oriental countries (Iraq: Land of Two Ri-
vers, 1980; and Slow Boats to China, 1980).
The 1970s and 80s saw the arrival of radically different approaches to old and new material,
as mass tourism made the world accessible to the average European and thus impinged on
the traditional turf of the solitary travel writer. Bruce Chatwin (1940-89) virtually changed
the genre single-handedly. After a career at Sotheby's and studying archaeology at Edin-
burgh University, he travelled in Africa, Asia, and Europe, developing a deep interest in
nomadic cultures. He expanded the genre limits of travel writing in his first book, In Pata-
gonia (1977), by blending fact and fiction (history, biography, anecdotes, geographical de-
scription, and occasional autobiographical details) and by writing in a pungent and extra-
vagant style. Chatwin also wrote novels (see, for instance, On the Black Hill, 1982), but his
hallmark in travel writing remained the use of a kind of magic realism, as in The Viceroy of
Ouidah (1980), a fictionalised account of a real slave-trader. Chatwin's The Songlines
(1987), published two years before his death of AIDS, became a best-seller. Concerned with
creation myths of Australian Aborigines, it also contains his speculations about nomads.
Some of his work appeared posthumously (see What Am I Doing Here, 1989; and Note-
books, 1993). Like Chatwin, Jonathan Raban (born 1942), also a sailor and a novelist, has
proved a genre-bender with his accounts of a voyage down the Mississippi (Old Glory,
1982) and of a journey in a boat round the British Isles (Coasting, 1986). Apart from sharp
political commentary, the latter also contains autobiography and marine scholarship. Raban
has moved on to explorations of emigration to America; thus in Hunting Mister Heartbreak
(1990) he also inquires into the loss and acquisition of identity, and in Bad Land: An Amer-
ican Romance (1996) he provides a most unusual account of the settling of Montana by im-
migrant farmers. In these works, different genres of writing are grist to Raban's mills, e.g.,
reports of discovery and exploration, interviews, documentary sources (read imaginatively),
personal encounters, and descriptions of landscape. If Chatwin and Raban have expanded
the genre, Colin Thubron (born 1939) has written on increasingly difficult terrain, in-
cluding a journey to Moscow and the Caucasus (Among the Russians, 1983), and trips to
China (Behind the Wall, 1987; The Lost Heart of Asia, 1994). Thubron is the Beckett among
travel writers, stressing as he does the solitary or estranged condition of human beings on
the road (see also his Shadow of the Silk Road, 2006).
There can be no doubt that travel writing has come into its own. The canon has been further
developed (or been changed) by the American Bill Bryson (born 1951), who has explored
England as a latter-day Persian (reminding us of the fictitious travel reports of Montes-
quieu's early eighteenth-century Persian Letters); Duncan Fallowell has devised the gay
travelogue; and various novelists have drawn on previous travel reports or on their own
voyages and experience abroad to produce highly intertextual works. Thus the novelist
Graham Greene (1904-91), who was also a journalist, has left vivid reports about his trav-
els in Mexico (The Lawless Roads, 1939) and Africa (Journey Without Maps, 1936; and In
Search of a Character: Two African Journals, 1961). The Nobel Prize winner V(idiadhar)
S(urajprasad) Naipaul (born 1932) based much of his fiction on his travels and sojourns
on several continents, described in such travel books and works of political journalism as
The Middle Passage (1961), on the Caribbean; An Area of Darkness (1964), a controversial
report on India; The Return of Eva Peron (1980); Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey
(1981); and A Turn in the South (1989), concerned with the Bible Belt and evangelical
Christianity in the southern states of the USA. Beryl Bainbridge's (born 1934) 1991 novel
Birthday Boys draws substantially on the polar narratives of R(obert) F(alcon) Scott (1868-
1912; see The Voyage of the Discovery, 1905; and the journal, Scott's Last Expedition, 1913)
and Apsley Cherry-Gerrard (see his account, The Worst Journey in the World, 1922). And
the poets Simon Armitage (born 1963) and Glyn Maxwell (born 1962), walking in the
footsteps of their predecessors W. H. Auden and Louis McNeice, described their visit to
Iceland in Moon Country (1996). Alain de Botton (born 1969), a philosopher and writer
born in Switzerland and educated there and in England, gave the postmodern travel report
yet another formal and structural twist with his fascinating The Art of Travel (2002).
Arranged by category (departure, motives, landscape, art, and return), this book considers the
fact that we often begin our travels with pre-conceived ideas derived from literature or art. De
Botton takes cognizance of this fact and uses writers and artists as "guides" to the places he
introduces. He begins with an exploration of travel as metaphor for life, includes illustrations of
the landscapes and paintings described, and makes us see various parts of the earth (the Carib-
bean, the Antarctic, Provence, but also the streets near his house in Hammersmith) through the
imagination of, inter alia, Ruskin, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, and van Gogh. Skillfully weaving
together modern and historical strands of travel writing and providing much self-parody in
philosophical comments, de Botton proves as entertaining a genre bender as some of the idio-
syncratic and eccentric authors to whom he is indebted, both old (e.g., Xavier de Maistre, Jour-
ney Around my Bedroom, 1794) and contemporary (e.g., Tony Hanks's Round Ireland with a
Fridge, 1998).
The field of literary criticism has seen the rise and the end of several movements as well as
the work of a few outstanding critics who are not easily categorized. Eminent Shakespeare
critics include A(ndrew) C(ecil) Bradley (1851-1935; see Bradley's Shakespearean Trag-
edy, 1904), whose "detective approach" was later mocked by L(ionel) C(harles) Knights
(1906-97; see "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?", 1933), E(dmund) K(erchever)
Chambers (1866-1954), John Dover Wilson (1881-1969), editor of the New Cambridge
Shakespeare, and G(eorge) Wilson Knight (1897-1985; see The Wheel of Fire, 1930).
They each stand for a particular approach to Shakespeare's plays, which they explained in
their critical studies and annotated editions. Literary criticism received new impulses from
the Imagist T(homas) E(rnest) Hulme, who was opposed to the art and philosophy of
Romanticism and demanded precise and concise language and imagery, and from I(vor)
A(rmstrong) Richards (1893-1979), the central figure of the New Criticism in England
and America. Richards looked for new standards of criticism that were to be based on the
close analysis of language, as he explained in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and
The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). In his Practical Criticism (1929) he focused especially
on semantic ambiguity and structure. One of the poets and critics inspired by Richards was
William Empson (1906-84) who developed a psychoanalytic and semantic approach to
poetry (see his Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1930). A moral and ethical dimension of literary
criticism was formulated by F(rank) R(aymond) Leavis (1895-1978) and his circle, open-
ing the way for Hopkins and Eliot. The influence of psychology and of Jung's theories88 on
literature is recognizable in Virginia Woolf's The Common Reader (1925 and 1932) and in
Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (sec. ed. 1948). Until the arrival of new the-
oretical models in the late 1960s, Ian Watt's analysis of The Rise of the Novel (1957; rev.
1972) was a standard work of literary criticism, based as it was on the analysis of realism
and the consideration of the growing importance of the middle class. It was to be challenged
by American studies, notably by Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel (1988)
and Margaret A. Doody, The True Story of the Novel (1996).
It seems typically British to have initially reacted with common sense or extremely careful
scepticism to the inroads which structuralism and post-structuralism made into literary
criticism and literary theory in the 1960s and 1970s. It took more than a decade for British
academics to adopt some of the ideas put forward by the structuralists (e.g., Ferdinand de
Saussure, Roman Jakobson, and Grard Genette). With his Structuralist Poetics (1975),
Jonathan Culler (born 1944), an American academic who taught at the universities of
Cambridge and Oxford before moving to Yale University, acted as mediator between the
anglophone tradition and the new French school. Post-structuralism (propagated by Roland
Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva,
and Gilles Deleuze, to name just a few important critics) never really became popular among
British critics. Structuralism and Since, edited by John Sturrock in 1979, introduced major
figures (e.g., Foucault, Lacan, Derrida) to the reading public. Yet a positive reception of the
varieties of post-structuralism e.g., Deconstruction and Feminism among younger aca-
demics did not start until the late 1980s when introductions for university courses appeared
(see, for instance, Maggie Humm's Feminist Criticism, 1986; and Madan Sarup's An Intro-
ductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, 1988). In the 1990s, the varieties
of post-structuralist analysis from Deconstruction to New Historicism, Gender Studies,
and Reader Response were finally accepted as possible approaches in literary criticism and
theory, not least because there was a strong American influence in this field. Though post-
structuralist approaches are today part and parcel of university courses in English taught in
British universities, there can be no doubt that certain approaches are more popular than
others. Among the popular varieties, one finds Feminism and what has been termed New
Historicism and Cultural Studies. Starting with Richard Hoggart's (born 1918) ground-
breaking The Uses of Literacy (1957), which united sociology, literary criticism, and a left-
wing view of culture in a nostalgic analysis of British working-class culture, British critics
have cherished a cultural analysis of the socio-political function of literature. The Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham proved vastly influential in this respect.
Created by Richard Hoggart in 1964, it was supported by Raymond Williams (1921-88),
among others, and directed by Stuart Hall (born 1932). Williams was a leading figure of the
British "New Left" who tried to move beyond the limits of Marxist criticism by elaborating
the socio-historical development of forms of communication and relating them to social in-
stitutions and political practice (see his Culture and Society, 1958; The English Novel from
88 Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist and, from 1907 to 1913, a collaborator with
Freud. Jung then founded his own school of "analytical psychology". He introduced into psy-
chology such terms as "collective unconscious", "extrovert" and "introvert", and "archetype."
His concept of psychological types has been adopted in experimental psychology. His central
idea is that mental illness mirrors a disunity of the personality. He has influenced many artists
and writers.
Dickens to Lawrence, 1970; The Country and the City, 1973, and Marxism and Literature,
1977). Britain's internationally known Marxist critic today is Terry Eagleton (born 1943).
Eagleton teaches as the Thomas Wharton Professor of English Literature at Oxford Univer-
sity. He wrote a highly praised introduction to Literary Theory (1983; rev. 1996) and ad-
dressed issues of criticism and ideology in various works, including The Ideology of the
Aesthetic (1990) and The Function of Criticism: From "The Spectator" to Post-Structural-
ism (1994), The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996); and The Idea of Culture (2000).
Historiography has profited from the work of politicians, among them Sir Winston Churchill
(1874-1965; see the 6 volumes of his The Second World War, 1948-54), and academics such
as G(eorge) M(acauly) Trevelyan (1876-1962), who was Regius professor of modern hist-
ory at Cambridge (see his History of England, 1926, and English Social History, 1944), and
A(rnold) J(oseph) Toynbee (1889-1975), who studied at Oxford and taught at King's
College, London. Toynbee's 11 volumes of A Study of History (1934-59) provide a survey
of the major civilizations of the world and detect a waning and fragmentation of Western
civilization. Sir Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979) proved influential with The Whig Inter-
pretation of History (1931) and The Origins of Modern Science (rev. ed. 1965). Many poets
and writers have profited from James Frazer's (1854-1941) The Golden Bough, which was
published in 12 volumes between 1890 and 1915 and provides a thorough study, with a new
approach, of primitive societies. Frazer's work prepared the way for the critical view of
modern rational cultures. Trevelyan and Toynbee, the grand old men of British historio-
graphy, were followed by two historians who proved equally influential and created their
own schools Lawrence Stone (1919-99) and Sir Keith Thomas (born 1933). Both wrote
under the influence of the French "Annales" school, which turned the searchlight on the
workings of history on a local level, analyzing the development of customs, mores, and be-
haviour in selected families and communities. Stone was educated at Christ Church, Oxford,
and in 1963 was appointed professor at Princeton University. He is best known for his meti-
culous studies of the early modern period The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1588-1641 (1965);
The Causes of the English Revolution (1972); and his monumental The Family, Sex and
Marriage in England 1500-1800 (1977), which also drew on literary and visual sources and
became a bible for two generations of scholars. His final works were concerned with the
history of modern marriage and marital breakdown Road to Divorce: England 1930-1987
(1990), and Broken Lives. Separation and Divorce in England 1660-1857 (1993), which
was televised by the BBC. Sir Keith Thomas produced two books that have become classic
historical studies Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in 16th-
and 17th-century England (1971), and Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in
England 1500-1800 (1983).
Lawrence and Stone, together with Sir J(ohn) H(arold) "Jack" Plumb (1911-2001; see
The Commercialization of Leisure in 18th-century England, 1973; and The Birth of a
Consumer Society: The Commercialization of 18th-Century England, 1982, edited with Neil
McKendrick and John Brewer) formed a new generation of historians who, in the final
decades of the twentieth century, produced fascinating books that found a large reading
audience. This generation of scholars include Peter Burke (born 1937; see Popular Culture
in Early Modern Europe, 1978; The Renaissance, 1997; and A Social History of Knowledge,
2000), Simon Schama (born 1945), John Brewer (born 1947), and the prodigious Roy
Porter (1946-2002). Schama, Brewer, and Porter studied together at Cambridge in "Jack
Plumb's cohort". Simon Schama taught at Cambridge and Oxford universities until his
appointment as professor of history at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His studies of

the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods became international best-sellers; they include
an historical analysis of Holland's "golden age" in the seventeenth century, The Embarrass-
ment of Riches (1987), which also draws on paintings; Citizens. A Chronicle of the French
Revolution (1989); and another survey of art, politics, and economics in seventeenth-century
Holland, Rembrandt's Eyes (1999). John Brewer has taught in Europe and America, in-
cluding the University of California at Los Angeles and the European University Institute in
Florence, Italy. Together with Roy Porter and Ann Bermingham, Brewer edited superb and
rich volumes about the Enlightenment (e.g., Consumption and the World of Goods, 1993;
and The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800, 1995) and provided us with a marvellous study
of English culture in the Enlightenment with The Pleasures of the Imagination (1997). Roy
Porter taught as Professor in the Social History of
Medicine at the Wellcome Institute in London.
Also a dedicated reviewer who wrote for scholarly
journals as well as for The Evening Standard and
ran a BBC TV show for a while, Porter wrote
books at the rate of almost one every year. Inde-
fatigable and an unselfish counsellor to his stud-
ents and colleagues, he had a gift for spotting the
funny and the uncommon and made the period of
the English Enlightenment his special area of re-
search. Among his numerous works, which all
make for fascinating reading, some received prizes
and became best-sellers. They include volumes of
essays he edited with his wife Dorothy and some
colleagues, and numerous monographs, including
English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982);
Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness
from the Restoration to the Regency (1987); A So-
cial History of Madness (1987); London: A Social
History (1994); the monumental The Greatest
Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Mankind Roy Porter, smiling and helpful,
from Antiquity to the Present (1997); and Enlight- before he died in 2002
enment. Britain and the Creation of the Modern
World (2000). In the new millennium, Roy Porter wanted to enjoy early retirement and the
writing of more books with his partner Natsu Hattori, but the Grim Reaper caught up with
him as he cycled to his allotment in St. Leonards on the Sussex coast.
British historiography is far from being monolithic. Apart from the "common sense" school,
a Marxist school represented by such historians as E(dward) P(almer) Thompson (1924-
93) and Eric J(ohn) Hobsbawm (born 1917) took a keen interest in the rise and develop-
ment of the English working class. Thompson's most influential work was The Making of
the English Working Class (1963); when he published a companion volume to this book,
Customs in Common (1991), he saw no reason to change his arguments or to revise the
views brought forward in his first study. If Thompson focused on the early modern period,
Hobsbawm, who was born in Alexandria and studied in Vienna, Berlin, London, and Cam-
bridge, worked on the period after the French Revolution with such widely read studies as
The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (1962); The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (1975); The Age of
Empire 1875-1914 (1987); and The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-
1991 (1994). Finally, the modern period in France found a dedicated chronicler in the hist-
orian Theodore Zeldin (born 1923), a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford. In the five
volumes that make up France 1848-1945 (1973-77), he provided a meticulous study of the
change of Gallic mentalities over two centuries.
Biography continues to be a popular genre of non-fiction both among critics and the larger
reading public. The general assumption which is unfortunately wrong is that if one looks
at a writer's life (e.g., the places in which he lived) one will immediately get a better under-
standing of the literary works. What is very seldom considered is the parasitical nature of
literature hence those biographies are best which focus on what writers have read, seen
(images, films) and heard (music). Traditional biography, however, continues to find diehard
supporters. In fact, the genre has been defended even in the late twentieth century by Robert
Gittings in The Nature of Biography (1978) and Richard Ellmann in Golden Codgers (1984),
where they tackle such issues as the nature of privacy, the objectivity of written sources
(letters, diaries), the plotting of "lives", and celebrity. But it seems that we do not have
enough with about 500 lives of Napoleon, 200 lives of Byron, 40 biographies of Marilyn
Monroe, and already five lives of Sylvia Plath. The most gifted writer in early twentieth-
century biography was Lytton Strachey (1880-1932). His Eminent Victorians (1918)
applies a brilliant and often ironic style to the genre of the biographical essay. He also at-
tacked Victorianism and revealed the hypocrisy behind the public facade, thus ushering in a
new wave of writing. Stracheys imitators and successors perfected the analytical and psy-
chological approach. The second half of the twentieth century saw the publication of some
excellent works combining high scholarly standards with imagination and verbal skill. They
include the biographies of Keats (1968) and Hardy (2 vols., 1975 and 1978) by Robert Git-
tings (1911-92) and Richard Ellmann's (1918-87) much-praised and monumental study,
James Joyce (1959; rev. ed. 1982) and his biographies of Yeats (1948) and Wilde (1987).
Michael Holroyd (born 1935), the husband of the novelist Margaret Drabble, has tackled a
number of important literary figures, from a biography in two volumes of Lytton Strachey
(1967-68, rev. 1994) to a similar three-volume work on Shaw (1988-91; rev. 1997). In ad-
dition, we have the confessional Portrait of a Marriage (1973), Nigel Nicolson's personal
exploration of the life of his mother, the poet and novelist Victoria Mary Sackville-West.
The novelist Peter Ackroyd (born 1949) is as well known for his London-based fiction as
he is for his lives (with occasional fictional interludes) of Ezra Pound (1980), T. S. Eliot
(1984), Dickens (1990), William Blake (1995) and Sir Thomas More (1998). There has also
been a new interest in the lives of women writers, with remarkable studies of Virginia Woolf
(1996) by Hermione Lee; Vita Sackville-West (1983) by Victoria Glendinning (born
1937), a novelist who has also written lives of Rebecca West (1987), Anthony Trollope
(1992), and Jonathan Swift (1998). Other important biographies of women authors include
Claire Tomalin's (born 1933) works on Mary Wollstonecraft (1974), Katherine Mansfield
(1987), Dorothy Jordan (1994), and Jane Austen (1997). Tomalin took a new path in bio-
graphical writing with The Invisible Woman (1990), an investigation of Dickens through the
experience of his secret mistress, Nellie Ternan. This "microbiography" seems much more
interesting than the endless stream of lives we have been getting on the major literary fig-
ures.
Literature has always had very close links with philosophy. And philosophical writing has
often appeared under the guise of fiction in order to make itself more attractive. In this con-
text it is telling that Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), England's leading philosopher in the
last century, received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950. Writing on the philosophical
aspects of logic, education, politics, and economics, Russell's major works are Principia
Mathematica (1910), which he wrote in collaboration with A(lfred) N(orth) Whitehead
(1861-1947), An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), and Human Knowledge, Its Scope
and Limits (1948). Twentieth-century English philosophy has refused to give answers to the
basic problems of everyday life, concentrating instead on a discussion of truth and percep-
tion. One of Russell's students was Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), an Austrian by birth
who came to England in 1908 and spent most of his life in Cambridge, where he taught as
professor of philosophy (1939-47). Wittgenstein has exerted an enormous influence on
several generations of writers through his treatises on language. He came to his vocation
through the study of the philosophy of mathematics with Russell. In his early work, Trac-
tatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), he argued that the only meaningful use of language is as
a picture of scientific fact and that it is nonsensical in metaphysics. He gradually changed
this view after the 1930s, comparing what he now saw as a multiplicity of language use to a
carpenter's tool-bag. Wittgenstein's insistence on the complicated nature of language, which
he advised to address first before looking at philosophical problems (which are always
framed in language), is certainly one cause behind the pessimism vis--vis understanding
and knowing one encounters in literature, from the post-war theatre of the absurd to the rise
of post-structuralism in the 1960s (see also Wittgenstein's posthumously published Philo-
sophical Investigations, 1953). With his monumental A Study of History, mentioned above,
A(rnold) J(oseph) Toynbee (1889-1975) contributed to cultural philosophy by continuing
Oswald Spengler's line of thinking, though without the latter's pessimism.
Writers have also reacted to the revolutions and discoveries in natural science, especially to
major books in which the scientists tried to explain their discoveries to the reading public.
The Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins (born 1941) popularized the latest recognitions in
genetics and evolution in two books. His The Selfish Gene (1976) became an international
best-seller and was translated into eleven languages. The title is almost self-explanatory, as
Dawkins builds on Darwin and argues that there seems to be a drive toward survival and per-
fection in human and animal genes. Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker (1986) was as suc-
cessful. In this book, he addressed the ticklish issues of the meaning of life and evolution by
natural selection, arguing that the unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially non-random
process discovered by Darwin is the only answer to the question: why do we exist? Dawkins
has two English colleagues in the fields of physics and mathematics who have also become
international stars as it were Stephen Hawking (born 1942), a theoretical physicist who
teaches at Cambridge, is equally known for his books and his courage in overcoming his
severe physical handicap (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that affects muscle con-
trol), and Roger Penrose (born 1931), Hawking's doctoral supervisor who was knighted in
1994 for services to science. As a very young man, Hawking became intrigued with "black
holes" and "space-time singularities" while working on the theory of the origin of the uni-
verse. He found ways to link relativity (gravity) with quantum mechanics (the workings of
atoms) and contributed to what phycisists call Grand Unified Theory, a way of explaining
physical matter. Hawking was named a fellow of the Royal Society when he was only 32,
and in 1979, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post
formerly held by Sir Isaac Newton. Hawking came to international public attention not only
trough his lectures on several continents and his appearances in movies and on TV but
especially through his study A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes
(1988). A best-seller of long standing, this book explains the evolution of his thinking about
the cosmos for a general audience. It established his reputation as a genius who could ex-
plain his work to the larger public. Roger Penrose is the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathe-
matics at Oxford and also the recipient of distinguished awards, such as the Albert Einstein
prize. Penrose has done research in geometry, relativity theory and the foundation of quan-
tum theory, and he has contributed to the fast growing science of consciousness. He came to
international renown with The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and
the Laws of Physics (1989), a book that was hailed as a marvellous survey of modern phys-
ics as well as a brilliant reflection on the human mind, offering a new perspective on the sci-
entific landscape. Penrose addresses a vast range of issues, from relativity and quantum me-
chanics, to many problems in mathematics, and ultimately the important questions about AI
(artificial intelligence). His major thesis is that AI (generated through computers) cannot in
principle duplicate the workings of the human brain. In unison with Einstein, he also ex-
presses grave philosophical doubts about quantum mechanics. The book thus addresses is-
sues that are important to scientists, philosophers and writers. Penrose's second best-seller
was Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (1994).
Building on his arguments in the first book, namely that AI cannot be attained or simulated,
he applies Gdel's Undecidability Theorem to Turing machines, which at times proves dif-
ficult reading for laypeople. In the remaining part of the book he then turns to the foun-
dations in modern physics (relativity and quantum theory) of the phenomenon of conscious-
ness. He argues that in order to explain the non-computational elements of consciousness
and intelligence a new physical synthesis is necessary, a reconciliation of quantum theory
and Einstein's gravitational theories. Penrose is honest enough to admit that more research is
needed to establish any connection between physical and mental phenomena. Hawkings and
Penrose also published a book of essays together The Nature of Space and Time (1996),
based on their lectures and a debate at Cambridge. In his contributions to this exploration of
the question whether the quantum theory of fields and the general theory of relativity can be
united in a single quantum theory of gravity, Hawking builds a strong case for quantum
gravity while Penrose argues in favour of general relativity.
Finally, in a field closer to literature proper, the essay has seen a new flowering with the
introduction of decidedly partisan viewpoints Christian, Socialist, psychological, feminist,
and ethnic. Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) wrote his essays (e.g.
Heretics, 1905) with an implicit and often explicit Christian belief.
William Ralph Inge (1860-1954) criticized his country from the
perspective of an active Christian, though he was more interested
in the power of mysticism (see his Outspoken Essays, 1919 and
1922, and The Platonic Tradition, 1926). Unlike Belloc and Inge,
H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw saw the salvation of
mankind in socialism and said so in their didactic essays. A more
stylish writer was Henry Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), best
known for his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1928), who
toned down his message sufficiently for the sake of rhetoric. The
old literary tradition was continued by Max Beerbohm (1872-
1956), who was also a gifted caricaturist. His elegant and witty
essays have been collected in Yet Again (1909) and And Even Now
David Levine's portrait (1920). From Matthew Arnold in the Victorian Age down to
of C. P. Snow contemporary authors, writers have always used their pen as a
weapon when they saw British culture in danger. An outstanding example from the late
1950s is the minor novelist C(harles) P(ercy) Snow (1905-80). His Rede Lecture delivered
at Cambridge on The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revo-
lution (1959) was widely read and caused several con-
troversies. Snow argued that a gulf had arisen in British
society between the culture of "literary intellectuals" and
that of "scientists, and as the most representative, physical
scientists". Deploring the missing communication between
the "two cultures", he detected the reasons behind the gulf
in educational attitudes and recommended some changes.
One of the adversaries who strongly attacked Snow's views
was the Cambridge critic F(rank) R(aymond) Leavis
(1895-1978; see Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P.
Snow, 1962).
F. R. Leavis
as seen by David Levine
AMERICAN LITERATURE
I. The Colonial Period
American literature consists not only of literature written in English; properly speaking, it
embraces a whole range of cultural and linguistic traditions. Since the rise of the American
ethnic movements in the 1960s, literary historians have taken more notice of this fact. And
although this survey focuses on literature written in English in the colonies and the territory
that became the USA, one should not forget that from the very beginning there have been
several cultures in North America; either native ones like those of the Indians or imported
ones like those from Africa, Asia, Polynesia, and Europe.
The discovery and settlement of what later be-
came the United States occurred almost by acci-
dent. Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) was
not looking for America, but for the Indies, when
he arrived in the Caribbean in 1492 and disco-
vered the Bahamas, Cuba, and Haiti. The name
"America" is derived from Columbus's com-
patriot and successor, the Italian explorer Ame-
rigo Vespucci. In 1497, Vespucci reached the
American mainland, before Columbus and John
Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), another Italian, who
served the English king Henry VII. When the
English began to settle in the New World in the
late sixteenth century, they did not treat the
native Americans, the Indians, as cruelly as the
Spanish conquistadors before them. Neverthe-
less, they took the Indians' land, ignored their
cultures and religions, and, as far as possible,
tried to christianize and Europeanize them. To-
day, only the names of regions, states, cities, and
Captain John Smith. Engraving from a map
rivers on the East Coast testify to the existence in his The General History of Virginia. 1624.
of Indian nations long extinct (Massachusetts, Engraved by Robert Clerke
Narragansett, and Potomac, for instance). Early after (?) Simon van de Passe
attempts at settling, by Sir Humphrey Gilbert
in Newfoundland in 1583 and by Sir Walter Ralegh in North Carolina in 1585, failed. So
did some ventures in what is now Virginia, before Captain John Smith established the first
permanent settlement in Jamestown in 1607. It was with John Smith's reports about this
enterprise that American literature started.
The American sense of mission religious, moral, and political and the myth of America
as "God's own country" and the "New Jerusalem" began with the arrival of the Pilgrims and
the Puritans in the early seventeenth century. In 1620, some 100 Pilgrims1, a group of Prot-
1 The persons who came to Massachusetts on the Mayflower in 1620 and, by extension, all the
early settlers of Plymouth Colony. The pilgrims, unlike the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay
Colony, were Separatists who had split from the Established Church of England, organizing
284 AMERICAN LITERATURE
estant Separatists from Britain who had emigrated to Holland and found a leader in William
Bradford (1590-1657), reached America in the "Mayflower" and settled in Plymouth,
Massachusetts. They were followed in 1630 by the Puritans2, who, organized as the Massa-
chusetts Bay Company and with their first governor John Winthrop (1588-1649), arrived
in the "Arbella" and founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, their "City upon the Hill"3, in
what is now Boston. There was soon disagreement over church policy, and this led to the
founding of further colonies (the Connecticut valley was settled by Thomas Hooker and
his group, and Rhode Island by Roger Williams). Puritanism became the dominant force in
the northern colonies, whereas the South was more secular from the very beginning. A
greater religious tolerance and more cultural variety developed in the Middle Colonies:
William Penn (1644-1718) and his Quakers4 founded Pennsylvania (1681), New Jersey,
and Delaware; and Maryland was settled in 1634 by a group of English Catholics.
By 1700, some 250,000 people lived on the East Coast, where four distinct regions had
come into being: New England, economically prospering and theocratically governed; the
Middle Colonies, with New York and Philadelphia as centres of economic and cultural life;
the South (Virginia and Maryland), characterized by aristocratic social structures and the
slavery plantations; and the newly settled colonies in the Carolinas and Georgia, which later
adapted to the social fabric of the "old" South.
It would be wrong to assume that most of the colonists went to the New World in search of
religious and political freedom. To be sure, the clergymen and many political leaders praised
America as the New Eden. The American jeremiad (a sermon form whose name is derived
from the warnings pronounced by the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah) is one form of theo-
logical prose that arose out of the need of the colonists to justify their mission, to give a
meaning to their lives in the wilderness, and to overcome the bitter truth that America soon
resembled the Old World in many respects. Jamestown and the Massachusetts Bay settle-
ments were important economic ventures, and those in search of religious freedom and poli-
independent congregations. The Pilgrims first emigrated from Scrooby, England, to Amsterdam
(1608) and then to Leiden. Those who came to New England included William Bradford, Wil-
liam Brewster, and Edward Winslow.
2 In England, the Puritans demanded a thorough reformation of the Church under Elizabeth I. At
first, they wanted only to eliminate certain (Catholic) ceremonial rituals but believed in a state
church. The Puritans who went to America came mainly from the middle class. They believed
in the theology of Calvin (predestination) and preferred congregationalism as a form of church
organization.
3 The idea derives from Christ's sermon on the mount (cf. Matthew 5.14: "Ye are the light of the
world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid").
4 A religious group also called 'The Society of Friends' that was founded in England by George
Fox (1624-91). The Quakers avoid rigid doctrines and set forms of worship and have no trained
leaders. Until the Toleration Act (1689), they were persecuted in England because they refused
to support the Anglican Church. The first Quakers came to America in the 1650s, and in Massa-
chusetts they were also persecuted by the Puritans because of their opposition to theocracy.
After the founding of Pennsylvania, they became widely known for their humanitarianism.
They were the first to oppose the slavery of Africans and to deal kindly with the Indians.
Today, the 'Society of Friends' consists of various groups in America, with a total membership
of circa 130,000..
THE COLONIAL PERIOD 285
tical liberty were soon outnumbered by those who wanted to make money or who were
forced to come to America: indentured servants5, slaves, criminals, and the desperately
poor. This silent majority left very few literary records, but they had a great influence on the
development of the country, not least in the practical undermining of the established official
myths of equality and opportunity.
The major ideologies at work in early American literature were the Calvinistic Puritanism of
New England, which controlled the work of writers as diverse as Cotton Mather and Anne
Bradstreet and lasted well into the eighteenth century, and the more worldly mercantilism of
the South. Toleration of diversity in religious and political organizations, as practised in the
Middle Colonies, became increasingly important in the eighteenth century. Towards the
mid-eighteenth century, the influence of the Enlightenment made itself felt in America, with
Benjamin Franklin as a major spokesman, teaching America to be reasonable, human, and
frugal. As Puritanism lost its influence, the Great Awakening6, prepared in America by the
preaching of the Methodists (John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield), found in
Jonathan Edwards a proponent of religious emotionalism who exhorted his listeners to
search their own hearts. Both religious revivalism and Enlightenment thought championed
individualism, which was to become a central idea and motif in American literature and cul-
ture.
Considering the harsh frontier conditions in the seventeenth century and the Puritan domin-
ance in New England which discouraged imaginative literature, the Puritan colonies pro-
duced a surprising quantity of literature. This cannot be said of art. The Puritan view of art
was that it had to serve a moral or didactic purpose; hence most English art of the time (es-
pecially Restoration art) was not accepted in New England where the portrait was the genre
that found some imitators. Outside New England, however (e.g., in Virginia), one welcomed
English examples. When the American colonists started their first major buildings, archi-
tecture echoed English styles, such as the Palladian variety as represented by Inigo Jones
(1573-1652) and Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723). The Sir Christopher Wren Building,
the main entrance building at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, which dates from
c.1695 and was reconstructed after its first destruction, might as well have been erected in
England.
2. Poetry
In New England, poetry had to be either religious or pragmatic to be acceptable. It had to
serve a purpose, and in most cases this meant praising God and his works and warning men
not to forget the worship of their creator. The essence of such poetry was of course its mes-
sage rather than any refinement of form. It was published in popular almanacs and funeral
elegies. The best example of verse made subservient to didactic and moral purposes are the
5 Until the nineteenth century, English apprentices had to sign an agreement which usually bound
them to their masters for several years. Until the end of the period of training, the master was
legally responsible for the servant, and the servant had to obey his master's orders. The agree-
ment, the indenture as it was called, controlled the personal life of the servant to an often ex-
cessive degree. There were a few minor rebellions by servants in London.
6 A series of religious revivals beginning with Jonathan Edwards's evangelicalism c. 1734. The
movement had its centre in New England but then extended throughout the colonies (1740-50).
two books that were meant to spread the Puritan ideology the Bay Psalm Book in the
"meeting house" (the Puritan church), and the New England Primer in schools.
Edited by such eminent clergymen as, among others, Richard Mather and John Eliot, the
Bay Psalm Book (1640) was the first book to be printed in the British colonies and it saw
many editions between 1640 and 1752. The rhymed psalms in this collection were sung, and
the singers probably did not mind the odd syntax and the rhythmic irregularities of the dog-
gerel verse. Here is an example, David's psalm "The Lord is my shepherd."
The Lord to me a shepherd is,
want therefore shall not I.
He in the folds of tender grass,
doth cause me down to lie:
To waters calm me gently leads
restore my soul doth he:
he doth in paths of righteousness:
for his name's sake lead me.
Yea though in valley of death's shade
I walk, no ill I'll fear:
because thou art with me, thy rod,
and staff my comfort are.
For me a table thou hast spread,
in presence of my foes:
thou dost anoint my head with oil:
my cup it overflows.
Goodness & mercy surely shall
all my days follow me:
and in the Lord's house I shall dwell
so long as days shall be.
Similarly, the school and conduct book, the New England Primer, edited between 1683 and
1690 by Benjamin Harris (by the nineteenth century it had sold close to 6 million copies),
hammered Calvinist principles in simple forms into the heads of large sections of the popu-
lation while teaching them the alphabet and the prayers:
In Adam's fall
We sinned all.
Heaven to find
The Bible mind.
The idle Fool
Is whipt at school.
As runs the Glass,
Our life doth pass.
My book and Heart
Shall never part.
Job feels the rod
Yet blesses God.
The most prominent representatives of Puritan religious poetry were Michael Wiggles-
worth and Edward Taylor. Wigglesworth (1631-1705) came to Massachusetts as a child.
He studied at Harvard (founded in 1636) and became a minister in Malden, Massachusetts.

His Day of Doom (1662) is, according to its subtitle, "a poetical description of the great and
last judgment", and as such a jeremiad in verse. It was widely read in the Puritan colonies.
The first stanza of this gloomy ballad describes the false security of the world before
Christ's Second Coming:
Still was the night, serene and bright,
when all men sleeping lay;
Calm was the season, and carnal reason
thought so 't would last for aye.
Soul, take thine ease, let sorrow cease,
much good thou hast in store:
This was their song, their cups among,
the evening before.
Surpassing Wigglesworth in form and style, Edward Taylor (c. 1644-1729), another Har-
vard-trained clergyman, is today recognized as the most eminent Puritan sacred poet. Like
the works of Bradford and Winthrop, Taylor's poems were discovered much later and first
published in 1939. His verse is in the direct line of the English devotional metaphysical
poets (among them Herbert, Donne, and Crashaw) and analyses problems of life and faith in
a rich and concrete language, comprehensive imagery, and conceits that are based on the
colonial experience and are thus early examples of truly American verse. His best poems are
to be found in a series called Preparatory Meditations, written for his own pleasure after
preparation for sermons he delivered at monthly communion. Like Donne, Taylor created
surprising new meanings by blending incongruous images. His technique is masterfully dis-
played in the short poem "Huswifery", which develops metaphors of spinning until the
climax brings the central image, a garment made by God through man, combining the ideas
of work, piety, religion, and God's grace:
Make me, O Lord, Thy spinning wheel complete.
Thy Holy Word my distaff make for me.
Make mine affections Thy swift flyers neat
And make my soul Thy holy spool to be.
My conversation make to be Thy reel
And reel the yarn thereon spun of Thy wheel.
Make me Thy loom then, knit therein this twine;
And make Thy holy spirit, Lord, wind quills.
Then weave the web Thyself. The yarn is fine.
Thine ordinances make my fulling mills.
Then dye the same in heavenly colors choice,
All pinked with varnished flowers of paradise.
Then clothe therewith mine understanding, will,
Affections, judgment, conscience, memory,
My words, and actions that their shine may fill
My ways with glory and Thee glorify.
Then mine apparel shall display before Ye
That I am clothed in holy robes for glory.
In Puritan secular poetry, the work of Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672) is remarkable,
especially the shorter pieces in which she deals with everyday life in the colonial situation
with a simple narrative efficiency and religious conviction. Together with her father,
Thomas Dudley, and her husband Simon, she went to New England in 1630 in the
"Arbella". In England, she had received a good education which included studying of the
works of the metaphysical poets and of Sidney and Spenser. As the mother of eight children
and wife to a man who became governor of Massachusetts, she still found time for writing
verse. Her first book of poetry, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America, was published
in London in 1650 without her consent and contains in its prologue a covert defense of
women's right to compose poetry. But it is in the posthumously published Poems (1678) that
one finds her most convincing verse recording personal experiences, rather than discussions
of faith and religion, such as "Upon the Burning of Our House" and the poems on her
deceased grandchildren. "To My Dear and Loving Husband" is one of the several love
poems she wrote for Simon Bradstreet, expressing a rather un-Puritan concern with life and
love in this world.
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let so persever,
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
John Berryman (discussed in the chapter on twentieth-century American poetry below)
wrote a moving biographical poem on New England's first woman poet in his Homage to
Mistress Bradstreet.
Outside New England, the mundane spirit found expression in the poetry of Ebenezer Cook
and William Byrd II. Not much is known about Cook (c. 1672-1732). He was probably a
malcontent Englishman in Maryland recording his failure to succeed as a tobacco merchant
because of the frauds of the colonists. A realistic satire in the tradition of Butler's Hudibras,
Cook's The Sot-Weed Factor (1708; revised in 1731) which means "the tobacco mer-
chant" makes fun of the rough frontier conditions and lacks any sort of religious back-
ground. America, to Cook, is not the New Jerusalem, but the country of banishment where
the sons and daughters of Cain try to make a living. In the following passage, a local farmer
is described in a manner reminiscent of Butler and Rabelais:
Then out our Landlord pulls his Pouch,
As greasy as the Leather Couch
On which he sat, and straight began
To load with Weed his Indian Gun,
[]
The Reverend Sir, walks to a Chest,
Of all his Furniture the best,
[]
Which seldom felt the Weight of Broom:
From thence he lugs a Keg of Rum,
And nodding to me, thus began:

I find, says he, you don't much care
For this our Indian Country Fare;
But let me tell you, Friend of mine,
You may be glad of it in Time,
Though now your stomach is so fine
[]
John Barth (a postmodernist Ameri-
can novelist) made this mock-heroic
and polemical description of early
America the basis of his prose satire
The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), playing
with the form of the historical novel
as well as with the popular idea of
American history.
The Virginia gentleman William

Byrd of Westover (1674-1744) loved
literature as much as the ladies and
the good life and has left us a number
of valuable chronicles of colonial life.
No Puritan could have written such a
poem as Byrd's "Upon a Fart", which
was found among his papers and
literary exercises and is written in the
scatological7 tradition in which Jona-
than Swift also distinguished himself.
Title-page from John Smith's The General
History of Virginia. 1624. Engraved by Jan Barra
3. Drama
As the Puritan authorities were opposed to music and drama as mere entertainment, the
theatre found no favourable atmosphere in New England. However, in the Middle Colonies
and in the South plays were performed. In Virginia, we know of an early play, Ye Bear and
ye Cub, through a court case. European acting companies like the Hallams travelled in
Virginia, New York, and South Carolina, staging mainly English plays but probably also
the American Thomas Godfrey's (1736-63) romantic blank verse tragedy The Prince of
Parthia, written in 1759 and published in 1765. But drama did not really find a foothold in
America until the late eighteenth century.
7 Scatological literature is concerned with excrement, usually in a comical or satirical context.

This tradition was popular throughout the Middle Ages and well into the eighteenth century.
Many scatological poems and songs were publicly recited and sung. The tradition came to a
stop in the Victorian period. In modern America, such literature would be considered obscene:
there is a large and euphemistic vocabulary in American English that indicates a strong dislike
of scatological words and subjects.
4. Prose
Utilitarian forms of prose reports of discovery, histories, sermons, and theological treatises
dominated in the colonial period. American literature is often said to have begun with the
several reports and histories of Captain John Smith (c. 1580-1631), a former adventurer
and soldier who became governor of Virginia and helped the Jamestown settlers to survive.
His A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents as Have Happened in Virginia
(1608) is a report to the Virginia Company in London while A Description of New England
(1616), which the "Mayflower" settlers used as a
source of information, as well as Advertisements
for the Unexperienced Planters of New-England
(1631), are propaganda for future settlers describ-
ing America as a land of plenty and of great op-
portunities. Smith's General History of Virginia,
New England, and the Summer Isles (1624) is the
most fascinating of his works, apart from The
True Travels, Adventures and Observations (1630),
and probably contains a few passages that are in-
vented. Even the myth-making Pocahontas story
in this book may be pure fiction: it tells how
Smith was saved from being killed by the daugh-
ter of an Indian chief. This girl, Pocahontas, later
married an Englishman, John Rolfe, and died in
England. The episode gained symbolic value and
was treated in American plays, poetry and fiction
during the following centuries. Other important
Pocahontas. From John Smith's reports of travel and discovery in the colonies are
The General History of Virginia. 1624. George Alsop's A Character of the Province of
Engraved by Compton Holland Maryland (1666), John Josselyn's New England's
after Simon van de Passe
Rarities Discovered (1672), and William Byrd's
witty and entertaining records, History of the Dividing Line (1728) and Journey to the Land
of Eden (1733), in which he comments on the life-style of the colonists in Virginia and
North Carolina. Byrd's work, like that of other eminent colonial writers, was published
posthumously, and in some cases only in the twentieth century. There is a rich stock of
historical prose that has survived from the colonial period. The story of the pilgrims was
taken down by William Bradford (1590-1657) in his History of Plymouth Plantation,
written between 1620-51 and published in 1856, while John Winthrop, one of the gover-
nors of Massachusetts, made a history out of his journal (1630-49), later published as The
History of New England (1825/26). Edward Johnson's Wonder-working Providence of
Sion's Saviour in New England (1654) is a sort of Calvinist history of the New England
colonies. An example of the genre of Puritan "providences", it is written with great pathos
and foreshadows the cultural-theological history of Puritan New England and of its congre-
gations and ministers, Cotton Mather's huge Magnalia Christi Americana (1702). Cotton
Mather (1633-1728) was New England's most prolific theologian of the third generation.
He wrote more than 400 sermons as well as theological and scientific treatises. His
Magnalia is a long collection of histories of the various congregations and includes reports
about the Indian wars, sermons, vitae of ministers and governors, records of witch trials, and
"wonderful providences". A more satirical account from New England is Thomas Morton's
New English Canaan (1673). Morton was a kind of early anarchist and separatist who
founded an "irreligious" settlement at Merry Mount (now Quincy, Massachusetts) and was
finally forced by the Pilgrims to leave. In his book he makes fun of Winthrop and Bradford.
If Morton pleaded for tolerance, Nathaniel Ward defended Puritan religious intolerance in
The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam in America (1647). The Quaker's point of view has entered
the pages of William Penn's A Brief Account of the Province of Pennsylvania (1682), and a
lighter and wittier tone is discernible in Robert Beverley's (c. 1672-1722) The History and
Present State of Virginia (1705), written from a royalist's angle.
Puritan practical literature included A Key into the Language of America (1643), by the
separatist Roger Williams (1603-83), who founded Providence Plantation, and the countless
treatises in medicine and the natural sciences from the pen of New England's prodigy, Cot-
ton Mather. However, Puritan literature is especially known for two genres, the diary and
the sermon. Many Puritan diaries have survived, but none is as lively and interesting as that
of Judge Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), who provided a sober record of New England life
that even includes details about his meals. Cotton Mather's journal is much more self-con-
scious, as Mather was permanently concerned with his soul and the impression he was to
leave. Two other types of colonial diaries are the Quaker John Woolman's (1720-72)
Journal (1774), an honest record of his love for God and man, and William Byrd's Secret
Diary, covering the years 1709-12, and Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover,
1739-1741, in which he reports freely and openly about his most intimate experiences in
London and Virginia. A rather spectacular journal is A Narrative of the Captivity and Res-
tauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), which is the first Indian captivity report by a
woman who was in the hands of the Narragansett Indians for almost twelve weeks. Such
reports soon became a literary genre and were published until the late nineteenth century.
The American Puritans created an unsurpassed sermon literature, and within this tradition a
particular sermon form, the jeremiad, which has had a lasting influence on American poli-
tical rhetoric and ideology. The outstanding preachers whose sermons were published in
America and England were John Cotton (1584-1652), who reached Massachusetts in 1633,
Thomas Hooker (1586-1647), Roger Williams, banished from Massachusetts in 1635, and
the "Mather dynasty", i.e., Richard Mather (1596-1669), Increase Mather (1639-1723),
and Increase's eldest son, Cotton Mather. Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) was one of the
last in this line of outstanding preachers, and his most famous sermon, "Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God" (1741), is both a jeremiad and an emotional sermon typical of the
Great Awakening. The Puritan jeremiad was developed in the early 1640s and was in its full
bloom by the 1660s. It made use of a rhetoric, "the plain style", and a view of Americans and
America that can still be noticed today in the speeches of American presidents. The
jeremiad was devised by the clergymen to remind a sinning people of their duty toward God
(like the Israelites, they believed in a convenant with God) and as a psychological help to
overcome the cruel reality of life on the frontier. In their jeremiads, the preachers continued
to tell Americans that, though there were many sinners in the land, America was a special
country, chosen by God for His people and set apart from the rest of the world; and since
this was so, it was the duty of God's people to spread His glory. Thus the Puritan jeremiad
can be seen as a major source of American rhetoric and of America's understanding of
herself. The notion that America was to give an example, politically and morally, to the rest
of the world has survived the era of self-doubt of the Vietnam War.
II. From the Revolution to 1800
Even in the age of Revolution and Enlightenment, America never lost her interest in re-
ligion. For although Puritanism was on the wane after 1700, the Quakers were among those
who dominated America's cultural and economic life in the eighteenth century. Toward the
mid-eighteenth century, the Great Awakening became one of the first waves of religious-
emotional revivalism that have characterized American religious practice down to Billy
Graham, Jerry Falwell1 and recent religious TV channels, such as God, which is even broad-
cast in Europe. Most of the American leaders during the Enlightenment were not atheists
but deists who wanted to serve God by doing a good job on earth, trusting in the power of
reason and the natural rights of man.
In an age of revolution, literature was greatly influenced by political texts. In many cases
these texts are of more interest than the fiction and the didactic verse they provoked. The
American Revolution was a consequence of British greed and the American wish for more
freedom and less taxation. Although the American colonies were not represented in the
British parliament, they were forced to pay increasingly repressive taxes, as determined by
the Sugar Act (1764), the Stamp Act (1765), and the Townshend Acts that charged duty on
imported glass, paint, lead, paper, and tea. Resistance, first in print, led to the Boston
"massacre" in 1770, when five protesters were killed by British troops. In 1773, Americans
attacked British merchant ships in what became known as the Boston Tea Party. Thereafter,
several states organized joint resistance, and by 1774 the First Continental Congress met in
Philadelphia and denounced "taxation without representation." In the War of Independence,
which began rather haphazardly in 1775, George Washington was appointed by Congress
to lead the Continental Army. He faced a succession of military failures and had difficulty
recruiting sufficient numbers of soldiers from a divided population. But as the popular de-
mand for independence grew, so did military success. On July 4, 1776, Congress approved
the Declaration of Independence, one of the most important political texts of the Enlighten-
ment. Aided by France from 1778 on, the Americans finally defeated Lord Cornwallis's
army at Yorktown in 1781. By the Treaty of Paris in 1783 Britain recognized the independ-
ence of the United States of America. By 1789 the USA had a constitution. Confidence was
great and history to be made by a new country that finally saw the optimism of the founding
fathers reconfirmed. As far as American literature from this period is concerned, it is very
much rooted in political events. Many writers were politicians themselves, siding with the
Royalists and Loyalists or the Independents.
1 Billy Graham (William Franklin Graham, born 1918), American evangelist and Baptist preach-
er. A forceful and eloquent preacher, he has toured the United States and Europe, attracting
audiences totalling millions and winning thousands of converts. He has published several books
and has done numerous radio and TV programmes.
Like the fundamentalist Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham maintains the traditional, often literal, in-
terpretations of the Bible, which the fundamentalists consider the ultimate and inerrant author-
ity.
FROM THE REVOLUTION TO 1800 293
American art during this period was still under the influence of European examples, with
portrait painting dominating the scene. Many American painters left their country to seek
fame in Europe. A representative of both portrait and history painting, John Singleton
Copley (1738-1815) was among the first to try a new, American style in his portraits (see,
for instance, Mrs Winthrop, 1773). When Copley moved to England in 1774, however, he
changed his style under the influence of Joshua Reynolds and his countryman Benjamin
West. Copley is best known for his history paintings celebrating events of the American
War of Independence, such as Brook Watson and the Sharks (1778) and The Death of Major
Pierson (1783). Another portrait painter who, like Copley, was fostered during his time in
England by Benjamin West, was Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828). He became the chronicler of
American statesmen (see, for instance, his George Washington, 1796). It is in the art of
Benjamin West (1738-1820),
however, that one notices the
competition at that time be-
tween portrait and history
painting. In fact, West aban-
doned the former to adopt the
latter when, after a period in
Italy, he moved to England in
1763, making London his sec-
ond home. The major figure of
classicist painting and, as
president of the Royal Aca-
demy, vastly influential for
many subsequent American
painters, West is today remem-
bered for his dramatic history
paintings depicting scenes Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe. 1770
from the European coloniza-
tion of North America, such as The Death of General Wolfe (1770), based on an event in the
Anglo-French war in Canada (1754-63), and Penn's Treaty with the Indians (1771). A
master of the classical portrait style, Charles Wilson Peale (1741-1827) painted the leaders
of the Revolutionary War and was the organizer of the first art school in America. If any
resemblance between literature and art can be detected, it lies in the fact that both proceeded
along the same pattern of using old-World models and genres (e.g., the letter novel and
portrait painting) while injecting them with American subjects.
2. Poetry
Starting in the 1760s, a great number of poems dealt with the issue of independence. Mostly
didactic or satirical, these works appeared in newspapers and almanacs and provide an im-
pression of how the "big question" was treated in popular culture. As so often in revolution-
ary periods, satire flourished, especially among a group of poets known as the Connecticut
Wits (also called Hartford Wits, Yale Poets, or Connecticut Choir). The members of this
group (John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, Lemuel Hopkins, Richard Alsop and
others) wanted to achieve America's literary independence and focused on native history and
society. Most of the Connecticut Wits were conservative intellectuals in favour of Federal-
ism and opposed to Jeffersonian Republicanism2. As they never really went beyond the
poetic patterns established by the English Augustans, their attempts to create a new Ameri-
can poetry failed. Only three, Trumbull, Dwight, and Barlow, wrote poetry that is worth
remembering.
John Trumbull (1750-1831) taught at Yale University and wrote a satire in verse and prose
against the follies of university life and theological instruction entitled The Progress of
Dullness (1773). It is largely indebted to Addison, Swift, Pope, and the comedy of manners.
Trumbull is best remembered for his burlesque satire M'Fingal (1782), which is written in
the manner of Hudibras and mocks the English Tories supporting the Crown in America.
Timothy Dwight (1752-1817) was the grandchild of Jonathan Edwards and also taught at
Yale, serving as its president from 1795-1817. Both an excellent rhetorician and a passion-
ate patriot, Dwight described Washington's victory in The Conquest of Canaan (1785), an
allegorical epic in 11 books written in the manner of Pope and as nationalistic as Joel
Barlow's (1754-1812) Miltonic The Vision of Columbus (1787; later published as The
Columbiad, 1807), which is Barlow's attempt at a "national" epic in heroic couplets and in
eight books. The Wits were at their best when they brought local colour into their verse. It is
this native element that makes Barlow's The Hasty Pudding (1796) one of the few out-
standing poems from this period. Written in France, where Barlow tried to find supporters
of the American Revolution, the poem on a native American dish (made from Indian corn
and water) is a mock epic celebrating American simplicity over the sophisticated decadence
of aristocratic Europe. Here is an excerpt.
Dear Hasty Pudding, what unpromised joy
Expands my heart, to meet thee in Savoy!
Doomed o'er the world through devious paths to roam,
Each clime my country, and each house my home,
My soul is soothed, my cares have found an end,
I greet my long lost, unforgotten friend.
For thee through Paris, that corrupted town,
How long in vain I wandered up and down,
Where shameless Bacchus, with his drenching hoard,
Cold from his cave usurps the morning board.
London is lost in smoke and steeped in tea;
No Yankee there can lisp the name of thee;
The uncouth word, a libel on the town,
Would call a proclamation from the crown.
Another patriotic writer of satiric verse was Francis Hopkinson (1737-91), a lawyer from
Philadelphia who signed the Declaration of Independence and satirized the English in The
Battle of the Kegs (1778), a ballad celebrating American military ingenuity on the Delaware
River.
2 Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) found himself in opposition to Alexander Hamilton (1755-

1804), who favoured a strong, centralized government and urged the encouragement of manu-
facturing. Jefferson feared that Hamilton's programme would lead to the establishment of a
monarchy, and he therefore championed individual liberties, the rights of the states, and an
agrarian system.
However, the poet most often associated with the Revolutionary period is Philip Freneau
(1752-1832). He studied at Princeton and wrote patriotic verse at an early age. As a prisoner
of war he was badly treated by the British in 1780 and developed a lifelong hatred of
England. Freneau worked in Philadelphia and also owned a ship with which he sailed the
Atlantic and the Caribbean. His first-hand experience of slavery during that time found a
reaction in some anti-slavery poems, such as the one attacking Sir Toby, a sugar planter in
the interior of Jamaica. The opening of this piece shows Freneau as an enlightened defender
of human rights and a true revolutionary. Alluding to the West Indian custom (sanctioned
by law) of branding a newly imported slave on the breast, with a red hot iron, he pictures
the lives of Africans in the Caribbean as an existence in hell; the English plantation owners
seem to make no difference between their herds of cattle and their herds of slaves:
To Sir Toby
If there exists a hell the case is clear
Sir Toby's slaves enjoy that portion here:
Here are no blazing brimstone lakes 'tis true;
But kindled rum too often burns as blue;
In which some fiend, whom nature must detest,
Steeps Toby's brand, and marks poor Cudjoe's breast.
Here whips on whips excite perpetual fears,
And mingled howlings vibrate on my ears:
Here nature's plagues abound, to fret and tease,
Snakes, scorpions, despots, lizards, centipedes
No art, no care escapes the busy lash;
All have their dues and all are paid in cash
The eternal driver keeps a steady eye
On a black herd, who would his vengeance fly.
But chained, imprisoned, on a burning soil,
For the mean avarice of a tyrant toil!
[] 1784; published in 1792
After 1790, Freneau edited newspapers (The National Gazette, 1791-93) and returned to his
plantation, Mount Pleasant, in 1799. Because of financial difficulties, he had to return to
shipping between 1803-1807. He died in a blizzard, impoverished and almost forgotten.
Freneau tried almost all contemporary forms of poetry: political satire, elegies, didactic
verse, and poems describing nature and his travels. His patriotism and his political views
were always in competition with his undeniable lyrical gifts. He poured his American pride
into The Rising Glory of America, written together with Brackenridge as the Commence-
ment3 poem for 1771 at Princeton, and voiced his dislike of the English in the heroic
couplets of The British Prison-Ship (1781), which is based on his own experience. In his
later life Freneau refused to eat food or wear clothing of British origin, but he could not
resist imitating English poetic diction, as in the Gothic allegoric-philosophical elegy The
House of Night (1775), a poem that stands clearly in the tradition of Young and foreshadows
Poe. As a poet, Freneau was most convincing when he described nature, the sea, and his
countrymen and the Indians. His imaginative poems, such as "The Beauties of Santa Cruz"
(1776), "The Wild Honey Suckle" (1786), and "On a Honey Bee" (1809), mark him as a
3 The day, and the ceremonies in connection with this event, when degrees are conferred in
American schools and universities.
Romantic writer. As the first American poet to write on the Indians, he made a strong im-
pression on Walter Scott and Thomas Campbell. Freneau's "The Indian Student", for in-
stance, reports about one of the "children of the forest" who studies at Harvard but then
leaves civilized Boston to return to his tribe. The poem expresses an Indian's disappoint-
ment with the white man's world. Indian culture, though poetically romanticized, is also the
focus of his "The Dying Indian" (1784) and "The Indian Burying Ground" (1788), of which
the beginning follows.
In spite of all the learned have said,
I still my old opinion keep;
The posture, that we give the dead,
Points out the soul's eternal sleep.
Not so the ancients of these lands
The Indian, when from life released,
Again is seated with his friends,
And shares again the joyous feast.
His imaged birds, and painted bowl,
And venison, for a journey dressed,
Bespeak the nature of the soul,
Activity, that knows no rest.
His bow, for action ready bent,
And arrows, with a head of stone,
Can only mean that life is spent,
And not the old ideas gone.
Thou, stranger, that shalt come this way,
No fraud upon the dead commit
Observe the swelling turf, and say
They do not lie, but here they sit.
Black literature did not develop before the nineteenth century, and black poetry came even
later than prose. But the case of Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-84), an educated slave in a
Boston household who achieved literary attention with her Poems (1773) in England and
America before ending in poverty, illustrates a phase of black identity in the New World.
Although Wheatley's poems are essentially "white", employing the forms and themes of
traditional English poetry, they remain historically important as documents of a period
when the racial question was almost totally ignored. In the following poem, she celebrates
America and "civilization"; her twentieth-century successors were to do the opposite,
seeing their influential roots in Africa.
On Being Brought from Africa to America
'Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Savior too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their color is a diabolic dye."
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refined, and join the angelic train.
3. Drama
Drama, as far as it existed in America in the later part of the eighteenth century, was dom-
inated by growing patriotism. The most typical example is The Contrast (1787), a light so-
cial comedy by the lawyer Royall Tyler (1757-1826). While on a visit to New York City,
Tyler attended a performance of Sheridan's The School for Scandal. Within a few weeks he
wrote The Contrast, which was consciously modelled on Sheridan's successful comedy and
the first play by an American to be produced by a professional American troupe. After its
successful staging in New York, it was published in 1790. It is indicative of the reigning
spirit in New England, however, that the comedy had to be disguised as a "moral lecture in
five parts" when it was given in Boston. Tyler's comedy contrasts homespun and honest
American dignity with the foreign and ridiculous foppery of the British. It has a conven-
tional plot of intrigue, love, and misunderstandings and is mainly remembered for the up-
right American hero, Colonel Manly, and the subplot, concerned with Manly's servant
Jonathan, the first example of the classic stage Yankee who denies he is a servant and wants
to be seen as a "true blue son of liberty".
4. Prose Fiction
In the age of the American Revolution, there was little room for the novel. Existing needs
were easily satisfied by the European market. Between 1760-1800 such works as The Vicar
of Wakefield (1766), Robinson Crusoe (1719), Tristram Shandy (1759-67), and Clarissa
(1748-49) were best-sellers in America. American novels of literary value were few and far
between, although the commercialization of literature and the rise of journalism were soon
to contribute to the birth of the short story. Richardson's fiction inspired a number of Amer-
ican writers to produce sentimental romance, laced with a bit of eroticism, such as William
H. Brown's (1765-93) The Power of Sympathy (1789), Susanna Rowson's (c. 1762-1824)
Charlotte Temple (1791), and Hannah Foster's (1759-1840) The Coquette (1797), an epis-
tolary novel dealing with seduction which, by 1800, had sold 50,000 copies. It anticipates a
whole series of such novels that were highly popular in the nineteenth century.
Told in 74 letters, mainly from Eliza Wharton to her friend Lucy Freeman, the plot was ap-
parently based on fact. Early in the novel, the heroine is freed for flirtation when her disliked
fianc dies. Pursued by J. Boyer, Eliza keeps him waiting because she is fascinated by the
libertine Major Sanford. Both men abandon her, but, still attracted to the married Sanford, Eliza
Wharton has an affair with him and becomes pregnant. Seriously ill and dejected, she abandons
her home and friends. The tragic ending describes how she and her baby die in childbirth.
More substantial novels were written by Brackenridge and Brown. Modern Chivalry is a sa-
tirical picaresque novel in the manner of Don Quixote, published in installments from 1792-
1815 by the Scottish-born Federalist Henry Hugh Brackenridge (1748-1816).
The heroes are Captain Farrago and his Irish servant Teague O'Regan. They travel through the
forests of Pennsylvania, and Teague is eventually tarred and feathered and sent to France,
where his adventures continue. Brackenridge fleshes out his story with commentary on, and
criticism of, American politics in the new republic in which he perceived a degeneration of
liberty into licence. Brackenridge's satirical style refers to Butler, Swift and Fielding.
With his four novels written between 1798-1801 Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810)
became the pioneer for several genres of fiction and prepared the way for Cooper, Poe, and
Hawthorne. In Wieland, or, The Transformation (1798) as well as in Edgar Huntley (1799),
both epistolary novels, he dealt with aberrant psychology and strange adventures in Ameri-
can settings.
Wieland could be characterized as a Gothic romance. The novel is initially concerned with the
elder Wieland, a German mystic, who emigrates to the United States (Pennsylvania) and dies
by spontaneous combustion in the temple he has erected on his estate. When his wife dies too,
the children Clara and the younger Wieland become dependent on Catharine Pleyel. A
happy circle seems to form, as Wieland marries Catharine, and his sister falls in love with
Henry Pleyel, who is betrothed to a woman in Germany. But then a mysterious vagabond,
Carwin, appears and unearthly voices pronounce warnings. Complications follow when Henry,
who believes the voices, falls in love with Clara but then abandons her, assuming that she has
had an affair with Carwin. At the same time, Wieland is driven mad by the voices, and kills his
wife and children. Carwin then reveals to Clara that he has produced the voices by ventriloquism
to test the courage of the entire family. When the insane Wieland, who has escaped from an
asylum, arrives to murder his sister, Carwin commands him through his voices to desist. At the
end, Wieland commits suicide, Carwin retires to a remote part of Pennsylvania, and Clara
marries Pleyel who has become available after the death of his first wife.
Ormond (1799) is also a typical Gothic novel, and Arthur Mervyn (1799) is a story of initia-
tion in a complicated romance of intrigue and terror. There are some realistic passages
where Brown describes the consequences of yellow fever in Philadelphia. Influenced by
Godwin, Rousseau, and Voltaire, Brown explored philosophical and moral problems while
focusing on the mysterious world of man's psychology and soul.
5. Nonfiction
The intellectual leaders of the revolutionary period, men such as Thomas Paine, John
Dickinson, and Thomas Jefferson, sought to put into political practice such ideas as
liberty, equality, natural rights, and the pursuit of happiness. It was Thomas Paine (1737-
1809) who provided the ideology for the Revolution. An Englishman, he went to Phila-
delphia in 1774, summoned by Franklin, and defended the cause of the colonies both in
America and Europe. Paine's Common Sense (1776) was a severe criticism of the English
monarchy and a call to Americans to separate from Britain. It became a huge success, was
read before the troops, and fanned the American intellectual fire. Paine was accused of
treason in England because of his defence of the French Revolution in The Rights of Man
(1791/2) and had to flee to France, where he became a French citizen. After a brief period of
imprisonment during the French reign of terror (1793-94), he returned to America in 1802,
spending the remainder of his life in poverty and illness and despised by his countrymen
because of his radical thinking. Paine was a master of style and political propaganda. With
The Age of Reason (1794/5) he wrote a deistic treatise attacking traditional religion and
arguing for religious freedom and tolerance in the light of reason and morality.
John Dickinson (1732-1808) also prepared the way for the Revolution with his denuncia-
tion of colonial taxes in the pamphlets entitled Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the
Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1768). Once the Revolution had started, four men
provided the ideas that were needed for a new constitution: John Adams (1735-1826),
Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), James Madison (1751-1836), and Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826). They developed their ideas in speeches, political essays, pamphlets, and trea-
tises. Adams was the leader of the conservatives and argued against Paine's Common Sense
in Thoughts on Government (1776). Hamilton and Madison defended the new constitution
in the 85 essays contained in The Federalist (1787/8). However, the central figure was un-
doubtedly the Virginian Thomas Jefferson. He was educated at the College of William and
Mary and became a lawyer and a renowned diplomat. His only book, Notes on the State of
Virginia (1782; published in 1787), proves his wide-ranging interest in science, history,
architecture, and other subjects. Jefferson served as Secretary of State under Washington
and became the third President of the United States (1800-1809). His draft of the Declara-
tion of Independence, revised by Adams and Franklin, shows the power of his rhetoric; its
clear and simple diction has not lost anything of its power:
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the
political bands which have connected them with another, and assume among the powers of the
earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them,
a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which
impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and institute new
government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form,
as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness []
Of course Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) also be-
longs to the group of intellectuals who served the
American cause at home and abroad. Franklin was an
active and busy man: an inventor and diplomat, a poli-
tical agitator and founding father of the Constitution,
a journalist and man of letters. He founded numerous
American institutions (societies, hospitals, libraries,
universities) and wrote on the nature of earthquakes,
air and sea currents, heat and electricity; he invented a
stove, bifocal spectacles and the lightning rod, among
other things, and became a member of the Royal So-
ciety in London (1756). Franklin served his country in
many functions and positions, one of them being Min-
ister to France (1776), and he helped to bring about
the Treaty of Paris in 1783. When he died, he was one
of the best-known and certainly most beloved public
figures in America. This is a remarkable story of suc-
cess for the tenth son in a family of 15 children.
Franklin's father was a Boston tallow chandler and
soap-maker. Young Ben was apprenticed at age 12 to
his half-brother James, a printer. But he soon ran Benjamin Franklin as seen by
away, working in print shops in Philadelphia and Lon- David Levine
don, England, while educating himself and working
hard. He made his literary debut with sniping satires on local affairs published in the New
England Courant and signed "Silence Dogood". By 1729, Franklin had his own print shop
in Philadelphia and edited the Pennsylvania Gazette (1729-66). Between 1733-58 he wrote
and published the most famous of American almanacs, Poor Richard's Almanack, issued in
three editions (for New England, the Middle Colonies, and the South) and a phenomenal
success. The almanacs presented humorous and wise characters (Richard and Bridget
Saunders, for instance) and offered the readers fables, essays, maxims for living, and infor-
mation about the weather, science, and philosophy. Many of the contributions Franklin
wrote were collected and published as Father Abraham's Speech in the almanac for 1758.
Franklin's literary gifts are evident in his satires, An Edict by the King of Prussia (1773),
exposing the English exploitation of the colonies, the moral tale The Speech of Miss Polly
Baker (1747), which attacks Puritan double morality, and the humorous Advice to a Young
Man on Choosing a Mistress (1745), in which the young man is told that older women are a
better choice for marriage as they "are so grateful". In France Franklin also printed a number
of "bagatelles" (short satires), such as The Ephemera (1778), addressed to his good friend
Madame Brillon, and The Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout (1780), proving him a
true writer of the Enlightenment. At the age of 65, Franklin began writing his Autobiography
for his son William. It covers his earlier years, up to 1758, and was not published in its full
text until 1868. Tracing his way as a self-made man, Franklin pointed out that frugality and
hard work were the means to success. Franklin's Autobiography thus shows him to have
been under the influence of both Puritanism and the age of Reason. As a Yankee Puritan
who had learned from Cotton Mather's sermons, he also agreed with Rousseau and Voltaire
and used the language of Defoe and Addison for his moral propaganda. The Autobiography
reveals a pragmatic, lucid, and enthusiastic mind whose "do-good" complex has influenced
large sections of American society.
The new republic was described and praised in the prose of several writers. Some com-
mented on the possibilities of a developing country, and others on the natural scenery of
America. In his twelve essays that make up the Letters from an American Farmer (1782),
Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crvecur (1753-1813) ignores the harsh reality of the wilder-
ness and stresses the pastoral and idyllic aspects of American life. As a farmer in New York,
de Crvecur undertook extensive journeys before returning to France in 1790. Writing in
the established genre of the "farmer's letters", he created in Europe a romantic picture of
America in the spirit of Rousseau and provided beautiful and detailed descriptions of Amer-
ican natural scenery, some realistic scenes of war, and a few attacks on slavery. De Crve-
cur had a very positive view of America, praising it as the haven for all persecuted people
and thus helping to create the image of a free country that welcomes immigrants from all
corners of the globe.
Natural science or natural philosophy, as it was then called found a first representative
in William Bartram (1739-1823), the son of John Bartram (1699-1777), botanist and
creator of the Botanic Garden at Philadelphia. Like Linnnaeus in Europe, Bartram was inter-
ested in the ordering and registering of plants and animals. The "flower hunter", as the In-
dians called him, became professor of botany at the University of Pennsylvania and wrote
one of the most interesting books for the fields of natural science and geography: Travels
Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (1791) became a
major source of inspiration for, among others, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. In a
poetic prose imbued with pastoral pathos, Bartram provided descriptions of landscapes,
flowers, and animals but also of the Indians whom he considered, in the spirit of his age,
as noble savages.
III. The Nineteenth Century
Under the first four presidents George Washington (1789-1797), John Adams (1797-
1801), Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), and James Madison (1809-1817) the confidence
of the new nation increased while the idea of the union and the United States as an entity
was boosted by the War with Great Britain (1812-15). The war brought advantages to nei-
ther side but saw the birth of the American national anthem: Francis Scott Key's "The Star-
Spangled Banner". American self-confidence was strengthened by the purchase of the
Louisiana territory from France in 1803, and of Florida from Spain in 1819, as well as the
Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which stated that no further colonies were to be founded in
America and that no interference threatening American independence would be tolerated. In
1845 the United States annexed Texas, obtained the Oregon Country by treaty with Britain
in 1846, acquired vast territories, including California, from Mexico in 1848, and in 1867
Alaska was bought from Russia. The annexation of Hawaii took place in 1898. In that year,
which also marked the end of the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico and the Philippines
were ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Paris. The bright image of democratic
America acquired its first dark patches as the United States, the emblem of anti-colonialism,
waged a colonial war in the Philippines between 1898-1902, which cost the lives of more
than 4,000 American soldiers while
20,000 enemy soldiers were killed and
about 750,000 civilians lost their lives.
The Philippines had to wait until 1948
to become truly independent. The ac-
quisition of territories by the United
States came to an end in 1917, when
the U.S. bought the Virgin Islands from
Denmark. After Andrew Jackson had
been elected president in 1828, the
frontier (i.e., the edge of settled and
civilized territory) rapidly moved west-
ward. The Jacksonian years favoured
the common man and sanctioned ex-
pansionist politics and economics. For US soldiers and Moro children
blacks and Indians the nineteenth cen- in the Philippines (Mindanao). 1899
tury proved to be crucial: for blacks it
brought freedom after the Civil War (1861-65), and for the Indians it brought the end of the
freedom they had known for centuries.
The submission of the Indians, as the history books call it, is one of the darkest chapters in
American history. Overrun by prospectors, such as the Forty-Niners of the California gold
rush in 1849, hemmed in by farmers, harassed by the US Army and often harassing in
retaliation one Indian tribe after another had to cede its land and surrender to be huddled
into reservations, i.e., desert land and barren regions where the Native Americans starved
and grew desperate before resigning themselves to their fate. As white men and women
moved westward and southward, this became the fate of, among others, the Creeks and
Seminoles in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida; of the Navajos in the West, "subdued" by Kit
Carson in 1863/4; of the Apaches in the Southwest, who surrendered under their chief
Geronimo in 1886, and of the Great Plains Indians, such as the Sioux (or Dakota) who, led
by their chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, annihilated the vainglorious General Custer
and his army in the Battle of the Little Big Horn (1876) before being "quelled" in 1891. A
few Indian chiefs, such as the Shawnee Tecumseh (1768?-1813) and the Teton-Dakota
Sitting Bull (1831?-1890; his Indian name was Tatanka Yotanka), tried unsuccessfully to
unite the Indian tribes. On 29 December 1890 over 200 Sioux men, women, and children
were massacred at Wounded Knee. This marked the Indians' last stand. By 1890 the
"physical" frontier, too, had reached its end, as there was no free land left. The frontier,
already mythologized by such figures as Billy the Kid (New Mexico), Wild Bill Hickock
(Kansas), and Daniel Boone (Kentucky), became a metaphor.
The Civil War divided the United
States over the slavery question.
The plantation economy of the
South could flourish only with
black labour controlled by a
white planter aristocracy. In the
face of human suffering, the abo-
litionists from the North refused
to consider economic issues. The
consequence was the rupture of
American society as the South's
eleven Confederate States, led by
"President" Jefferson Davis,
waged a long and costly war with
J. M. Stanley, Osage Scalp Dance. 1845 President Abraham Lincoln's 23
states of the North. Initially, the
Confederacy gained the upper
hand under General Robert E. Lee. But after 1862 and Lincoln's Emancipation Pro-
clamation of 1863 that freed all slaves in the South, the Confederacy fought the North and
human freedom and finally surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant in 1865. Human values
triumphed, and the plantation system came to an end, creating massive economic problems
for blacks and impoverished whites. Segregation continued well into the twentieth century.
After the Civil War, the industrial power of the North helped America to achieve enormous
economic progress. Industrialists and bankers, joined by inventors, catapulted the USA to
the top of all Western nations: Andrew Carnegie achieved in steel what Cornelius Vander-
bilt did in railroads and shipping, J. Pierpont Morgan in banking and John D. Rockefeller in
oil. The transcontinental railway, the Union Pacific, was completed in 1869. Although the
money market crashed twice, in 1873 and 1893, the inventions of Remington (typewriter),
Bell (telephone), and Edison (phonograph) heralded a new age.
The literature of the nineteenth century is dominated, topically, by the issue of slavery and
by the frontier (the Indians, the new territories), and, intellectually, by the ideas of democra-
cy, ethical subjectivism, and the impulses of religion and the Enlightenment, which emerged
in Transcendentalism. After mid-century, the "American literary renaissance" turned back,
to an analysis of the Puritan past, and forward, creating the modern psychological and sym-
bolic novel. As capitalism triumphed in American society, realism and naturalism in the
fiction of William Dean Howells and Stephen Crane analysed the darker sides of eco-
nomic advancement.
American art truly came into its own in the nineteenth century. Though many American
painters still went to Europe for an apprenticeship, they returned home to found schools and
propagate new styles. Romanticism found expression among a first generation of artists,
with Washington Allston (1779-
1843) as the leading figure who
produced landscapes (see Moonlit
Landscape) and narrative paintings
based on literary or biblical sub-
jects. An interesting figure in the
1820 and 1830s was John James
Audubon (1785-1851), a great for-
mal artist whose "ornithological art"
(recorded in four gigantic volumes
showing 435 species, life-size: The
Birds of America,1827-38) has in-
fluenced artists well into the twen-
tieth century. Audubon had to hunt Albert Bierstadt, The Last of the Buffalo. 1889
and kill the birds, in great numbers,
to describe them; he would then wire them to a board in a position that seemed both
aesthetically pleasing and informative. The result was often a plate hovering between artistic
adoration and scientific information. Rebelling against the classical tradition of aristocratic
portraiture, a group of American artists returned from Europe founded the Hudson River
School. They championed romantic depictions of American landscape in paintings also
reflecting the rise of national pride and a feeling for independence. The leaders of the school
were Thomas Cole (1802-48), Asher Durand (1796-1886; see Kindred Spirits, 1849), and
Thomas Doughty (1793-1856). Their concerns were clearly those one also finds in the works
of contemporary writers the fiction of Cooper and the poetry of Bryant, for instance who
celebrated American sceneries, American pioneers and the natives. The first Hudson River
group was followed by painters who were more sentimental and more literal e.g., Frederick
Church (1826-1900; see Niagara, 1857), the German-born Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902; The
Last of the Buffalo, 1889), John F. Kensett (1818-72), and Thomas Moran (1837-1926).
Eminent solitary figures were George Caleb Bingham (1811-79), who made the frontier his
theme in romantic-realistic scenes (see, for instance, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri,
c. 1845), George Innes (1825-94), famous for his eastern landscapes, and the Quaker Ed-
ward Hicks (1780-1849), a sign and carriage painter and one of the first "primitives" in folk-
art that is today highly prized in America (see his Peacable Kingdom, c. 1834). In the second
half of the century, portrait painting and realism found a powerful master in Thomas Eakins
(1844-1916), who had studied under Grme in Paris before returning to Philadelphia (see
The Swimming Hole, 1883; and Walt Whitman, 1888). Eakins's contemporary Winslow
Homer (1836-1910; see The Blue Boat, 1892) was one of the most eminent landscape paint-
ers, and history painting flourished a last time with the German-born Emanuel Leutze
(1816-1868). Leutze was to decorate the Capitol in Washington, but he finished only one wall
painting. His melodramatic canvas Washington Crossing the Delaware (1849-50) became
an icon of American painting; it has fascinated many generations of artists, the last being the
pop artist Larry Rivers (1924-2002) who mocked its extreme patriotism in a parody exhib-
ited in 1953. The customs and manners of native Americans found the interest of a number
of artists, among them George Catlin (1796-1872) who followed the example of the Swiss
painter Karl Bodmer (1809-93), one of the first to record the life of the Plains Indians.
During long trips in the American West, undertaken with the sole purpose of finding out
about and painting native Americans, Catlin visited almost 50 tribes. He recorded in pencil
and colour Indian warriors, chiefs, and women, observing their rituals, riding with them on
buffalo hunts, entering their tents and sweat
lodges, and keeping extensive notes in his
journals about their appearance, customs,
and ceremonies. Catlin's Letters and Notes
on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions
of the North American Indians (2 vols.,
with illustrations, 1841) is as important a
document for cultural history as his draw-
ings and water colours. In the late 1830s
and early 1840s, Catlin exhibited his "In-
dian Galleries" to large audiences in Ameri-
ca and Europe. The closing decades of the
century saw the emergence of the American
answer to European impressionism in the
works of James McNeill Whistler (1834-
1903), who left America for Europe in
1863; Mary Cassatt (1845-1926), who
studied under Degas in Paris; William
Merrit Chase (1849-1916), still famous for
his landscape paintings; and John Singer
Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits. 1849 Sargent (1856-1925), known for his mural
paintings in the Boston Public Library. The
true leader of the American impressionists, however, was Childe Hassam (1859-1935), one
of the founders in 1895 of the group Ten American Painters and as important for American
art as Claude Monet was for French impressionism.
2. Poetry
Traces of European Romanticism, i.e., the preference for feeling and imagination and the
importance of individualism and patriotism, can be found in the work of several American
poets before the Civil War. William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was the first American
poet to gain international reputation. He was born in Massachusetts and worked as a lawyer
and journalist. At first an admirer of Pope, he soon abandoned the heroic couplet and
became interested in the verse of Gray, Young, Cowper, Thomson, and Wordsworth. Death
and transience of the natural world are the themes of his elegy "Thanatopsis" (1817), written
in blank verse. In his nature poems he used American surroundings to lyrical effect: "The
Yellow Violet" and "To a Waterfowl", both composed in 1815, are charming poems, and
"The Prairies" (1834) celebrates the vastness and beauty of American scenery in the same
romantic way as the Hudson River school of painters, above all Thomas Cole (1801-48),
with whom Bryant explored the Catskill Mountains near New York.
These are the Gardens of the Desert, these

The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful.
And fresh as the young earth, ere man had sinned
The prairies. I behold them for the first,
And my heart swells, while the dilated sight
Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch
In airy undulations, far away,
As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,
Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,
And motionless for ever Motionless?
No they are all unchained again. The clouds
Sweep over with their shadows, and beneath
The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye;
Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase
The sunny ridges. Breezes of the South!
The great lyric poet of the pre-Civil War period was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). Born in
Boston, Massachusetts, he became an orphan at an early age and was sent to school in
England by his foster-father John Allan, a Richmond merchant. Poe studied at the University
of Virginia and tried a military career, but he was dismissed from the military academy of
West Point. Although he always felt a Virginian, he later returned to Boston and began a
brief and brilliant literary career that was overshadowed by his inclination for alcohol. In
1836 he married his thirteen-year-old cousin. When she died in 1847, Poe never recovered
from the blow.
Ironically, Poe's stories are superior to his verse and this fact would seem to contradict his
own theory. But he was the first American man of letters who made literature his job. In
addition to his poetry and literary theory, he practically invented and popularized the tale of
terror and the modern detective story. Emerson and English-speaking poets of the time
dismissed Poe as "the jingle man", objecting to his excessive use of alliteration and musi-
cality. Yet his verse exerted a powerful influence on the French symbolists (Baudelaire,
Rimbaud, Mallarm)1 and was appreciated by Browning, Tennyson, and Yeats.
Poe laid down the principles for his own poetry and for what he thought poetry should be in
such lectures as "The Poetic Principle" (1848/9; published in 1850) and his essay "The
Philosophy of Composition" (1846), which influenced later poetic movements. Good verse,
according to Poe, has to be brief (a thesis which foreshadows the Imagists), devoid of didac-
ticism (which anticipates the "art for art's sake" movement of the late nineteenth century),
and has to treat of transient beauty, best expressed in the death of a beautiful woman as seen
by her lover (the union of Eros and Thanatos). A convincing poem, he argued, must have a
planned effect, which is achieved by the rational composition of sound, rhythm, and mean-
ing. As his various poems show, Poe was often more interested in poetic forms and effects
than in content, and his themes never change very much: love and death, preferably in-
volving a child-woman, and art. His theory suggests a rational and theoretical approach to
1 Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was a revolutionary figure in nineteenth-century literature. He

wrote verse very early, completing his most famous poem ("Le bateau ivre") at the age of 17: it
inquires into unknown realities and became an important text for the following generations of
writers. He then tried to turn himself into a visionary, describing the unsuccessful attempt in
Les Illuminations, and concluded his life as a tramp and vagabond in Europe and Africa.
writing verse, but it does not fully explain the charm of his verbal music and lyrical gift.
"The Raven" is a variation on his favourite topic. In this poem the bird finally becomes a
symbol of death. The first stanza shows Poe's subtle use of rhythm varied by syncopation:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door
Only this, and nothing more."
Similarly, sound is put to impressive use in the first stanza of "Ulalume: A Ballad" (1847),
which Mallarm liked very much. In "Annabel Lee" (1849) Poe first creates a fairy land of
innocent and saint-like child-lovers (thus sex and the woman as "Other" are excluded)
whose happiness is destroyed by an evil fate. The final stanza demonstrates his Romantic
inclination for the Gothic and the abnormal in a picture of a lover beside the corpse of his
bride, an image that expresses a male nineteenth-century obsession one also finds in art on
both sides of the Atlantic. It is fascinating in the sense that it elevates woman to the status of
a monument to be adored even while silencing her and making her powerless and accessible
to the male gaze. If one adds to this the melodious rhythm of the anapestic metrical pattern
of the poem, one may understand why the melancholy that is thus created attracted and
continues to attract readers:
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
She was a child and I was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love
I and my Annabel Lee
With a love that the wingd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud by night
Chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me;
Yes! That was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling
And killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love

Of those who were older than we
Of many far wiser than we
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but l feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
And so, all the night tide, l lie down by the side
Of my darling my darling my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Some of Poe's poems, like some of his stories, create a melancholy, sad, and bizarre land-
scape "Poeland" as it has been called in which night is stronger than day and horror
becomes familiar. Examples are "Dream-land" (1844) and "The City in the Sea" (1831).
Although Emerson, Henry James, and T. S. Eliot considered Poe's verse either too childish
or too superficial, many other writers and poets have expressed delight in his lyrics, praising
him as a pioneering aesthetician, a literary technician, and a psychological investigator.
What many of Poe's contemporaries objected to was his idea that poetry should not serve a
moral purpose. Defenders of moral poetry were Bryant and the Boston "Brahmins"
Whittier, Longfellow, and Lowell whom Poe attacked on many occasions. The term
"Brahmin" was coined by the critic and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94) to desig-
nate the cultural aristocracy of New England who promoted literary consciousness and
ethical commitment. John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92) came from a Quaker family and
was a farmer (he is often compared to Robert Burns, the Scottish poet). His early verse is
inspired by his support of the anti-slavery cause. After the Civil War, he focused on history,
nature, the people of New England, and religion. Examples of his late Romantic poetry can
be found in Anti-Slavery Poems (1852), Home Ballads (1860), and the nostalgic "Snow-
Bound: A Winter Idyll" (1866), in
which he looks back at his youth.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(1807-82) was the dominating fig-
ure among the "Brahmins". He was
also the most popular poet of his
time. Born in Portland, Maine, he
studied in Europe and became pro-
fessor of modern languages at Har-
vard. Longfellow was fascinated
with the German Romantic writers
and, after 1854, he dedicated all his
time to literature in a circle of
friends. With the exception of a few
short poems, his verse suffers from Illustration for Longfellow's Hiawatha. 19th century
an overdose of moral sentiment and lacks depth, passion, and originality, yet he was a gifted
technician with a polished style and used a variety of poetic forms and distinctive metres.
His major themes are derived from European history and literature. Sometimes these are
transposed to the New World, as in Evangeline (1847), a verse epic in hexameters that was
inspired by Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea and tells the story of the French Canadians
driven out of Nova Scotia by the English in 1755. In the following passage, the poet praises
the beauty of the North American wilderness and bewails the fate of the French Canadians
driven from their land:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighbouring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?
Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers,
Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands,
Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven?
Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!
Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October
Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o'er the ocean.
Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pr.
Longfellow had tremendous success with his first two volumes of poetry, Voices of the
Night (1839; see the excellent "Hymn to the Night") and Ballads and Other Poems (1842).
His reputation grew steadily with The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and The Courtship of Miles
Standish (1858). The latter is a humorous verse novella on the love story of one of his
ancestors, John Alden, and his wife to-be, Priscilla. In Hiawatha Longfellow created the
romanticized American Indian hero who civilizes his people and leaves with the setting sun,
the symbol of a dying culture, before the white man and Christian religion appear on the
scene. The narrative poem is written in unrhymed trochaic tetrameter, and owes some of its
substance to the Finnish epic Kalevala. It proved so popular that several scenes were en-
graved by Currier and Ives and the whole poem was set to music. Some of Longfellow's
best short lyrical poems are contained in Ultima Thule (1880; see the sonnets in this
collection) and In the Harbor (1882; see "Sundown" and "The City and the Sea").
The third "Brahmin", James Russell Lowell (1819-91), was born at Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts, and educated at Harvard. He succeeded Longfellow as professor of modern lan-
guages. Also a renowned essayist and critic, Lowell was the first editor of the Atlantic
Monthly, an influential magazine established in 1857, and served as a diplomat in Spain and
England. Like Longfellow, Lowell was opposed to slavery and tried to acquaint the Amer-
ican public with the European cultural heritage. As a poet, he began with odes, sonnets, and
verse parables such as The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848). Lowell was best as a humourist and
political satirist, and he demonstrated his gifts in A Fable for Critics (1848), which makes
fun of contemporary men of letters, and his major work, The Biglow Papers. Containing
prose and verse, this political satire is written in a racy Yankee2 dialect. It was published in
two series, in 1848 and 1867, discussing such political issues as the Mexican War and the
Civil War in the persona of the New England farmer Hosea Biglow.
The South saw the brief flourishing of some patriotic poets, such as Henry Timrod (1828-
67), Paul Hamilton Hayne (1830-86) and William John Grayson (1788-1863), who all
defended the Southern cause in the Civil War in odes and war poems. But none of them can
be considered as important as Sidney Lanier (1842-81), a native of Macon, Georgia, and of
Huguenot parentage. He was a soldier in the Confederate army, contracted tuberculosis and,
after 1866, tried several professions including that of musician in a Baltimore orchestra.
Before he died from his fatal disease, he lectured on literature and literary theory and wrote
a novel on the Civil War, Tiger-Lilies (1867). Lanier was fascinated by the relations
between music and poetry. Like Poe, he made much use of melody and sound in his verse
and experimented with form. He demonstrated his musical theory of poetry, laid down in
The Science of English Verse (1880), in a series of poems, such as Symphony (1875) and
The Marshes of Glynn (1878). The latter is certainly his most famous poem. In its final part,
the speaker decides to remain close to God, whose presence he has felt in the marshes, and
compares himself to the marsh-hen:
As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God;
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies;
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God;
Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.
The major Transcendentalists Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and Fuller also wrote poetry,
but they could express their ideas better in the essay and related forms of prose. Their
poetry, and that of Emerson in particular, tends to be a mere vehicle for ideas and is thus
heavily meditative, intellectual, and moralistic. The two poets of the Transcendentalist
movement, Jones Very (1813-80) and Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-90), a Unitarian
minister, were concerned with religious issues, writing in traditional forms and in the spirit
of the English metaphysical poets.
Only two poets broke with poetic conventions in the second half of the nineteenth century,
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Both revolutionized and Americanized American
poetry. They proved profoundly influential and continue to be read and studied. Walt(er)
Whitman (1819-92) was born on Long Island, New York, the son of a carpenter. Whitman
grew up in Brooklyn and had an erratic life, working as printer, journalist, building con-
tractor, and teacher. Self-educated, he read without system or plan: the Bible, Homer, Shake-
speare, Dante, the Nibelungenlied, Greek poetry, and the English and German Romanticists.
After 1840 he edited newspapers in New York and New Orleans and served as a nurse in
army hospitals in Washington during the Civil War. Whitman took an active part in politics
and advocated democratic ideals. His great poetic masterpiece is Leaves of Grass. It was
2 A native or inhabitant of New England. During the Civil War, the term referred to the Union
soldiers and the inhabitants of the Northern states. Outside the USA, it is now used as a pejor-
ative nickname for any native of the United States.
first published in 12 parts in 1855 and was continually augmented until the "Death-bed
edition" came out in 1892. Leaves of Grass reflects many of Whitman's personal experiences
as well as his reading. What makes it remarkable poetry is its rejection of conventionality
both in form and content. Whitman refused to borrow verse from European and other for-
eign sources, discarded rhyme almost entirely, and took considerable liberties with metre.
The result, a kind of rhythmic prose ordered by caesura and alliteration and rich in images
and allusions, was revolutionary for the age and heralded a new style.
The various editions of Leaves of Grass indicate Whitman's development and preoccu-
pations. Thus the 1860 edition reflects his political involvement with the democratic cause
and his view of the sexual force of nature (see "Chants Democratic" and "Children of
Adam"); the edition of 1867 contains the poems dealing with the Civil War (published in
1865 under the title Drum-Taps) and mourning the death of President Lincoln, such as
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", a powerful elegy whose opening stanzas
provide an impression of Whitman's poetic skill.
1
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
2
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear'd O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.
In "Passage to India", incorporated into Leaves of Grass in 1876, Whitman celebrates the
completion of the Suez Canal and of the American transcontinental railway. Among his
contemporaries, only Emerson recognized Whitman's stature as a poet. Leaves of Grass is in
essence one song about America, about her nature, vitality, dynamism, and variety, and
about American democracy, which allegedly guarantees freedom to the individual. Thus he
sings of man, woman and America in the central poem "Song of Myself", which is made up
of 52 sections and brims with optimism:
Smile O voluptuous cool-breath'd earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!
Earth of departed sunset earth of the mountains misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbow'd earth rich apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes.
What Gerard Manley Hopkins did for English poetry, Emily Dickinson (1830-86) achieved
for American verse. Together with Whitman, she is today recognized as one of America's
most important poets, a forerunner of modernism far ahead of her time. Like Hopkins, she
was unknown as a poet during her lifetime. Publication of her almost 1,800 short poems
began in the 1890s, and it was only in 1955 that a full critical text of her work was made
available in a three-volume edition edited by Thomas H. Johnson.
Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, and spent almost all her life there in
seclusion, apart from a year at a seminary for girls and a few visits to Washington, Phila-
delphia and Boston. She corresponded with a few people, among them the clergyman
Charles Wadsworth, whom she probably loved passionately, and T. W. Higginson, who dis-
cussed her poems with her. After 1862 she spent almost all her time in her house in Am-
herst, concentrating on the inner life of her imagination and her immediate surroundings, the
flowers and birds in her garden and the objects in her home. The experience of nature and of
seasons ("Apparently with no surprise", "The Day came slow") often led her to the contem-
plation of death, the central theme of many of her poems. "Because I could not stop for
Death" shows that her poetry is indebted, in spirit, to Calvinism and the metaphysical poets,
and, in form, to the ballad and the church hymn.
712
Because I could not stop for Death
He kindly stopped for me
The Carriage held but just Ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess in the Ring
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain
We passed the Setting Sun
Or rather He passed Us
The Dews drew quivering and chill
For only Gossamer, my Gown
My Tippet only Tulle
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground
The Roof was scarcely visible
The Cornice in the Ground
Since then 'tis Centuries and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity
Dickinson's economical use of metre, her preference for assonance and ellipsis, creating
both verbal and syntactical ambiguity, and her special way of separating verses by dashes
make her poetry essentially modern. She gave expression to a wide range of moods. Thus in
"The soul selects her own society", the speaker reflects on her withdrawal from society and
her happiness with just one being who could be a lover or God:
303
The Soul selects her own Society
Then shuts the Door
To her divine Majority
Present no more
Unmoved she notes the Chariots pausing
At her low Gate
Unmoved an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat
I've known her from an ample nation
Choose One
Then close the Valves of her attention
Like Stone
In no. 585 she describes in a poetic riddle a new technical achievement the arrival of the
steam locomotive:
I like to see it lap the Miles
And lick the Valleys up
And stop to feed itself at Tanks
And then prodigious step
Around a Pile of Mountains
And supercilious peer
In Shanties by the sides of Roads
And then a Quarry pare
To fit its Ribs
And crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid hooting stanza
Then chase itself down Hill
And neigh like Boanerges
Then punctual as a Star
Stop docile and omnipotent
At its own stable door
And she was capable of expressing her intense imagination and passion, as for example in
"Wild Nights".
Wild Nights Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile the Winds
To a Heart in port
Done with the Compass
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden
Ah, the Sea
Might I but moor Tonight

In Thee!
The poem demonstrates her daring use of seemingly conflicting metaphors (erotic nights,
the romantic image of the boat, heavenly paradise) and a style that deliberately refuses to be
smooth. Yet the effect, the juxtaposition of Eros and religion, is as convincing as that of the
best of metaphysical poetry.
Thus Whitman, the verbose and optimistic singer in free verse of America's beauty and
democracy, and Emily Dickinson, the more reserved and pensive explorer of erotic and
religious passion and of death and human despair, became America's first significant poets
with an international influence.
At a time when they were barred from education and concerned with human freedom,
blacks wrote very little poetry. If they could write, they mostly chose prose, like Frederick
Douglass, to voice their complaints. Like the blacks, the Indians had an oral tradition with
marked poetic features. Written records, such as the Walam Olum (Painted Record) of the
Delaware Indians are extremely rare. Here are two
examples from other tribes. The first is a Winne-
bago creation song:
Pleasant it looked,
this newly created world.
Along the entire length and breadth
of the earth, our grandmother,
extended the green reflection
of her covering
and the escaping odours
were pleasant to inhale.
The second example is a Pawnee poem:
Let us see, is this real,
This life I am living?
You, Gods, who dwell everywhere,
This life I am living?
3. Drama
Although by the early nineteenth century, drama Karl Bodmer, Pehriska-Ruhpa. 1832-34
was flourishing in New York and Philadelphia,
American playwrights were few and far between. In New England, and outside the bigger
cities, the Puritan objection to the theatre could still be felt, and the Revolution as well as
the frontier conditions did not favour theatrical productions. Where drama was possible,
European plays dominated. As there was no copyright3 law until 1891, numerous English,
3 This is the exclusive right to the publication, production, or sale of the rights to a literary, dra-
matic, musical, or artistic work. It is granted by law for a definite period of years to an author or
a company. US copyright protects a work during the lifetime of its author and for 50 years after
French, and German comedies and melodramas were adapted and performed in America.
When Americans finally did write dramatic texts, they catered to an audience interested in
sensation and sentimentality. The early commercialization of the theatres led to "show busi-
ness" and was a further obstacle in the way of a serious and meaningful drama.
Significantly, America's first professional playwright, William Dunlap (1766-1839), adapt-
ed European plays for American audiences in New York (The Stranger, 1798, after Kotze-
bue; The Italian Father, 1799, after Dekker) and wrote a History of the American Theatre
(1832). James Nelson Barker (1784-1858) adapted plays in Philadelphia: Scott's verse
romance Marmion (1812), and How to Try a Lover (1817), based on a French picaresque
novel. However, Barker made a first step toward American themes with his Superstition
(1824), which is about the Salem witchcraft trials4 in seventeenth-century New England.
The story of Pocahontas and Captain Smith, in its romanticized form, was very popular until
the end of the century. Theatrical versions include Barker's The Indian Princess (1808) and
Pocahontas (1830), by the Virginian George Washington Parker Curtis. Hollywood re-
vived the mythical story in a cartoon movie released in the late 1990s.
As Barker's successful play about Pocahontas shows, the theatre as well as art and literature
began to sentimentalize Indians precisely at the point when their annihiliation, partly tol-
erated and partly planned by the American government, was progressing on the North
American continent. Significantly, the full title of Barker's drama The Indian Princess; or,
La Belle Sauvage alludes to Rousseau's ideas about the essential goodness of man (which
is to include Native Americans) while suggesting a peaceful union between the races op-
posing each other on the frontier. Beginning with John Augustus Stone's (1800-1834) im-
mensely popular Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829), which is concerned
with the tragic political failure and moral superiority of an Indian chief better known in
Western history writing as King Philip (cf. King Philip's War), the American stage was
flooded with melodramas featuring Native Americans. In these plays, the Indian, the noble
savage, is transformed both into a national stereotype and a mythological figure. This figure
was to remain ambiguous for a long time and allowed the projection of a good, natural,
America on to the Native Americans even while permitting the civilization of the whites to
outdo and overpower the culture of the Indians. At the end of this process, in the 1980s and
1990s, Hollywood, America's furnace producing the cultural illusions and dreams for the
West, has begun to reflect upon the extinction of the Indians in such movies as Dances With
the author's death. Until well into the nineteenth century, in the absence of copyright, authors
could not prevent publishers from exploiting them by reprinting published works.
4 Witchcraft, if proved according to the laws then in practice, was punishable in England and
America until well into the eighteenth century. Around 1692, an epidemic disease resembling
epilepsy spread in Salem, Massachusetts. Encouraged by sermons from Cotton Mather, many
people began to believe that evil spirits in the form of witches haunted the area. In the spring
and summer of 1692, the delusion was highest: 19 people were hanged, one was pressed to
death, 55 were tortured into confessions of guilt, and 150 were imprisoned. When the Puritan
establishment, including the governor's wife and relatives of Cotton Mather, became the object
of suspicion, the delusion was over. Judge Samuel Sewall was among those who did public pen-
ance for the wrong verdicts. The events have often been treated in American literature; Arthur
Miller's The Crucible (1953) is one example from the twentieth century.
Wolves (1989). The film preserves some of the sentimental components of the Indian melo-
dramas of the first part of the nineteenth century.
The American city, in this case Philadelphia, was romanticized in Robert Montgomery
Bird's (1806-54) The City Looking Glass (1828). Many of the plays written in the early
decades of the century are today forgotten, e.g. John Howard Payne's Clari (1823) and the
plays by Nathaniel Parker Willis and George Henry Boker.
Toward mid-century, melodrama began to displace historical tragedies and romantic com-
edies. Dion Boucicault (1820-90) enjoyed great success with his adaptations of French
plays and dramatizations of Dickens's novels as well as with Rip Van Winkle and his own
drama, The Octoroon (1859), a tragedy on seduction and racism.
Based on Mayne Reid's novel and play The Quadroon (1856), Boucicault's melodrama features
a benevolent Englishman travelling in Louisiana. The hero saves a beautiful Creole5 and her
quadroon slave from drowning when the steamboat on which they find themselves explodes.
The typical complications of melodrama follow as the Englishman falls in love with the slave,
has to fend off the love of the Creole and to kidnap his black lover. Finally, she is freed to
marry her Englishman.
While Boucicault's melodrama sympathizes with the blacks in Louisiana, it never questions
the Southern plantation system; instead it blames the scrupulous capitalism of the northern
states. Equally popular were Shenandoah (1888), by Bronson Howard (1842-1908), which
develops a love story set in the Civil War; the comedies and farces of Clyde Fitch (1865-
1909), such as Beau Brummel (1890); and the melodramatic plays, laced with local colour,
of Augustus Thomas (1857-1934), James A. Herne (1839-1901; see Margaret Fleming
1890, and Shore Acres, 1892), and David Belasco (1853-1931), who was co-author of
Madame Butterfly (1900), set to music by Puccini. Best-sellers like Uncle Tom's Cabin also
enjoyed great theatrical success. It was not before the early twentieth century that American
playwrights, under the influence of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov6, turned away from sen-
sational and sentimental melodrama to develop a distinctly American theatre.
5 Creoles are defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as a) persons of European descent
born in the West Indies or Spanish America; b) persons descended from or culturally related to
the original French settlers of the southern United States, especially Louisiana; c) persons of
mixed Black and European ancestry who speak a creolized language; and, as a less common
meaning, d) Black slaves born in the Americas.
6 Johann August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a Swedish playwright and writer. His plays are con-
cerned with the issues of religion, social class, marriage, and sexuality; they combine an
aggressive naturalism with a sense of the pathological. His tense, symbolic dramas (Miss Julie,
1888, The Dance of Death, 1901) usually portray some aspect of human suffering and influenced
the plays of O'Neill and the writers of the theatre of the absurd.
Anton Chekhov (or Tchekhov, 1860-1904) was a Russian dramatist and short story writer. He
wrote several light one-act comedies but is best remembered for his late plays which blend
naturalism and symbolism in detailed portraits of the upper class (The Seagull, 1895, Uncle
Vanya, 1900, Three Sisters, 1901, The Cherry Orchard, 1904). Chekhov has had an immense
influence on English and American literature.
4. Prose Fiction
4.1 The Novel

Much impressed by the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper
(1789-1851) turned for his romantic fiction to the recent American past, to the life of the
American frontiersmen, to the Red Indians, and the prairies and forests. A native of New
Jersey, Cooper grew up in a frontier community in the state of New York. He studied at
Yale, served in the American Navy and, in 1817, became a farmer. During a long stay in
Europe (1826-33) he acquainted himself with European customs and politics and read the
German Romantic writers. Back in America, he became an ardent social critic and attacked
Jacksonian society. But the public preferred his fiction concerned with the frontier, which,
as one often tends to ignore, amounts to less than a third of his novels.
Cooper's The Spy (1821), combining ad-
venture and romance, is a melodramatic
historical novel about the Revolution,
while The Pilot (1823) is one of the bet-
ter known of his sea stories: both works
owe a lot to Scott's style and technique.
It was with his Leather-Stocking series
that Cooper achieved world-wide suc-
cess. With Natty Bumppo (also called
Leather-Stocking, Deerslayer, Pathfind-
er, and Hawkeye), Cooper created a ro-
mantic mythological frontiersman. The
order in which Cooper wrote his five
Leather-Stocking novels does not corres-
pond to the chronology of his hero's life.
Thomas Cole, Daniel Boone and His Cabin
Thus The Deerslayer (published last of
on the Great Osage Lake. c. 1826 the series in 1841) is set in the French
and Indian Wars and shows a youthful
Natty Bumppo. Natty is portrayed as an experienced hunter and trapper in The Last of the
Mohicans (1826), prefers the wilderness to marriage in The Pathfinder (1840), experiences
with mixed feelings the advance of civilization into Indian territory in The Pioneers (1823),
and, aged almost 90, lives his last adventure on the Western plains in The Prairie (1827).
For all his weaknesses in style and characterization (stereotypes of good and bad persons,
including Indians, abound), Cooper provided much suspense, a marvellous portrait of the
American landscape, and a study of the conflict between the values of civilization and the
wilderness clashing at the frontier. Cooper's novels admittedly suffer from too much idealiz-
ation of nature and people and they virtually exclude women. Cooper, like Hawthorne, Mel-
ville, and Mark Twain, was largely unable to create convincing female characters. Never-
theless, he stands at the beginning of a truly American tradition of the novel that made use
of native settings, problems, and characters.
What F(rancis) O(tto) Matthiessen (1902-50) termed the "American literary renaissance"
came after Cooper, toward the middle of the century, when within five years Hawthorne,
Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman published such important works as The Scarlet Letter
(1850), Moby-Dick (1851), Walden (1854), and Leaves of Grass (1855). Nathaniel Haw-
thorne (1804-64) considered himself a psychological novelist. While Cooper focused ro-
mantically on the frontier, Hawthorne was concerned with both the influence and the
waning of Puritanism in New England. To some extent, he was inspired by the ideas of the
Transcendentalists, but he disliked Thoreau's moral navet and was fully aware of the
implications of evil and sin, which he treated in his short stories and symbolic novels. A
New Englander by birth, he worked as a journalist and customs officer in Salem, Massachu-
setts, and, in 1841, lived for a few months on "Brook Farm" with the Transcendentalists.
Hawthorne got to know Melville and served as American consul in Liverpool (1853-57)
before spending two years in Italy and returning to Concord, Massachusetts. Guilt, remorse,
isolation, repentance, and despair are the themes in his major novels. He termed them ro-
mances, "somewhere between the real world and fairy land, where the actual and the imag-
inary may meet". With his first novel, Fanshawe (1828), he was himself dissatisfied. The
Scarlet Letter (1850) was his first novelistic treatment of Puritanism and the issue of guilt.
Set in seventeenth-century Boston, The Scarlet Letter is concerned with the heroic suffering and
eventual triumph of Hester Prynne over Puritan society. Because Hester committed adultery with
Arthur Dimmesdale in the absence of her husband, Roger Chillingworth (the child Pearl is the
living proof of this sin), she is forced by the Puritan community to wear the red letter "A" (for
adultery) as a token of her guilt. Hawthorne analyses the mental suffering and the moral
conflicts of the three major characters. Chillingworth returns to find his wife in the stocks,
refusing to name her lover, and he decides to conceal his identity. In his search for Hester's
paramour he becomes a morally degraded monomaniac. The preacher Dimmesdale struggles for
years with his conscience. He finally makes a public confession and dies in Hester's arms.
Hester, the heroine, does penance for her sin by helping other unfortunates in the Puritan
community, but she refuses to live according to the rigid Puritan standards. She even returns
voluntarily from her exile in Europe, decides to continue wearing the letter "A" and finds her
peace of mind by living according to her own conscience.
The study of sin and evil is also central to The House of the Seven Gables (1851), which is
concerned with the consequence of a curse pronounced on the author's great-grandfather, a
judge in the Salem witchcraft trials, and to The Blithedale Romance (1852), which contains
episodes from Hawthorne's time spent at "Brook Farm", the idealist community of the
Transcendentalists. In The Marble Faun (1860), Hawthorne chose a European setting,
Rome, but the characters remain essentially Puritan as the psychological drama of the con-
sequences of a crime unfolds. An-
other theme of this novel, which
foreshadows Henry James, is the
meeting of European and American
ideas and ideals.
Hawthorne shared with Herman
Melville (1819-1891) a preference
for psychological exploration and
symbolism as well as his fascina-
tion with evil. But Melville had a
more tragic vision of life. Although
he ridiculed Emerson and the Trans-
cendentalists, he shared some com-
mon ground with them, such as the Boat Destroyed by a Whale. 19th-century engraving
philosophical view of the individual and the tendency to symbolize the soul and see nature
as an allegory of human experience. Melville's outstanding work, Moby-Dick, had to wait
until the twentieth century to be recognized as one of the significant novels in American
literature. Melville was born in New York, the son of a wealthy businessman. He lost his
father at the age of 12. Because of his father's bankruptcy, the young Herman's education
was cut short, and in 1839 he shipped to Liverpool as a cabin boy. He was much impressed
by life at sea, but returned to upstate New York for a brief period to teach school. In 1841
he embarked on the whaler Acushnet for the South Seas. At the Marquesas, he left his ship
and lived for a month on those beautiful islands, escaping from the hostile natives on an
Australian trading ship that took him to Tahiti. Before returning to Boston in 1844, he also
visited Hawaii.
This education at sea, as it were, formed the basis for his best fiction. Combining personal
experience with imagination and information from books he had read, he wrote a number of
novels that, although mere preludes to Moby-Dick, made him famous. Thus Typee (1846)
and Mardi (1849) are set in the Marquesas, while Omoo (1847) depicts the island life on
Tahiti; Redburn (1849) makes use of his knowledge of shipping and of Liverpool, and
White-Jacket (1850) is also partly autobiographical in its realistic description of the occa-
sionally brutal life aboard a man-of-war.
The success of these novels won Melville a large readership and entrance to the literary
circles of Boston and New York. In 1849, two years after his marriage, he made a voyage to
England and France and then settled on the Massachusetts farm that was to be his home for
the next thirteen years. He became a good friend of his neighbour, Hawthorne, to whom he
dedicated his Moby-Dick (1851). Few of Melville's contemporaries understood the literary
value of Moby-Dick. Like Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, it is both a realistic and a sym-
bolic novel. Contained within the realistic account of whaling and adventures at sea is the
symbolic description of man's desperate struggle with his fate and his quest for knowledge
women, such as Ahab's bride, are absent in this male world.
The story is told by Ishmael, a youth who becomes friendly with Queequeg, a Polynesian prince.
Together they sign on the Pequod, a whaling ship. The ship's captain, Ahab, has an ivory leg and
proves to be a monomaniac: after a few days at sea he reveals that his only aim is to capture the
cunning white whale Moby-Dick that tore away his leg in a former encounter. Before the white
whale is finally sighted, the Pequod is nearly carried around the world, a few whales are
captured, and many accidents and incidents are described. In an almost apocalyptic final fight
that lasts for three days, the whale is harpooned but drags Ahab down into the deep after sinking
the ship. Ishmael, the only survivor, is saved by another whaler.
In Moby-Dick the sea, with its fierce force and dangerous beauty, is of prime importance.
Melville describes it in lyrical passages giving it epic grandeur. The plot of the voyage is
interwoven with discussions of the nature of the whale and of the whaling industry. Moby-
Dick becomes the central ambiguous symbol: the Biblical Leviathan and, for Ahab, the
incarnation of evil. Ishmael sees Ahab's chase of the whale as a demonic self-destruction; to
him, the whale is not merely dangerous and destructive but also a creature of God and of
fascinating beauty. In a truly epic but unobtrusive manner, Melville tries to present an
encyclopedic view of life and the world on board a ship whose crew is made up of whalers
from many nations who, symbolically, represent mankind (if not womankind). Symbolism
works on many levels in this magnificent piece of fiction, including names (e.g., the whaling
ship, the Pequod, which alludes to an extinct Indian tribe; Ahab, a name that, like Ishmael,
is to remind the reader of characters in the Old Testament), as well as literary and linguistic
styles (the language of Shakespeare and American slang). The various elements of the novel
essays, speeches, sermons, parables, and anecdotes are not always successfully inte-
grated, but they are an attempt to reflect upon the process of narrating and of representation
as such, and the overall effect of Moby-Dick is one of deeply moving and symbolic fiction.
Melville even draws on painterly representation, especially on Turner's visions of landscapes
and the sea. And in a few instances, the novel even integrates famous paintings, and more
especially, the artistic problem of catching the truth of the moment. In Chapter 36 ('The
Quarter-Deck'), for example, the diabolic captain Ahab assembles his 'braves' (harpooneers)
on deck to make them swear an oath:
Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and ye mates, flank me with
your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in,
that I may in some sort revive a noble custom of my fishermen fathers before me [] 'Advance,
ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done, let me touch the axis.' So saying, with
extended arm, he grasped the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so
doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from Starbuck to
Stubb; from Stubb to Flask.
This scene is obviously intermedial, in the sense that it alludes to Jacques Louis David's sen-
sational pre-Revolutionary painting Le serment des Horaces (The Oath of the Horatii),
1785. By way of the allusion to the painting, Moby-Dick raises some questions about demo-
cracy, revolution, despotism and the justification of leadership. Melville's novel frequently
engages with painting and the reading of signs, even to the point where, in Chapter 99 ('The
Doubloon'), we are given a post-modern reading (avant la lettre) of a gold-coin, as every-
body who sees it perceives different meanings while the mad Pip comes closest to the mes-
sage of the chapter, when he argues that 'I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they
look', thus alluding to the problem of reading and understanding the signs of the world,
which is one of the central issues of Moby-Dick.
Melville was bitterly disappointed by the lack of public appreciation of Moby-Dick. As his
next novel, Pierre: or, the Ambiguities (1852), a satirical and symbolic attack on the bourgeois
world, was equally unsuccessful, he had to resort to short fiction to make a living. His
beautiful and haunting short stories were published in 1856 as The Piazza Tales. After an-
other voyage to Europe and the publication of an historical novel, Israel Potter (1855), and
another satire on society, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857; this work remained
unfinished), Melville moved to New York and wrote short stories, poetry and personal
journals. After finishing "Billy Budd" (1891), he died in New York, almost totally ignored
by the literary world and the public.
Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852), by the New England writer Harriet
Beecher Stowe (1811-96), is a novel that also belongs to the American renaissance, al-
though literary historians have disregarded the book for almost a century because of its overt
pathos and sentimentality and its lack of subtle characterization. However, feminist studies
published after 1980 have pointed out that Mrs. Stowe's novel, for all its melodrama and
didactic antislavery stance, has more than historical value (it sold 300,000 copies in the first
year and had a powerful influence in America and abroad): it deserves to be studied for its
archetypal characters indebted to Puritan typology and because it is one of the first success-
ful novels by a woman in an age when men dominated the literary scene.
Stowe is fairer to the South than is often realized. Her humanitarian attitude often leads her
to create melodramatic scenes. Thus, toward the end of the book, Tom's former "good"
master arrives to see him die and vows to devote his life to the cause of abolition. But it is
the intense pathos of the novel which helped it to become one of the most influential books
in American history. Feminists have argued that, given woman's place and treatment in
nineteenth-century society, Stowe could not write differently and that her sentimental style
is the product of the way nineteenth-century women were conditioned to see the world.
As the new American nation pushed
further west and south, literature tried to
capture the rapidly changing conditions
on the various frontiers. "Local colour"
became a term for fiction, particularly
short stories, dealing both realistically
and romantically with specific areas of
the United States and the people that
lived there. For the novel, this meant
either realistic and humorous, and later
more serious, studies of frontier life or
historical romances. The local-colour
school produced a great many outstand-
ing authors. In the South, there were
G. C. Bingham, Fur Traders Descending writers like George Washington Cable
the Missouri. 1845 (1844-1925), who described Creole life
in Louisiana in his novel The Grandis-
simes (1880); Kate Chopin (1851-1904), who married a Creole in Louisiana and dealt with
her marriage and adultery in The Awakening (1899), a novel many found shocking at the
time; the Virginian Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922), who made his home state the setting
of his novel Red Rock (1898), while Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) set his fiction in
Georgia. Harriet Beecher Stowe set most of her stories in New England, and New England
also provides the background for Sarah Orne Jewett's (1849-1909) novel on Maine, The
Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).
The local-colour movement has been associated especially with the Middle West and the
West. Here, the names of the Eggleston brothers, of Bret Harte and Mark Twain are most
prominent. The backwoods of Indiana are the backdrop for Edward Eggleston's (1837-
1902) The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871) and the tales of his brother George (1839-1911).
Before turning to Mark Twain, the historical novel deserves a brief glance. It was an off-
shoot of the local-colour movement and, to some extent, a reaction against the rising realism
of the late nineteenth century. Cooper and Sir Walter Scott had written exemplary novels,
and they found a few successors. To the genre belong Sidney Lanier's Civil War novel
Tiger-Lilies (1867), Silas Weir Mitchell's (1829-1914) novel on the Revolutionary War,
Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker (1897), and the less known historical fiction of Maurice
Thompson (1844-1901) from Indiana, Winston Churchill (1871-1947) from St. Louis, and
the Brooklyn-born Paul Leicester Ford (1865-1902). Not concerned with America, but
also historical novels, are the major works of fiction of the cosmopolitan Francis Marion
Crawford (1854-1909) and the spectacular Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) by the
Indiana lawyer and diplomat Lewis Wallace (1827-1905). Ben-Hur was dramatized and
made into two Hollywood film epics in 1926 and 1959.
It is in the early work of Mark Twain that several currents, including local colour, met:
realistic-humorous description, convincing dialogue based on regional dialects, and an ele-
ment of satire mellowed by boisterous comedy. Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Lang-
horne Clemens (1835-1910). He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a small town on the Mis-
sissippi that was to provide him with incidents and characters for many of his works, as did
the great river itself, which he got to know intimately as a river pilot (1857-60). In the Civil
War, Twain served for a brief period in the Confederate Army before going to Nevada as a
prospector. In 1862 he turned to journalism, beginning with humorous sketches and stories
of the frontier. Twain also went on lecture tours and worked as a newspaper correspondent
in Hawaii (1866) and in Europe (1867). The Innocents Abroad (1869), based on his voyage
to Europe, Egypt and Palestine, was his first book. It established his reputation as a hu-
morous writer. The book is a satirical description of overrated and outmoded aspects of the
Old World as provided by a self-confident if nave American traveller. A new phase in Mark
Twain's life began in 1870, when he married Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a tycoon, and
moved with his wife to New England where he became acquainted with William Dean
Howells. Mark Twain was unable to handle money. Fascinated by new technology, he spec-
ulated on a number of gadgets, including an impractical typesetting machine that returned no
profit, and incurred heavy debts when his publishing company (of which he owned a part)
went bankrupt in 1894. But he was able to repay his creditors in full by going on a world
lecture tour and by publishing further books. Despite this success, he became increasingly
depressed, especially after the deaths of his wife and their two daughters. His bitterness and
pessimism found expression in his late works, such as The Mysterious Stranger (1916).
One would not do justice to Mark Twain by calling him a satirical humorist, for there are
many sides to his work that are often obscured by the popularity of Tom Sawyer and Huckle-
berry Finn. Thus it is easily overlooked that in 1873 Twain published The Gilded Age, writ-
ten in collaboration with Charles D. Warner (1829-1900), which denounced materialism
and political corruption. He also wrote a fictional biography of Joan of Arc (1896), which is
marred by a strong sentimental streak and appeared under yet another pseudonym, a satirical
report on his trip through Germany and Switzerland, entitled A Tramp Abroad (1880), and a
jibe at contemporary attempts to revive historical fiction with his burlesque, A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), in which the ingenious Yankee mechanic Hank
Morgan teaches King Arthur and his knights, among other things, how to ride a bicycle in-
stead of a horse. But Hank's nineteenth-century technology engenders death and destruction
instead of advancement, thus introducing a final pessimistic note. With The Prince and the
Pauper (1882), a book for children, he satirized social events in Tudor England, and in
Roughing It (1872) he recollected with much humour his experiences in Nevada and Hawaii.
Mark Twain was at his best when he wrote about the people on the Mississippi. The first 14
chapters of Life on the Mississippi appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1873 and were then
enlarged and published as a book in 1883. It shows the rich and eventful world, the comic
and tragic experiences, that Mark Twain had enjoyed so much in his youth in Hannibal,
Missouri. The Mississippi again figures prominently in two picaresque novels, The Adven-
tures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its superb sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).
Tom Sawyer's adventures in the river town of St. Petersburg, Mo., with his friends Joe
Harper and Huck Finn, as they discover a murder, play hookey, and hide on a river island,
are merely the prologue to Huckleberry Finn. Ernest Hemingway saw this novel as the be-
ginning of truly American fiction.
Huckleberry Finn has often been read as a children's story. Its episodic manner can easily
hide the implicit complexities of American life. Ironically enough, the book was temporarily
banned from some American school libraries because of its alleged use of "racist" vocabu-
lary. (The censors who object to the use of "nigger" ignore that America has a past one
should not deny). In this novel of initiation, Mark Twain managed to unite realism and ro-
mantic illusion.
Huck Finn is a most unusual narrator. As an uneducated river rat and abandoned child under the
protection of the Widow Douglas, he uses his Missouri dialect for an entertaining report about
his adventures during a trip on a raft down the Mississippi. Huck's first sentence, brimming
with lexical and grammatical mistakes, directly addresses the readers as if they were listeners.
Although linguistically unreliable (an essential element of realism), Huck proves a fascinating
narrator, as he describes the adventures with his friend, the runaway slave Jim, on their way
down the great river. A large part of the novel's satire and humour derives from Huck's seem-
ingly nave comments on aspects of civilized life, on bourgeois families and people he meets.
Afraid that Tom Sawyer's aunt will take him under her socializing wings, Huck concludes at the
happy ending of the novel, "I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,
because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there
before".
As Huck and Jim drift along on their symbolic voyage, which can be read as an initiation into
the world, Mark Twain unveils the false morality and conventionality of adult and bourgeois
life. At each contact that Huck and Jim make with the world, this world tries to corrupt and de-
prave them. The American dream is reduced to an illusion ironically upheld by Huck's final
words. Against the corrupt image of civilization are set the idyll of the raft and a Rousseau-like
though partly world-wise hero. The realistic style and characters in this novel paved the way for
the works of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Salinger, to name just three novelists who profited
from Twain's most influential book.
Inherent in the local-colour movement was an element of realism that is most obvious in the
social criticism of Mark Twain's The Gilded Age of 1873. As capitalism, "big business", and
a fast developing technology began to dominate American public life and politics, literature
took up the issues involved in this process in realistic or naturalistic attempts to show how
this affected individual lives. Literary influences from Europe, such as Zola's fiction, also
helped to develop the realistic school in American writing. William Dean Howells (1837-
1920) was a prominent representative of this movement. Self-educated and antagonistic to
the prevailing romantic spirit in American literature, this critic, journalist, and novelist
called for a truthful portrayal of average characters and everyday life. He put his theory into
practice in a large number of short stories and novels. Of his novels, A Modern Instance
(1882) is the one he cherished most. It deals with a woman's marriage to and divorce from a
ruthless Boston journalist. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is the story of a "nouveau riche"
who, coming from modest origins in Vermont, tries to rub shoulders with Boston's upper
social circles, the "Brahmins". The hero eventually recognizes the value of moral standards
and abandons his aspirations. Containing strong elements of social criticism, the novel is a
masterpiece of realistic description and humour. Big city politics and the conflict between
late nineteenth-century capitalism and socialism are portrayed in A Hazard of New Fortunes
(1890). Basil March, its hero, also figures in other novels by Howells. Like Mark Twain and
Henry James, Howells sometimes confronted American simplicity with European sophistica-
tion, as in Indian Summer (1886), which is concerned with an Indiana publisher in Florence,
Italy. Unlike the later naturalists, Howells avoided tragic aspects and maintained an opti-
mistic critical attitude that was partly influenced by Tolstoy's7 Christian socialism. As the
editor of Atlantic Monthly, Howells promoted the work of his friends Henry James and
Mark Twain and of some younger writers who came to be known as naturalists: Hamlin
Garland, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris.
Naturalism grew out of realism as the works of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin's theory of evo-
lution, and Hippolyte Taine's (1828-93) studies of environment and "milieu" began to make
themselves felt. The American naturalists learned from the fiction of Flaubert, Zola, Tolstoy,
and Turgenev.8 Implicitly arguing that men and women are products of their environment
and their social situation, natur-
alistic fiction ignores freedom
of will while focusing on the
disadvantages of human nature
and society. Traditional Ameri-
can optimism opposed the crude
determinism of the naturalists,
and some writers like Crane
(whose Maggie, 1893, did not
sell at all) never became as pop-
ular as their European contem-
poraries. Hamlin Garland
(1860-1940) dealt with the
harshness of life in the Middle
West in his short stories (Main- Winslow Homer, Croquet Scene. 1866
Travelled Roads, 1891) and
suggested social reforms with his novels. A Spoil of Office (1892) attacked political cor-
ruption, and The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop (1902) describes the injustice done to
the Indians.
Stephen Crane (1871-1900), the son of a Methodist preacher, and Frank Norris (1870-
1902), whose father was a rich jeweller in Chicago, were both greatly influenced by French
7 Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian prose writer. In the West, he is remem-
bered for his War and Peace (1863-69), an epic novel about the Napoleonic invasion of Russia
and the lives of three aristocratic families, and Anna Karenina (1873-77), which is about the
tragic passion of a married woman to a young officer. Tolstoy had extreme moral views that in-
cluded non-resistance to evil, the rejection of property and any kind of secular or religious
authority (except God), and a deep love of humanity.
8 Gustave Flaubert (1821-80), French novelist and master of realism. He has gone down in liter-
ary history for his authenticity of detail, impersonal narrative method, and a precise and har-
monious style. His major novels include Madame Bovary (1857), about the ennui and adultery
and suicide of a doctor's wife in Normandy, Salammb (1862), and L'Education sentimentale
(1869).
Ivan S. Turgenev (1818-63), Russian novelist and playwright. Turgenev spent much of his life
outside Russia and was acquainted with many writers in Europe. His major and influential
works are the collections of stories about Russian farmers entitled A Hunter's Notes (1847-51),
and his play, A Month in the Country (1850).
naturalism. Crane had an eventful life as a war reporter and ruined his health. Slandered
because of his political views and his fiction, he became disappointed with America and
settled in Sussex, England, in 1898. He died of tuberculosis in Badenweiler, Germany. Also
a master of the realistic short story, Crane has gone down in literary history for two novels.
Maggie (1893) displays the unpleasant realities of New York slum life in the story of a girl,
Maggie Johnson, who struggles and strives hopelessly in a factory and works as a prostitute
before committing suicide. Crane had trouble finding a publisher for this novel. He was
more successful with The Red Badge of Courage (1895). This is a brilliant psychological
study of human behaviour during war and successfully demythifies hero worship and the
glories of war. The novel could be termed a psychological analysis of fear: Crane tells the
story of Henry Fleming who, after going through a period of cowardice and fright, finally
achieves his own kind of courage and understanding of man's importance. Crane's prose
gives the impression of being factual and sober; yet his concise style also provides moments
of impressionism as the battlefield becomes a symbol of the cruel world the individual has
to face.
War of a different kind, the struggle for power between the ranchers and the railroad ("the
octopus") in California, is the subject of Frank Norris's The Octopus (1901). Norris was a
theorist of naturalism and demanded the inclusion of the unusual and the horrible in fiction.
For Norris, the big cities harboured evil, and he demonstrated it repeatedly in his short
stories and novels by describing the misery of the slums. Thus, in The Octopus, descriptions
of the huge wheat fields and the farms alternate with scenes of violence and poverty in the
cities. Of the originally planned three volumes of The Epic of the Wheat, Norris finished
only The Octopus and a sequel, The Pit (1903). His earlier McTeague (1899), an experi-
mental novel, records the gradual degeneration of a San Francisco dentist whose animal in-
stincts prove too powerful to be controlled.
The realistic and naturalistic tradition as represented by Crane and Norris, but also in the
more romantic novels of Jack London (1876-1916; see The Call of the Wild, 1903; and
White Fang, 1906), was further developed in the twentieth century by Dreiser, Anderson,
Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Faulkner.
Equally influential for the modern American novel was the psychological realism that marks
the fiction of Henry James (1843-1916). Born in New York, he came from a rich family of
intellectuals. Together with his brother, the philosopher and theorist of pragmatism William
James (1842-1910), Henry was educated in England, France, Switzerland, and at Harvard.
Financially independent, James could dedicate his life to literature and became concerned
with the technique of fiction. He largely ignored the world of the working class and the
social conflicts and miseries of his time. As an avid reader of George Eliot, Flaubert, and
Turgenev, Henry James experimented with the form of the novel but did not consider
American authors. He was attracted to the elegance and the aristocratic traditions of the Old
World. From the late 1860s on he lived mostly in Europe. In 1915, in protest against
America's hesitation to come to Britain's aid in the war, he became a British subject. Like
T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, James stood between the Old and the New World. In fact, one
of the central themes of his fiction, especially in his "Atlantic" novels, is the analysis of
Americans in European society in ambiguous scenes presenting innocence and experience,
purity and corruption. Thus The American (1877) contrasts American sincerity with Euro-
pean falsity, and in Daisy Miller (1879) an American girl, unaware of European manners,
shocks Rome's society with her natural and unperturbed behaviour. James also tried Amer-
ican settings, as in The Europeans (1878) and Washington Square (1881), but returned to
his favourite situation, the American in Europe, with The Portrait of a Lady (1881).
The heroine of this novel, Isabel Archer, arrives in Europe and is strongly impressed by the
culture and the traditions of England and Italy. Her love of independence and her unconven-
tional behaviour assures her the attention and admiration of her European friends. Isabel marries a
Europeanized American, but is disappointed to find out that her husband is merely interested in
her money.
As in many of James's novels, the plot is not as important as the psychological art with
which the author explores emotions and feelings. The "story" unfolds in the actions and re-
actions of the hero and heroine as reflected in his and her consciousness. The author is not,
like Fielding, the one who knows and controls all, but merely shows the reader a conscious-
ness, as in What Maisie Knew (1897), or several consciousnesses, as in such later works as
The Ambassadors (1902). James's technique allows him to reveal ideas and emotions as well
as the reflection of other characters' thoughts and actions. He thus prepared the ground for
the psychological novel and the stream-of-consciousness technique.
Henry James put his impressionistic method to masterful use in his later works: The Wings
of the Dove (1902) and The Golden Bowl (1904). The latter is a good example of James's
special kind of fiction in which content is often less important than form and art. It analyses
life in the morally corrupt world of four people, symbolized by a golden bowl with an in-
visible crack. The hidden crack refers to the "false art" of the characters who, for the sake of
maintaining the illusion of happiness and trust in each other, are willing to ignore adultery.
Instead of traditional narrative techniques, James used allusions and reflections of various
consciousnesses. Brief impressions eventually establish in the reader's mind a picture of
what is going on.
James was also a prolific and gifted short story writer. In addition to some 100 stories, he
wrote 20 novels, numerous critical essays, reviews, and portraits of writers and artists.
Realism dominated the closing decades of the century. But some writers, such as Lew
Wallace, preferred established traditional or escapist modes of fiction. Edward Bellamy's
(1850-98) utopian Looking Backward (1880) suggested state capitalism and serious social
reforms. The American myth of success through hard work and frugality of the Benjamin
Franklin type was kept up by numerous best-selling novels for adolescents from the pen of
Horatio Alger Jr. (1832-1899), such as Ragged Dick (1867), Luck and Pluck (1869), and
Tattered Tom (1871). Finally, the cowboy novel arose from frontier literature, a sentimental
late romantic genre celebrating lonesome heroes who avoid women and prefer to fight for
law and order. The best-known writer in this field was Owen Wister (1860-1938). He had
studied at Harvard and often went hunting in Wyoming. Wister's melodramatic The Vir-
ginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902) became the prototype for a wave of cowboy novels
in the twentieth century. One of the most prolific authors of this genre was the former dentist
Zane Grey (1875-1939; see, for instance, Riders of the Purple Sage, 1912).
4.2 The Short Story

As a new form of fiction, the American short story was shaped by magazines, almanacs, and
literary periodicals. An important step forward was made by Washington Irving (1783-
1859) in his literary sketches, essays, and tales published in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey
Crayon, Gent (1819/20). An admirer of the European Romantics and of the English essay-
ists (Addison), Irving spent many years in Europe. The Sketch Book made him famous. The
picture of Europe that emerges from the sketches in this collection is coloured by sentiment,
but Irving was a good humorist and successfully melded European myths and American
settings in such ever popular stories as "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hol-
low". In "Rip Van Winkle" a Dutch-American falls asleep in the woods as a subject of King
George III and awakes 20 years later as an American citizen in a new republic.
What Irving began in theme and character, Poe completed in form and theory. Edgar Allan
Poe initiated the tale of horror and the detective story. In 1848, while writing a critical eval-
uation of Hawthorne's tales, Poe developed his own theory of the short story. The principal
points in this theory are brevity and unity of effect. Poe wrote more than 70 stories, many of
them collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and Tales (1848). Roughly,
they fall into two categories: those of "Gothic horror" set in a nightmare world of evil and
death (see, for instance, "Ligeia", "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Pit and the Pen-
dulum" and "The Imp of the Perverse"), and those of "ratiocination", which set the standards
for the modern detective story (see "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of
Marie Rogt", and "The Purloined Letter"). Poe's horror stories are symbolical and often
have several levels of meaning. Landscapes, rooms, and characters contain "an undercurrent
of meaning" that leads into the border area of consciousness, hallucination, and insanity.
While Poe treated of fear and horror in his short fiction, Hawthorne showed the corrupting
force of guilt and pride in his Twice-Told Tales (1837), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846),
and The Snow Image (1851). Thus "Young Goodman Brown" deals with temptation and the
loss of faith in Puritan Salem, Massachusetts. In "Endicott and the Red Cross" Hawthorne
wrote of the American fight for independence, and in "The May-Pole of Merry Mount", a
symbolical tale of sensual pleasure and Puritan ascetism, he found a more humorous tone.
Herman Melville, like Hawthorne, considered evil as a powerful force in human life. His
stories are collected in The Piazza Tales (1856) and present his themes in a concentrated
form. Most important are "Benito Cereno", the ambiguous story of a mutiny of slaves on a
ship bound for America, "Bartleby the Scrivener", which deals with self-isolation in a
Kafka-like9 manner, and "The Encantadas", sketches of the Galapagos Islands and some
people living there. "Billy Budd", a longer story, was published in 1924. It is about a young
and innocent sailor who kills an evil companion and is sentenced to death. The judge, the
ship's captain, is haunted by the question whether Billy was really guilty.
The "local colour movement" developed a kind of short story containing both romantic and
grotesque as well as humorous elements in colourful frontier settings peopled with such
low-life characters as gold-diggers, whores, and thieves. Apart from Mark Twain's humor-
ous and burlesque tales, anecdotes, and sketches of the West, collected in The Celebrated
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867), the stories of Bret Harte (1836-1902) proved of
great influence. Between 1854-1871 Harte worked as a journalist in California and acquired
9 Franz Kafka (1883-1924), German-speaking Jewish novelist and a very influential writer
among the modernists. Kafka is the author of three novels (Der Process 1925, Das Schlo,
1926, and Amerika, 1927) and numerous short stories (e.g. "Die Verwandlung", 1915, and "Das
Urteil", 1913). Kafka describes lonely and threatened individuals in an enigmatic world. The
term "Kafkaesque" is used to describe literature that employs similar narrative techniques and
creates the same uneasy response as Kafka's fiction.
literary fame with his stories about the wild and romantic life in the West. In such stories as
"The Outcasts of Poker Flat", "Tennessee's Partner", and "Brown of Calaveras", collected in
The Luck of Roaring Camp (1870) and Tales of the Argonauts (1875) his later work was
less successful he provides
realistic and humorous impres-
sions of wild scenery and
rough people with hearts of
gold. Harte tried to preserve
Poe's economy in words and
style, but his romantic view of
the frontier often came close to
sentimentality.
One of Bret Harte's early imi-
tators was Ambrose Bierce
(1842-1914). In the tradition of
Poe, Bierce created the sensa-
tional type of the short story
Currier & Ives, American Farm Yard Morning.
that grips its reader and has a Engraving. 1857
surprising or shocking ending.
Ambrose Bierce was the son of an Ohio farmer and had to educate himself. Many of his
better stories Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891; revised and published in 1898 as The
Midst of Life), Can Such Things Be? (1893) are concerned with death and the horrors of
the Civil War, in which Bierce had served as a soldier. His much anthologized "An Oc-
currence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1891) exemplifies his technique of suspense and shock in
the story of a Confederate soldier and saboteur sentenced to death by hanging by the Union
army. In the brief moments between life and death, as his body drops down on the rope and
strangles him, the condemned man creates for himself (and for the reader) the illusion of an
escape and a reunion with his family. In such stories as "A Horseman in the Sky" and
"Chicamauga", Bierce dealt with the terror of the Civil War in a way that recalls Poe's
"Gothic" and has the additional attraction of psychological analysis, although Bierce's love
of the sensational was apt to lead him into melodrama.
The surprise ending remained very popular among writers and readers. The realists made use
of it Stephen Crane in his Western stories "The Blue Hotel" and "The Bride Comes to
Yellow Sky" as did Hemingway in the twentieth century. Crane's "The Open Boat", con-
tained in the collection of the same name published in 1898, again varied the short story.
Stressing fact and true experience, Crane attempted a kind of factual fiction that creates the
impression of journalistic precision in the "report" about the thoughts and emotions of four
men escaping in a small dinghy after the sinking of a steamer. Only three of the men
survive, while the one who helped most to save them drowns in the waves. Crane's sober
diction and his exploration of archetypal situations clearly foreshadows Hemingway.
Henry James's psychological realism has also had a number of modern successors. Many
of his stories assess the conflict between moral issues and social conventions (e.g. "The
Beast in the Jungle" and "The Real Thing"). In The Turn of the Screw (1898) he probed the
nature of evil in the framework of a ghost story reminiscent of Poe.
Many writers of this period had no literary aims and simply wanted to entertain the public.
To these belongs Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908), a Georgian whose knowledge of
Black folklore formed the basis of his stories about "Uncle Remus", a Black slave who tells
the legends and fairy tales of
his people to the young son of
his white family (Uncle Remus,
1881, and Nights With Uncle
Remus, 1883).
Beginning with Poe, the short
story also found a number of
theorists: Hawthorne, Melville,
Crane, and Henry James all
wrote about what a short story
should be. Some of the theor-
ists were university professors
and critics. Thus Brander
Matthews (1852-1929) pre-
Winslow Homer, Undertow. 1886 scribed a catalogue of "neces-
sary elements". But fortunately
the writers did not care about such traditionalists and purists, and the result has been the
richness, both in form and content, of the short story in the twentieth century.
5. Nonfiction
Several nineteenth-century writers of fiction also produced historical works. Washington
Irving's biography of George Washington is one example. The historians proper included
the New Englanders W(illiam) H(ickling) Prescott (1796-1859), John L. Motley (1814-77)
and Francis Parkman (1823-93). They all wrote outstanding histories of European coun-
tries, while Parkman was the only one with a deep interest in the American colonial period
and the West. The early national period was treated by George Bancroft (1800-91) and by
Henry Adams (1838-1918), the century's most prominent historian. Adams studied at
Gttingen and Harvard, where he taught history for a few years before travelling the world.
He returned to America only a few times. Adams wrote a brilliant History of the United
States in nine volumes (1884-89), covering the period from Jefferson to Madison, and ana-
lysed the cultural unity of the Middle Ages in Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904). In
his autobiographical and critical view of American history, The Education of Henry Adams
(1907), he deplored the emptiness and the superficiality of modern cultures when compared
with those of the Middle Ages.
The essay and literary criticism profited from the rise of Transcendentalism. Directed
against religious orthodoxy as well as against materialism and pragmatism, Transcendental-
ism achieved intellectual and spiritual independence for America after the country had
gained political independence. It was mainly represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Henry David Thoreau, who formed a "symposium" or "Hedge Club" in 1836 that included
W(illiam) E(llery) Channing, Thomas Parker, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, and a few
others. Transcendentalism as a term is derived from Kant's use of it in his Critique of Pure
Reason. Apart from Kant, Coleridge and German idealistic philosophy (Fichte and Schleier-
macher) proved important for the movement. In essence, Transcendentalism combined

German idealism with the Puritan American heritage. It held that each individual soul is
identical with the soul of the world, that God is present in every human being, and that the
human being is the source of moral law. Underlining the value of the individual and of self-
reliance, the Transcendentalists argued that God could be seen intuitively in nature. The
idealist spirit of the members expressed itself in a series of practical economical enterprises,
the best known being Brook Farm, near Boston, which Hawthorne covered in his The
Blithedale Romance (1852).
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) was the leader of the Transcendentalist Club. He came
from Concord, Mass., went to Harvard, and became a clergyman and professor, but later
resigned from the ministry. While on a visit to Europe, he became friendly with Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and Carlyle. Emerson expressed his philosophy in a number of lectures that
make up his books Essays (1841), Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849) and The Conduct
of Life (1860). His famous Harvard address of 1837, "The American Scholar", has been
called the intellectual American declaration of independence. Emerson laid the foundation
for the Transcendentalist movement with "Nature" (1836) and "The Over-Soul" (1841),
works that make man and woman the centre of philosophical speculation and argue that the
soul of man/woman and God meet in nature. These works and his Representative Men
(1850) show that Emerson was best as an essayist. They contain his moral and philosophical
views and demonstrate his belief that history reflects God's grace.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) also studied at Harvard. He lived for a few years in
Emerson's house and published essays for The Dial (1840-44), one of the journals of the
Transcendentalists. Thoreau put Emerson's ideas into practice and rebelled against
bourgeois-capitalist values, demanding the unimpeded development of the individual. In a
hut near Walden Pond, between 1845-47, he led an introspective life in utmost simplicity.
Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) was the delightful literary record of this experiment. It
describes beautiful natural scenes and reflects on the advantages of a solitary life. Thoreau
was both an idealist influenced by Rousseau and a social reformer. Once jailed for refusing
to pay taxes, he advised his readers to disobey bad laws in his essay "On the Duty of Civil
Disobedience" (1849). Also based on his journal records is his marvellous description of A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Like Walden, this is mostly concerned
with nature and philosophical observations.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94) and James Russell Lowell (1819-91) were two New
England essayists who are also known for their literary criticism. Holmes contributed sat-
irical essays to Atlantic Monthly. These were later collected in several volumes, the most
interesting being The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858) and The Poet at the Breakfast-
Table (1872). Lowell was the most eminent critic among the Transcendentalists. His essays
give evidence of his excellent knowledge of the classics and of a sound taste in the field of
literature.
Travel literature was written by Washington Irving (1783-1859), who described his adven-
turous journey to the Western frontier in A Tour on the Prairies (1835), and by Bayard
Taylor (1825-78), George William Curtis (1824-92) and Charles Warren Stoddard
(1843-1909). The Pennsylvanian George Catlin (1796-1872), a self-taught painter of native
American life, made an eight-year expedition to the Wild West, visiting and living with
about 50 Indian tribes. Catlin's artistic work, though primitive in style, constitutes an im-
portant historical document; it is as important as his The Manners, Customs, and Conditions
of the North American Indians (2 vols., 1841),

based on his extensive journal notes and containing
300 engravings. Catlin's later journeys in the
American West and South America were recorded
in Last Rambles Among the Indians of the Rocky
Mountains and the Andes (1867) and Life Among
the Indians (1867). The best known example from
social criticism is Henry George's (1839-97) Pro-
gress and Poverty (1879). One of the most fasci-
nating autobiographies of the century, and an early
example of black literature, is the Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass (1845, revised in 1892)
in which the former slave and later politician
Douglass (1817-95) tells about his escape from
Maryland to Massachusetts and about his liberation
through education. Although this remained his
most famous book, Douglass wrote two further
Cochise. Reproduced from a painting autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom
in the Arizona Historical Society (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
(1881).
The speeches of several Indian chieftains, some of them not published until the twentieth
century, convey an impression not only of the Native Americans' poetic language but also of
their bleak visions of the future of their people. Thus Sitting Bull (b.1831? and assassinated
in 1890), who belonged to the Hunkpapa band of Teton-Dakota (Sioux), prophesied the
defeat of General Custer, when the gold seekers invaded the Black Hills of the Lakotas. And
when the Sioux were confined to reservations and massacred at Wounded Knee, he wrote
their epitaph, "No chance for me to live, Mother mourn for me". The Chiricahua Apache
leader Cochise (died in 1874), who declined an invitation to visit Washington in 1871 (not
least because he had been arrested after accepting an "invitation" by Lieutenant George N.
Bascom), reminded his white listener, General Crook (the Apaches called him Gray Wolf),
of the former freedom of the Indians, when it was suggested that the Apache move to reser-
vations:
The sun has been very hot on my head and made me as in a fire; my blood was on fire, but now
I have come into this valley and drunk of these waters and washed myself in them and they
have cooled me. Now that I am cool I have come with my hands open to you to live in peace
with you [] When God made the world he gave one part to the white man and another to the
Apache. Why was it? Why did they come together? [] When I was young I walked all over
this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I
walked again and found another race of people had come to take it. How is it? Why is it that the
Apaches wait to die that they carry their lives on their fingernails. They roam over the hills
and plains and want the heavens to fall on them. The Apaches were once a great nation; they
are now but few, and because of this they want to die and so carry their lives on their fingernails.
Many have been killed in battle. You must speak straight so that your words may go as sunlight
to our hearts. Tell me, if the Virgin Mary has walked throughout all the land, why has she never
entered the wickiups of the Apaches? Why have we never seen or heard her?
Similar speeches by the last Chiricahua Apache chief Geronimo (1823-1909), by Red
Cloud (Lakota, 1822-1909), and by Chief Joseph (Nez Perc, 1840-1904: 'I am tired of
fighting [] I will fight no more for-

ever') have survived and have been col-
lected and published. During his im-
prisonment, Geronimo began to under-
stand the power of the written word and,
with the help of a white author, had a
defense of his actions and his people
written (Geronimo's Story of His Life); it
was published in 1906.10 To some extent,
these speeches were adapted to the al-
ready existing stereotype of the "noble
savage", and the long process of the
mythification of Indians, which included
the Indian melodramas mentioned above,
was also supported by George Catlin's
images of Native Americans, exhibited
in his famous "Indian Gallery" in 1837, 11
and by the "Wild West Show" started in
1883 by Buffalo Bill, i.e., William F.
Cody (1846-1917), a former frontier
scout who had fought in the battles
against the Sioux.
An important work in the field of lexico- G. Catlin, North American Indians
graphy was Noah Webster's (1758-1843)
American Dictionary of the English Language. It was first published in 1828, and included
a large number of Americanisms not before listed in dictionaries.
10 For examples of these speeches and other Indian literature, see Shirley Hill Witt and Stan
Steiner, eds. The Way. An Anthology of American Indian Literature (New York: Vintage,
1972); and Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. An Indian History of the American
West (New York: Bantam, 1972).
11 See George Catlin, North American Indians, ed. Peter Matthiessen (London: Penguin, 1989),
which includes reproductions of some oil paintings and Catlin's journals from the 1830s when
he visited and painted various tribes of the plains.
IV. The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Within a few decades after the turn of the century, the United States became the strongest
military and economic power in the world. Although there were some social reforms under
the presidencies of the Republican Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09) and the Democrat
Woodrow Wilson (1913-21), big business and capitalism triumphed again under the Re-
publican presidents Warren G. Harding
(1921-23) and Calvin Coolidge (1923-29),
not least because behaviourism and John
Dewey's philosophical pragmatism created
a favourable cultural climate for industrial
expansion. American democratic and mor-
al idealism, which was still high when the
US declared war against Germany and
Austria-Hungary in 1917, gave way to a
new isolationism in the 1920s.
As many disillusioned American writers
went abroad, the great American economic
dream came to a sudden halt with the col-
lapse of the stock market in 1929 which
Palmer Hayden, Midsummer Night in Harlem. announced a worldwide economic crisis.
1936 The years of the prohibition of the sale of
alcoholic beverages (1920-1933) were a
1
profitable time for bootleggers and gangsters: Al Capone made headlines and money in
Chicago. In 1932 unemployment was at 23 percent. The crisis brought the Democratic Party
back to power, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's (1933-45) radical "New Deal"2 initiated social
reforms and a number of laws and programmes in order to fight the depression.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, when the USA entered WW II, the country's
population had risen from 62 million in 1890 to almost 140 million inhabitants. Again,
America fought for a good cause and, in saving Western democratic and humanitarian
ideals, proved the superiority of American optimism and values. With the end of the war
came an economic boom, but also America's involvement and leading position in interna-
tional politics. After the Korean War (1950-53) and the inauguration in 1953 of President
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61), the USA faced internal political and racial problems.
The atmosphere of the "Cold War" led to a hunt for Marxists and Communists in America,
and between 1953 and 1955 this hunt was orchestrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
When the Supreme Court ordered the end of racial segregation in public schools in 1954,
1 Slang term for the persons who distribute liquor illegally.

2 President Roosevelt's administrative programme, started in the early 1930s, to correct economic
and social abuses. The New Deal brought some advantages for workers in the area of social se-
curity, and for other socially disadvantaged groups. But in 1937 another recession dealt it a
heavy blow.
there began a rapid spread of black protest against continued discrimination in the South. In
1955 Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, made history by refusing to give up her seat
on a bus to a white man. As school integration was being enforced, disturbances occurred at
Little Rock, Arkansas. Black protest ranged from non-violent demonstrations, often led by
the Reverend Martin Luther King (one of the leaders of the Civil Rights March on
Washington in 1963, where he gave his famous, "I have a dream" speech), to the extremist
Black Muslim movement that rose as the country witnessed widespread race riots in the big
cities between 1965-67.
The 1960s proved a vastly important decade both for American society and for literature.
The civil rights struggle brought more freedom and advantages for women and gays as well
as for ethnic groups, such as African-Americans and native Americans. As Afro-Americans
sought new identities in the "black power" movement and in Afro-Arab names (a boxer
called Cassius Clay renamed himself Muhammad Ali), they opposed the socio-political
structures dominated by WASPs. Violence increased and the decade was overshadowed by
a number of assassinations: John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, in a
killing that remains mysterious; Malcolm X, a leader of the Black Muslims, was assassin-
ated in 1965; and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were both killed in 1968. In
1970, the National Guard shot at student protesters at Kent State University. This decade of
great social change and political radicalism made as deep an impact on literature as the
Vietnam War that started rather silently in the early 1960s and ended in a national trauma.
International political problems arose with the "Cuban Missile Crisis" in 1962, when Pres-
ident Kennedy objected to the Soviet Union establishing rocket bases in Cuba and the
world teetered on the edge of a nuclear warfare. American involvement in Vietnam (1964-
1975) divided the nation, and a domestic political crisis arose with the Watergate affair
(1972-74), which forced President Nixon (1968-74) to resign from office the first Amer-
ican President to do so. He was succeeded by Gerald Ford (1974-77), Jimmy Carter
(1977-81), and two Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), who survived an
attempt to assassinate him in 1981, and George Bush (1989-93). A former mediocre Holly-
wood actor, Reagan was even less than mediocre in politics and became a mere puppet in
the hands of Republican hardliners and his advisers. He propagated a return to American
values of individual responsibility and less federal power (which in reality led to the reduc-
tion of programmes for the poor and the socially disadvantaged) and increased the budget
for defense to destabilize the Soviet Union, which he saw as the empire of evil. With the
economic and political breakdown of Communism in the countries behind the Iron Curtain,
the military supremacy of the United States was almost unchallenged, and George Bush
demonstrated it in the Gulf War of 1991. When Bill Clinton defeated Bush, a Democrat
again moved to the White House in 1993 and America and the world expected major
changes in domestic and foreign politics. But Clinton's presidency was marred at first by his
inability to institute important social and political reforms (e.g. in social security and health
care) and, towards the end of his term, by a sex scandal. The details of the Monica Lewinski
affair were publicized on the internet and contributed to an even higher scepticism in the
United States vis--vis politics and politicians. Clinton, who had started out as the follower
of John F. Kennedy (who, as we now know, was no less of a philanderer than his succes-
sor), discredited both the office and the status of American president. At the end of the
millennium, the United States witnessed a presidential election that was decided by a court
decision and in which the loser, the Democrat Al Gore, paradoxically had more votes than
the winner, George W. Bush. Surrounded by advisers who already served his father in the
early 90s, the new Republican president and former governor of Texas, known for his hard-
line attitude towards the death penalty, led the Western world into the twenty-first century
beginning it with a war on terrorism and another war against Iraq.
The American Indians organized themselves in the AIM (American Indian Movement) and
went to court claiming damages from the US government for the land and rights they had
ceded in the past. In 1979 the Sioux Indians were awarded $ 17,000,000 plus $ 105,000,000
interest as compensation for the Black Hills of South Dakota that had been confiscated in
1877. In 1985 a similar decision gave some compensation to the Narragansett Indians. Ironi-
cally, some of the barren territory allotted to the Indians by the US government has proved
extremely rich in mineral resources.
This sudden wealth creates even
more problems for native Americans
who, as a consequence of displace-
ment and disillusion have seen the
highest rates of alcoholism and illit-
eracy in their ranks. As some institu-
tions of the U.S. government and
corporate businesses "cooperate"
with the chieftains or tribal councils,
huge sums of money change hands
but do not get to those who are
supposed to profit from them. The
David Hockney, Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians. plight of native Americans continues
1965 as the FBI takes a dim view of the
AIM, which is seen as a subversive
and dangerous organization, not least since the shooting of two FBI agents on the Pine
Ridge (Sioux) Reservation in 1975. One of the AIM leaders arrested in the aftermath,
Leonard Peltier, was sentenced to double life imprisonment (two others were found in-
nocent). Both the prosecution and the judge who pronounced the verdict have meanwhile
admitted that Peltier was sentenced on false and insufficient evidence and international
organizations as well as personalities (Amnesty International, the European Parliament, the
Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela) have appealed to the American government to liberate the
AIM leader. But the FBI and South Dakota's governor William Janklow persuaded Presi-
dent Clinton, who could have pardoned Peltier on leaving office in January 2001, not to
grant a pardon. Leonard Peltier has now spent more than a quarter of his life in prison (see
his biography, My Life is my Sundance).
American confidence seemed bright and promising after President Kennedy's successful
handling of the Cuban missile crisis (1961-63), the first US manned space expedition in
1961, and the moon landing in 1969. But this confidence waned rapidly with the revelations
about the Vietnam War, the shameful retreat in 1975, and the Iran hostage crisis (1980-81).
In the 1980s, as America faced international resistance against her economic and political
influence, a new and defiant patriotism arose. It began with the Bicentennial in 1976, swept
Ronald Reagan to power, and found some unpleasant peaks in the invasion of Grenada
(1983) and the war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq (1991), with the Olympic Games of
1984 as a less aggressive but equally jingoistic intermezzo. President George W. Bush
faced his first major crisis, which entailed domestic and global consequences, with the at-
tack on the Pentagon and New York City's World Trade Center on September 11 2001. As
the Bush administration whipped the American public into a jingoistic frenzy that prevented
any kind of self-searching, with flags flying on cars and buildings for several months, the
enemy was declared to be Arab fundamentalism, led by Osama Bin Laden and his Taliban
followers in Afghanistan. Supported by NATO, the USA bombed what were considered
Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, already one of the poorest countries in the world.
Paradoxically, the United States had armed and supported the Taliban a few years earlier to
prevent the Soviet Union from taking control in Afghanistan. The former allies were killed
or taken prisoner. Many were driven out of the country or into the mountains. The American
government broke international conventions by treating the Taliban prisoners like war crim-
inals in an American military station in Cuba (like the AIM leader Leonard Peltier, the
Taliban prisoners seem to be beyond or outside American and international law). President
Bush declared war on terrorism, but until now Osama Bin Laden is still free, and in the
Arab and Islamic world President Bush's actions have probably made more enemies to the
USA than ever before. In March 2003, President Bush aided by Great Britain but
opposed by most European countries started the second war of the United States against
Iraq. It was over in a few weeks, as American high-tech bombers and cruise missiles first
literally blew up Saddam Hussein's soldiers and thousands of innocent civilians, including
children. The USA then staged a media-orchestrated war, with correspondents accom-
panying advancing tanks and infantry (no correspondents were seen on the Iraqi side as
the dictators's soldiers burnt to death or were blown to smithereens in the trenches)
allegedly in search of weapons of mass destruction. A month after the end of hostilities,
government spokesmen gradually began to admit that these weapons (and hence a real
reason for the war) may never have existed. It emerged that the actual strategic aim of the
USA was the establishment of a safe military base in a political unstable region.
By 2010, the American "mission" in Afghanistan has resulted in the death of thousands of
civilians, an unstable country, and the return of the Taliban in many provinces. In the
United States, the public is divided over the engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
Barack Hussein Obama, the first African American president elected in 2008, has not
found a solution. As he entered politics on the national level, he encountered as much of a
quagmire with his attempted reform of health care as on the international level where he
failed to put the US at the spearhead of environmental protection.
As far as the socio-intellectual background is concerned in its impact on literature, it is clear
in hindsight that the most important developments in post-war America were Senator
McCarthy's persecution of "un-American activities" in the context of the Cold War, the
Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 70s, the Vietnam War, the anxieties connected
with the failing American economy in the 1980s and again after 2000, and the impact of the
attack on the World Trade Center. Senator McCarthy's witch hunt for alleged Communists
in the early 1950s prevented an open and fundamental criticism of American society. So-
cialism became associated with Soviet Russia and liberation movements in the Third World
came to be regarded as "international Communism". Although this atmosphere changed in
the 1960s, large sections of American society still consider Socialism as either subversive or
"un-American". Arthur Miller, among others, dealt with this issue at the heart of American
thinking. The Civil Rights movement led directly to the emergence of Afro-American and
other ethnic identities (to some extent in literature) as well as the assertion of gay and femin-
ist issues. The Vietnam war produced a huge wound in the American psyche down to this
day, playwrights and novelists have tried to come to terms with it. And the brutal capitalist
greed of the 1980s, supported by Reagan in America and by his friend Thatcher in Britain,
produced a neo-realist reaction on the part of such writers as Bret Easton Ellis who depicted
the psychic disaster that is produced when the pursuit of happines is restriced to money.
Feminism, also a child of the 60s' struggle for sexual and racial equality, has changed
American society in fundamental ways. The concern with woman's role in society, past and
present, has had far-reaching consequences both in American higher education and in every-
day life. Not least because feminism, partly through its consciousness-raising groups and
partly through publications, has brought about institutional changes, there is now a high
awareness of gender issues in the United States. Women's Studies, and in its wake Gay and
Lesbian Studies, are important subjects in colleges and universities and there is a continuing
great social and political concern with the legal and social equality of women.
There is also a strong fundamentalist religious current in America that can be traced all the
way back to the Pilgrims and the Puritans. In the closing decades of the twentieth century,
fundamentalist religious movements have thrived. Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell (1934-
2007) are two internationally known fundamentalist preachers with a large following.
Numerous rich churches exist in America, and many people, including some unscrupulous
businessmen, have earned millions of dollars with religion. Worse than the financial ex-
ploitation of religious enthusiasm is the dangerous fanaticism of sectarians like the noto-
rious Reverend Jones, who took his people to South America and arranged a mass murder in
the jungle. But such catastrophes and the less dramatic expulsion in 1985 of the "Baghwan"
from Oregon will hardly stop American religious fervour. In the late 1990s, this fervour
could be studied in the media too, as TV channels (one of them, also broadcast in Europe, is
aptly named God) try to spread the Protestant Baptist creed all over the world. Never
doubting or even attacking triumphant American capitalism, which for obvious reasons
supports it, religion in the world's most powerful capitalist society now seems to come close
to the function (opium for the people) which Karl Marx, more than a century ago, described
and predicted both critically and prophetically.
In the 1980s and 1990s, American cultural life became increasingly divided between a mass,
popular culture (rock, pop, and rap music, movies, comics, best-sellers, and Broadway
shows) and the highbrow arts (literary fiction, avant-garde theatre and art, classical music).
Some cultural theorists claim that during this period pop culture became dominant, with the
consequence that cultural standards were lowered as the mediocre and the sensational were
accepted as the norm. The consumption of literature in the United States has become a vast
capitalist enterprise in which the driving forces publishing houses, some of them con-
trolled by such media giants as Warner Brothers, bookstore chains, book clubs, and TV
shows are interested less in literary quality than in making profits. The success of a book
often depends on its adoption by big bookstore chains (e.g., Barnes & Noble; Borders;
Phoenix; Waldenbooks) and on its cinematic potential. Serious literature challenging Ameri-
can values and ways of thinking has been able to claim a highbrow section of the market,
but that section is extremely tiny in comparison with popular genres such as romance,
science fiction, horror and fantasy, and westerns. Literature was supposed to be boosted by
the decision of the US Senate in 1985 to introduce the salaried post of "poet laureate" as an
adjunct to the Consultant for Poetry in the Library of Congress. Whereas the English equi-
valent is an officer of the royal household and is appointed for lifetime (his or her "job"
being the writing of verse at official occasions), the American honoree is not obliged to
write ceremonial verse and is appointed for a short period of time. Holders include R. P.
Warren (1986), Richard Wilbur (1987), Howard Nemerov (1988), Mark Strand (1990),
Joseph Brodsky (1991), Mona van Duyn (1992; she died in 2004), and Rita Dove (1993). It
is to be doubted whether such a post can do much for the boosting of poetry in public, espe-
cially if the recipients are even unknown to literary critics (e.g., Ted Kooser, appointed in
2004, and Donald Hall, the poet laureate for 2006).
For better or for worse (most experimental writers opt for the latter), TV has had an enor-
mous influence in the postmodern period. Not only did it shape the American consumer
mentality; it also provoked and inspired literature as at least two generations of writers have
reacted to it while partly adopting or subverting its formats and frames. Some TV series are
now almost classics and are being studied as cultural products of social commitment and
intertextual complexity. The phenomenal success of M*A*S*H, about an American medical
team in the Korean War, examined the human cost of war; Dallas, Falcon Crest, and Dyn-
asty were evening soaps that became the closest thing to an international culture, with
Dallas broadcast in virtually every continent as audiences enjoyed the stylized, pop quality
of the characters and actions (and even Parisians discussed Su Hlne). Miami Vice, a 1980s
police series, reflected postmodern American architecture and a hedonist lifestyle founded
on Camus and Sartre: that the world is meaningless and pervaded with cruelty and selfish-
ness, and that all we can do is make gestures of love
and compassion that are inevitably wiped out by the
violence generated in a postcapitalist country. This
attitude seems to have spilled over into more recent
series also adopted in Europe: Ally Mc Beal, a partly
surrealist soap featuring neurotic urban singles in
search of love and a meaningful life beyond making
money; and The Sopranos, a remarkably naturalistic
view of a New York/New Jersey Italian-American
mafia family in the 1990s. Thomas Pynchon and Don
DeLillo, but also John Updike, are novelists who have
shown how TV permeates the daily lives of Ameri-
cans.
Twentieth-century art in America has had a symbiotic
relationship with literature. This can be seen not in
any correspondence but in movements shared by both
and in the fact that writers were inspired by the ways
in which artists grappled with problems of represen-
tation and with the new media. Poets such as William
Carlos Williams and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, discussed Marcel Duchamp, LHOOQ. 1919
below, responded directly to painting and photo-
graphy (e.g., the photos and photogravures exhibited shortly after 1900 by Alfred Stieglitz)
or were painters themselves; and novelist like John Updike (who spent a year studying
drawing at Oxford) and John Hawkes (see below) have been praised for their painterly
prose. The productions of Robert Wilson (see the chapter on drama) have been termed "the
theatre of images" precisely because art and architecture (Wilson's first calling) interfere in
decisive ways in his dramatic art. The agenda of the postmodern arts may be compared to
some extent with avant-garde writing as the differences between high and low were levelled
and pastiche, parody, and quotation emerged as essential elements of representation. As far
as movements are concerned, the beginning of the century saw the persistence of American
impressionism in the works of Childe Hassam (1859-1935) but also the impact of mod-
ernism. The latter arrived in person with Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), who made America
his home for some years, and with the sensational New York Armory Show of 1913, which
acquainted the American public with the European Cubist painting (Picasso, Bracque) and
Duchamp's ready-mades. The discovery of folk art by Fauvism and Expressionism also
opened the door for American varieties of folk art, with Grandma Moses (i.e., Anna Mary
Robertson Moses, 1860-1961) from Eagle Bridge, New York, as a major representative. In
1917, Duchamp teamed up with Man Ray (1890-1976) to found an American Dada school.
Both artists proved vastly influential modernists and surrealists, Man Ray (who later moved
to and died in Paris) being especially known as an innovator in photography, the new art
form of the century. The realism that emerged between the wars can be studied in the
literary works of the Lost Generation (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Stein-
beck), but also in the art of Edward Hopper (1882-1967) and the precisionists, Charles
Demuth (1883-1935), Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), and Charles Sheeler (1883-1965).
The regionalists Grant Wood (1892-1942; see American Gothic, 1930) and Thomas Hart
Benton (1889-1975) developed their own kind of realism in works that were intended as
statements against urban civilization and modern technology. Together with Grandma
Moses, Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) and Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) tried to capture a
lost, rural and idyllic America in pictures that, in Rockwell's case, were mass-produced
(e.g., in the Saturday Evening Post) and thus widely known (see, for instance, Rockwell's
Freedom from Want, 1943).
The post-war era saw the rise in American art of what has been termed the single most im-
portant movement after World War II abstract expressionism or action painting. Essen-
tially developed by Jackson Pollock (1912-56), Arshile Gorky (1904-48), Franz Kline
(1910-62), Mark Rothko (1903-70), Mark Tobey (1890-1976), Barnett Newman (1905-70),
Adolph Gottlieb (1903-74), Willem de Kooning (1904-79), Clyfford Still (1904-80), Philip
Guston (1913-80), and Robert Motherwell (1915-91; see Unglckliche Liebe, 1975), ab-
stract expressionism was a reaction against many things: American popular optimism, the
tendency toward realistic representation and moral or ethical messages, and the idea of the
relation between reality and art. Although it is often considered a revolution in painting with
its insistence on non-representational forms that give expression to the subjective gesture of
the artist (Jackson Pollock's action paintings are the best example in this case), its radical
spirit also encompassed the sculpture of David Smith (1906-65) and Aaron Siskind's (1903-
91) photography. Trying to forge a new language, these artists were the inheritors of the
surrealist idea of automatism (uninhibited production that comes straight from the uncon-
scious) as they filled their canvasses with colour and forms as products of impulses. Like the
modernists, they also responded to the inventions of the machine age (film, telephone, auto-
mobiles) and to photography as a new art form represented by the vastly influential Alfred
Stieglitz (1864-1946) and Walker Evans (1903-75). In the 1960s, abstract expressionism
was followed by pop art. Like the experimental movement in postmodernist fiction, pop art
reacted deliberately against any notion of elite or sophisticated art while trying to make use
of images for advertising and billboards, mass production, reproduction, and comics. The
major representatives were Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97), Andy Warhol (1928-87; see his
multiple images of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley), and Larry Rivers (1924-2002) as
cult figures on an equal par with Robert Rauschen-

berg (1925-2008), George Segal (born 1924),
Claes Oldenburg (born 1929), known for his
public monumental sculptures (see, for instance,
Oldenburg's Clothespin, 1976, in Philadelphia),
Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004), and Jasper Johns
(born 1930). The liberation movements of the 60s
also allowed native and Latin American art a voice
in American culture. Postmodernism, the age of
deliberate ironical imitation and parody, has found
expression in numerous schools and genres in
American art and literature. These include indivi-
dualists like Philip Guston (1913-80), who re-
turned to figure painting; but also punk art, graffiti
(e.g, the works of Keith Haring, 1958-90), decora-
tion art (see the works of James Rosenquist, born
1933) and the neo-expressionist new image paint-
ings of Jonathan Borofsky (born 1942) and Julian
Schnabel (born 1951) as well as the photorealism
of Howard Kanowitz (born 1929) and Richard
Estes (born 1936). Neo-realism has found expres-
sion in the art works of Philip Pearlstein (born Cindy Sherman, Untitled #225. 1990
1924) and Duane Hanson (1925-96) and the
erotica produced by David Salle (born 1952) and
Eric Fischl (born 1948; see Sleepwalker, 1979). Another recent development is landscape
art, which celebrates the sublimity of the American natural scenery (see Walter de Maria's
The Lightning Field, 1977, in New Mexico) and the related earth art with notable works
produced by Robert Smithson (1938-73) and James Turrell (born 1943), the creator in the
1990s of the Roden Crater Bowl in Arizona. Conceptual or process art has been produced
by Bruce Nauman (born 1941; see his Carousel, 1988). The late 1980s also saw the rise of
the "Neo-Geo" movement, which both embraced and undermined kitsch with its use of
shrieking Day-Glo colours and has abstract representatives (e.g., Peter Halley) and simula-
tionists like Jeff Koons (born 1954). Now an international star in the art market, Koons is a
late pop artist who exaggerates the aura of consumer objects and deconstructs the postmod-
ern concern with surface and appearance (see his Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988). In
that sense, his preoccupation and aims can be compared with the literary work produced by
the experimental New York brat pack (e.g., Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney). In
addition to the neo-geo artists, female identity art has flourished in the works of the French-
born Louise Bourgeois (born 1911), who moved to New York in 1938 and whose sculptures
began to make an impact in the late 1980s (see her Lilith, 1994), and Cindy Sherman (born
1954). Almost single-handedly, Sherman has created a feminist genre of her own with her
ferociously ironic photographs starring herself in different roles (e.g., as house wife or
glamour girl). Her photographs and photomontages deconstruct various stereotypes imposed
on women while showing that female identity is always a construction. In the 1990s, some
younger artists (e.g., Jeremy Blake, born 1972) responded to the penetration and inundation
of American culture by electronics and computers, a reaction one also encounters in literature
(cf. the e-mail novel and hyperfiction discussed below). Blake's "time-based paintings", i.e.,
computer-generated, digital, art-works, have been exhibited in America and England.
2. Poetry
In 1912 a number of poetry anthologies and magazines appeared of which Harriet Monroe's
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, published in Chicago, proved the most influential over the
next decades. Monroe's journal opened its pages to the Imagists, printed the works of the
pre-modernists Whitman, Dickinson, and Hopkins, and became the major voice of the
"Chicago school" represented by Sandburg, Lindsay, and Masters.
Imagism owes its name to Ezra Pound. As a poetic movement it flourished between 1909
and 1917 and was international. In England, it included T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, Richard
Aldington, and D. H. Lawrence; in America the Imagists were represented by "H. D." (i.e.
Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950), and Amy Lowell (1874-
1925). Opposed to the romantic conception of poetry and inspired by Greek and Roman
classics as well as by Chinese, Japanese, and French poets, the Imagists looked for new
forms of expression that were to include common speech and new rhythms instead of poetic
language and traditional metre. Free verse and concise
metaphors and images became the favourite forms and
modes of expression. Ezra Pound defined "image" as
"that which presents an intellectual and emotional com-
plex in an instant of time".
Most of the American Imagists either became permanent
expatriates or lived abroad for long periods of time. Like
Pound and "H. D.", Amy Lowell spent many years in
Europe and founded an eccentric literary circle in London.
After Pound's interest in Imagism waned in 1914, Lowell
became the leader of the American group. In 1915 she
published the anthology Some Imagist Poets. Her poetry
as well as that of her expatriate friend John Gould
Fletcher is surpassed by the evocative verse of "H. D.",
who moved to Europe in 1911. For some years she was
married to Richard Aldington and, under the influence of
Pound and Gertrude Stein, became one of the most
ardent representatives of Imagism. Her Hymen (1921) and
Helioctera (1924) indicate the influence of Greek poetic
topics and forms and are among the best of Imagist
poetry. The early verse of Conrad Aiken (1889-1974)
Walker Evans, Brooklyn Bridge, NY.
1929
and William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) is also in-
debted to Imagism. Aiken's Nocturne of Remembered
Spring (1917) shows his play with sound and musical language. He later came under the
influence of Freudian psychology, which is most obvious in his Selected Poems of 1961.
Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" (1923) provides a good example of his Imagist ideas:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
This is a vision partly indebted to the photography of Alfred Stieglitz, but also to Cubist
painters. Williams tears his one sentence (and even words, such as rain water and wheel-
barrow) into "pieces" as it were in order to make the reader conscious of the details and the
materiality of the world around him/her. The poem perfectly embodies what Ezra Pound
demanded of good Imagist poetry precise and surprising images of everyday life, simple
and concise language, and clarity of expression.
Although Gertrude Stein is better known for her prose, many of her love poems and other
verse were written in the Imagist tradition.
However, of all the expatriates who wrote Imagist poetry, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is the
outstanding figure. He is one of the most influential poets of the early modern period. Pound
was born in a provincial town in Idaho and grew up in Pennsylvania. Disappointed with
American life and culture, he soon went to Europe and took a deep interest in the old lit-
eratures of Provence and of Italy. Pound lived in Italy and, from 1909-1920, in London,
working as translator, literary critic, poet, and editor of journals. He discovered and pro-
moted such writers as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Hart Crane, and Ernest Hemingway while
living in Paris (1920-24) and again in Italy (1940-45). Opposed to capitalism and Jews, he
supported the Fascist movement and saw in Mussolini a follower of Thomas Jefferson.
Because of his pro-Fascist and anti-American radio broadcasts during the war, he was
arrested and charged with treason in 1945. Until 1958 he was in a mental institution in
America and then returned to live in Italy.
For his own verse Pound drew on the poetic forms and ideas of a number of predecessors.
His poetry ranges from the early collection Personae (1909), in which he used voices and
masks in the style of Browning and Pre-Raphaelite lyrics, to the free poetic adaptation
Umbra (1920), the superb autobiographical satire in verse, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920),
and his life's work, The Cantos. "The Bathtub" (1913) is an ironic Imagist poem imitating
the Japanese "haiku" form.
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,
O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
With Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Pound made a severe attack on what he considered the cor-
rupt culture of his time and of England in particular. The anti-hero and mediocre poet
Mauberley, Pound's persona, is thus introduced in the first stanza:
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start

No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn []
This is already a rather demanding poem that explores the tensions between art and life, be-
tween aestheticism and the catastrophe of World War I, while alluding to such predecessors
as Browning, Ronsard3 and Greek poets in a style marked by ellipsis, literary quotations,
ironically used clichs, and the contrast between the great historic past and the superficial
present. Pound began with the writing of the Cantos as early as 1917, and this work kept
him busy until his death. In concept this huge series of poems is similar to Whitman's Leaves
of Grass and Joyce's Finnegans Wake, presenting a synopsis of human history as well as a
diagnosis of modern civilization in a highly ambiguous verse that is characterized by numer-
ous allusions to the cultural history of the East and West. The unifying centre of this "long
poem", which refers to Dante4, Homer5, and twentieth-century politics with equal ease, is
the "stream of poetic consciousness". Pound contrasts the corruption of Western civilization
with the order and harmony of Chinese philosophy and the "universal man" of the Renais-
sance. Foremost among the corruptions and, in Pound's view, a source of many modern
evils, is "usura" or "usury" (i.e. lending money at high interest).
With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that design might cover their face,
with usura
with usura, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour
What Pound attempted with The Cantos is a poetic vision of the cultural history of the
Orient and Occident in a sort of "guided tour" through the history of world literature that
includes unresolved philosophical and political problems, formal experiments and parody.
Ezra Pound did not achieve a final and complete poetic form, but The Cantos continue to
impress readers with their numerous masterful lyrical passages, such as the moving se-
quence of the Pisan Cantos (Nos. 74-84), written after his internment in Italy, and such out-
3 Pierre de Ronsard (1524-85), French poet and leader of a group of writers who popularized the
sonnet and Italian verse in France. His love poetry exercised considerable influence on the Eng-
lish poets of the 16th century.
4 Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), influential Italian poet and writer. He celebrated his love for a girl
called Beatrice in his Vita nuova and in his masterpiece, the Divina Commedia, a long poem he
finished just before his death and which comprises the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Para-
diso. The whole poem is a work of moral edification, full of symbolism and allusions to philos-
ophy, natural science, and history. Dante has influenced English and American writers from
Chaucer to T. S. Eliot, and also inspired many artists, such as Salvador Dal.
5 The supposed author of two influential early Greek epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, which
have inspired writers in the West from the fourteenth century on. Nothing reliable is known
about Homer who may have lived in the eighth century B. C.
standing sections as Nos. 1, 2, 13, 17, as well as his treatment of America in "Jefferson.
Nuevo Mundo". Here is the beginning of canto 17:
So that the vines burst from my fingers
And the bees weighted with pollen
Move heavily in the vine-shoots:
chirr-chirr-chir-rikk-a purring sound,
And the birds sleepily in the branches.
ZAGREUS! IO ZAGREUS!
With the first pale-clear of the heaven
And the cities set in their hills,
And the goddess of the fair knees
Moving there, with the oak-woods behind her,
The green slope, with white hounds
leaping about her;
And thence down to the creek's mouth, until evening,
Flat water before me,
and the trees growing in water,
Marble trunks out of stillness,
On past the palazzi,
in the stillness,
The light now, not of the sun.
Chrysophrase,
And the water green clear, and blue clear;
On, to the great cliffs of amber.
In 1913 the New York Armory Show introduced the American public to modernist Euro-
pean painters and cubism6. It caused an uproar. At the same time American poets began to
express themselves in new modes. Vachel Lindsay's (1879-1931) General William Booth
Enters into Heaven (1913) combined elements of folk music and musical instruments with
poetic language in verses that were meant to be recited before, and shared with, an audience.
Accompanied by Salvation Army music and often presented to literary circles by the poet
himself, this "apocalyptic" rhythmic poem was followed by The Congo: A Study of the
Negro Race (1914) which makes use of jazz rhythms and verbal imitations of sound. This
work was more successful than Lindsay's later attempts to create an "American hieroglyphic
poetry".
Like Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950) came from Illinois. He later worked in
Chicago and New York. In his Spoon River Anthology of 1915 he exposed in free verse the
hypocrisy and the lies of provincial life in a small Illinois town. Held in the form of poetic
and confessional self-portraits of characters from a small town, Masters's roughly 250 epi-
taphs attempt in verse what Sherwood Anderson tried in Winesburg, Ohio and Sinclair
Lewis in Main Street.
"Doc Hill" is a typical example. In this poem a former doctor confesses to a wasted life, a
ruined marriage, and a secret lover.
6 An early modernist movement in art, developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque (1882-
1963), in which forms are broken down into simple geometric shapes that present several views
of a single object. The first Cubist pictures were shown in 1907.
Doc Hill
I went up and down the streets
Here and there by day and night,
Through all hours of the night caring for the poor who were sick.
Do you know why?
My wife hated me, my son went to the dogs.
And I turned to the people and poured out my love to them.
Sweet it was to see the crowds about the lawns on the day of my funeral.
And hear them murmur their love and sorrow.
But oh, dear God, my soul trembled, scarcely able
To hold to the railing of the new life
When I saw Em Stanton behind the oak tree
At the grave,
Hiding herself, and her grief!
Free verse was also the favourite poetic form of Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) who held ma-
ny jobs and was a dedicated socialist in Illinois. Sandburg was initially influenced by Imag-
ism (see his poem "Fog"), but his later work reflects his democratic patriotism as well as his
love of folklore (The American Songbag, 1927) and nature in the Whitman tradition. He
described the wild and crude modern city in Chicago Poems (1916) and the man-consuming
industrial age in Smoke and Steel (1920). His personal and political interest in the socially
disadvantaged the old, the poor, and the misfits is most obvious in the panoramic verses
of The People, Yes (1936), a poetic description, including folklore and stories, of America,
of her spirit and the future of her people.
Another "national epic" of America was published by Hart Crane (1899-1932) in 1930, the
long poem The Bridge. Crane came from Ohio and began to write poetry under the in-
fluence of Pound and Eliot and the French symbolists, which is most obvious in his early
The White Buildings. The changing metres of The Bridge try to capture American history
from Columbus to Pocahontas and Rip Van Winkle, and from Whitman to the new technical
achievement, Brooklyn Bridge, which became a symbol of modern American life.
New England had two early poets
in Edward Arlington Robinson
(1869-1935) and in the outstanding
Robert Frost. A native of Maine,
Robinson led a life of poverty un-
til he was discovered and pro-
moted by President Roosevelt in
1902. Robinson was a master of
traditional forms, such as the bal-
Grant Wood, Spring Turning. 1936 lad, the sonnet, and blank verse,
and later received three Pulitzer
Prizes. The Man Against the Sky (1916) is among his best works, a sort of modern credo
professing an agnostic-stoical view of life. Robinson's Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), and
Tristram (1927) are dramatic verse epics retelling the legend of King Arthur for the
twentieth-century reader while his later poetry, such as King Jasper (1935), displays a com-
plex symbolism and an awareness of man's tragic situation in a world suffering from social
and moral dilemmas.
Robert Lee Frost (1875-1963) became the singer of New England's charms, but he was
much more than a "regional poet". He was born in California but made New Hampshire his
home after spending some time in various jobs and in England. Between 1916 and 1938 he
taught English literature at Amherst College and won the Pulitzer Prize on four occasions.
Frost's popularity arose from the fact that he welded traditional verse forms with distinctly
American speech and rhythms. "Desert Places", written in 1936, puts him in the bucolic
tradition of nature poetry but also indicates the metaphysical dimensions of his poems that
show New England's beauty while exploring loneliness, old age, and death.
Desert Places
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
A Further Range (1936), A Witness Tree (1942), and In the Clearing (1962) all contain at-
tractive lyrical-metaphysical verse showing Frost's indebtedness to the Transcendentalists
and to Emily Dickinson. His seemingly simple verse is based on exact observation and
thoughtful interpretation in consciously traditional forms carrying a personal vision. In the
sonnet entitled "Design" (1936), for example, he provides a poetic investigation of the
nature of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, in nature and the question of God's planning or
design of it all:
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?
If design govern in a thing so small.
The South found a number of poets and literary critics who published their verse in The
Fugitive (1922-25) and who were among the first proponents of what came to be known as
New Criticism (see the Glossary of Literary Terms). Opposed to industrialization, the major
members of the group John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), Allen Tate (1899-1979), and
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) met in Nashville, Tennessee, and recalled the literary
and historical past of the South in a poetry that favours polished classical forms. Ransom
was one of their leaders. An outstanding literary critic (see his The New Criticism, 1941) and
the founder of the distinguished journal The Kenyon Review, he treated with much irony of
mortality, imagination, reality, passion, and morality in such collections as Chills and Fever
(1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927), contrasting the glorious Southern cultural herit-
age with the boring present. Allen Tate popularized T. S. Eliot in the South and, as editor of
The Sewanee Review, made this journal internationally known. His poetry lacks the melody
and rhythm of Ransom's verse and has a more intellectual bent. One of his best known
works is the "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1926), which analyses the emotional distance
of the modern Southerner from his own past. The versatile Robert Penn Warren was an in-
ternationally recognized man of letters best known for his influential textbooks of practical
criticism, his literary essays, and his novels. Like Tate, he began with an intellectual and
allusive poetry in the manner of the metaphysical poets, such as Eleven Poems on the Same
Theme (1942). After 1940, he took to a more philosophical exploration of cultural and hist-
orical problems, his outstanding work being the long narrative poem Brother to Dragons
(1953; revised in 1979) which deals with the murder of a black slave by Thomas Jefferson's
nephews and reflects Warren's growing concern with the problem of evil. This theme occu-
pied him in his late poetry collected in Being Here (1980) and Rumor Verified (1981). In
1986, Warren was appointed poet laureate of the United States. Finally, Stephen Vincent
Bent (1898-1943), although not a Southerner, dealt with the Civil War in his epic verse
narrative John Brown's Body, which was published in 1928 and was awarded a Pulitzer
Prize.
If the major poets from the Midwest, New England and the South were traditional formalists
in many respects, Ezra Pound's enormous influence is more strongly felt in the experimental
verse of the expatriate T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and in that of Eliot's contemporaries in
America: Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings,
Marianne Moore, Archibald MacLeish, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Elinor Wylie. Wallace
Stevens (1879-1955) was a great individualist and did not become known as a poet before
his first collection, Harmonium, appeared in 1923 (expanded version in 1931), although
Harriet Moore had published some of his verse as early as 1915. Stevens studied at Harvard
and the New York University Law School and worked for an insurance company. His early
poetry stood under the French symbolist influence and the "posie pure" which stressed
precise expression and musical language. Thus the first stanza of his "Sunday Morning"
(1923), a poem about beauty, death, and salvation in human life and history, is highly inter-
medial in its allusions to Matisse's paintings:
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.

The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
Stevens's view of the imagination as "the one reality in the imagined world" is well rendered
in his "Anecdote of the Jar" (1923).
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
For Stevens fantasy dominates the chaos of reality, and he demonstrated his personal view in
such collections as The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937), whose title alludes to Picasso,
The Auroras of Autumn (1950), and his Collected Poems (1954). Stevens tried to explain his
idea of poetry in a collection of essays entitled The Necessary Angels (1951).
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) did not share Stevens's aesthetic preference for sophisticated
verse and ambiguous metaphor. He spent his childhood in Europe and later settled at Carmel
in California where he lived a life of seclusion. Inspired by the books of Spengler, Nietzsche,
Freud, and Jung7, he developed a pessimistic view of man and life. In his short lyrics he
7 Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), historical philosopher and author of Der Untergang des Abend-
landes (1918-22), a history of Western culture and philosophy that was written under the in-
fluence of Nietzsche and Darwin.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher and poet. Nietzsche rejected
Christian morality and affirmed the idea of the Superman (his main works are Also sprach
Zarathustra, 1883-92; and the posthumously published Der Wille zur Macht).
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, which has had an enormous effect
on both literature and literary theory. Freud practised for many years in Vienna, before he was
driven out, as a Jew, by the Nazis. He died in London. He made fundamental discoveries in the
development of the sexual instinct in children, in the workings of the unconscious and of
repression, and in the study of dreams.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), a Swiss psychiatrist who initially collaborated with Freud while
applying psychoanalytic ideas to the study of schizophrenia. Just before World War II, Jung
broke with Freud and founded his own school of "Analytical Psychology", which works with
such terms as "collective unconscious", "archetype", and "extrovert-introvert". His concept of
provided beautiful impressions of the California coast and the wild animals he loved (see
Tamar, 1924). His nihilism preferred wild nature to humanity: in "November Surf" (1929)
he looked forward to a future when nature can again assert itself:
Some lucky day each November great waves awake and are drawn
Like smoking mountains bright from the west
And come and cover the cliff with white violent cleanness: then suddenly
The old granite forgets half a year's filth:
The orange-peel, eggshells, papers, pieces of clothing, the clots
Of dung in corners of the rock, and used
Sheaths that make light love safe in the evenings: all the droppings of the summer
Idlers washed off in a winter ecstasy:
I think this cumbered continent envies its cliff then But all seasons
The earth, in her childlike prophetic sleep,
Keeps dreaming of the bath of a storm that prepares up the long coast
Of the future to scour more than her sea-lines:
The cities gone down, the people fewer and the hawks more numerous
The rivers mouth to source pure; when the two-footed
Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains
The dignity of room, the value of rareness.
The free rhythms of Jeffers's verse tales are reminiscent of Whitman in form, though not in
spirit, for Jeffers tells stories of murder, incest, and sexual perversion, in which the charac-
ters have symbolic value and refer to classical myths, as in Roan Stallion (1925), The
Woman at Point Sur (1927), and Give Your Heart to the Hawks, and Other Poems (1933).
His negative outlook is balanced by the ecstatic beauty of his descriptions of California in
which are set his metaphorical tales of perversion that make use of Greco-Roman, Biblical,
and Native American mythologies.
Jeffers's poetic version of Medea (1946)
became a great theatrical success.
A much less dramatic and sensational
poetry is that of William Carlos Wil-
liams (1883-1963), a doctor by profes-
sion who spent his life in Rutherford,
New Jersey. Although he learnt much
from Pound and Eliot in style, he did
not turn to the European cultural her-
itage for his themes. Williams was a
poet interested in American speech and
everyday life. The sober and precise
wording of his early imagist and im-
Edward Hopper, Eleven a.m. 1926 pressionistic poems (The Tempers, 1913,
and Sour Grapes, 1921) avoid both
poetic diction and metaphysical statements and present details of urban scenes. "The Young
Housewife" (1917) provides such a brief impression that is realistic and sensuous.
psychological types was adopted by experimental psychology, and he has had a great influence
outside psychiatry.
At ten A. M. the young housewife

moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband's house.
I pass solitary in my car.
Then again she comes to the curb
to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.
The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
This kind of poetry, but also his verse exploring paintings in the manner of W. H. Auden,
such as Pictures from Breughel (1962), have had a great influence on younger poets, notably
Ginsberg, Olson, and Creeley. Like Pound and Crane, Williams tried his hand at the "long
poem". The five books entitled Paterson (1946-58; an incomplete Book VI was published in
1963) are made up of fragments of Williams's life and environment and present a panoramic
view of the history of humanity as reflected in the city of Paterson, New Jersey, and "Dr.
Paterson", Williams's mythic persona. Written in free verse, the work contains prose pas-
sages from historical documents, literary texts, and even personal letters by Ginsberg and
Pound, all of them reinforcing the themes of the poem. Although Paterson is uneven in
many parts and oscillates between the satire of small-town life and a larger critique of life,
the central mythic figure "Paterson" creates a certain unity in a disparate poem. Here is the
opening of Book II, a scene called "Sunday in the Park".
Outside
outside myself
there is a world,
he rumbled, subject to my incursions
a world
(to me) at rest,
which I approach
concretely
The scene's the Park
upon the rock,
female to the city
upon whose body Paterson instructs his thoughts
(concretely)
late spring,
a Sunday afternoon!
and goes by the footpath to the cliff (counting:
the proof)
himself among the others,
treads there the same stones
on which their feet slip as they climb,
paced by their dogs!
laughing, calling to each other
Wait for me!

... the ugly legs of the young girls,
pistons too powerful for delicacy!
the men's arms, red, used to heat and cold,
to toss quartered beeves and
Yah! Yah! Yah! Yah!
More than any of his contemporaries, E(dward) E(stlin) Cummings (1894-1962) indulged
in formal experiments he preferred his own name to be spelled e. e. cummings. A painter,
novelist, and poet, he studied at Harvard and served as a volunteer in the French medical
corps during World War I. When he was erroneously imprisoned in a French concentration
camp, he recorded his experience in the autobiographical prose of The Enormous Room
(1922). During the 1920s Cummings lived in Paris, where he met Gertrude Stein and Ezra
Pound, and then returned to America and lived in Greenwich Village, New York. Attracted
by dadaism8, Cummings made daring experiments with poetic form. Unlike Vachel Lindsay
and other contemporaries who preferred their poems to be read aloud and stressed sound,
cummings paid more attention to the visual form, playing with capitalization or lack of it,
punctuation, line breaks and hyphenation. He used common speech and elements of popular
culture and often wrote poems without beginnings or endings to express the flow of life. It
was the spontaneity of expression that counted for cummings. His main themes were the
defence of the individual against society and the deflation of pathos and false feelings as in
the following poem, which makes ironic use of the American national anthem and patriotic
poems.
"next to of course god america i" (1926)
"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"
He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water
Cummings was also capable of short epigrammatic statements summing up the human situ-
ation, and he could write love poems, both of the tender and serious and of the burlesque
kind. Cummings's idiosyncratic manner is reflected in the very titles of some of his poetry
8 A nihilistic movement in art and literature that lasted from 1916 until the mid-1920s, with
Zurich, New York, and Paris as centres. Dadaists deliberately denied sense and order. The
members included Tristan Tzara (the founder) and Man Ray.
collections: And (1925); Vi Va (1931); No Thanks (1935); and 1 x 1 (1944). Larger collec-
tions of his verse are Poems: 1923-54 (1954) and 95 Poems (1958).
The verse of Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) indicates the various poetic currents of the
early 20th century. MacLeish's career as a poet fell into three stages. The first is charac-
terized by his status as an expatriate in Europe (1923-28) and the influence of Pound, Eliot,
and the French symbolists. Such works as Tower of Ivory (1917), The Pot of Earth (1925),
and The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928) voice the hopeless thoughts of an individual cast
into the chaotic post-war world. Upon his return to
the United States, then suffering from economic
depression, MacLeish became more aware of social
problems and his cultural heritage which became
central themes in New Found Land (1930), Frescoes
of Mr. Rockefeller's City (1933), and especially in
Public Speech (1936) and America Was Promises
(1938) where he demands in verse that something be
done to save democracy. Another poetic statement
of his patriotism is Colloquy for the States (1943).
MacLeish also wrote radio plays and verse epics on
related issues. In his later poems he dealt with bibli-
cal themes, such as Job's trials in the verse drama J.
B. (1958), and poetic adaptations of classical myths
and of events from American history.
Among the women who wrote experimental verse in
the wake of Imagism and the poetry of Pound and
Eliot, mention must be made of Marianne Moore, Max Ernst, La belle jardinire. 1923
Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Elinor Wylie. The Col-
lected Poems of Marianne Moore (1887-1972) were published in 1951 and received the
Pulitzer Prize. She was a friend of Yeats and Pound and contributed to such avant-garde
journals as The Dial and Poetry. Moore favoured capricious metaphors, subtle puns, and
irony, and had a preference for exotic animals. Her poems often contrast trivial everyday
things with abstract terms. Here is an example first published in 1931 and again in 1951:
No Swan So Fine
'No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles.' No swan
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
as the chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.
Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
Candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
Tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea-urchins, and everlastings,
it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers at ease and tall. The king is dead.
The poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) impresses with its lyricism and tech-
nical virtuosity, especially in the handling of the Elizabethan sonnet (Weaver and Other
Poems, 1923; Fatal Interview, 1931). Millay's themes disappointed love and mourning
are essentially romantic but are presented in a modern and surprisingly variable diction.
Elinor Wylie, ne Hoyt (1885-1928), who was also a novelist, adored the English meta-
physical poets and Shelley. Most impressive are her passionate and self-analysing sonnets in
Angels and Earthly Creatures (1928), which surpass the dream-like lyricism of her earlier
verse in Nets to Catch the Wind (1921) and Black Armour (1923).
American poetry published after 1945 is as rich in names as it is in schools and movements.
Several poets who wrote before the war and continued their careers well into the 1960s and
'70s Aiken, cummings, Frost, MacLeish, Ransom, Tate, Warren have come to be known
as the first generation of "academic poets", because their verse has been concerned with
literary precedents, subtle technical effects and ironic allusions. They were followed by a
second generation of "formalists" that include Theodore Roethke (1908-63), Randall
Jarrell (1914-65), Karl Shapiro (1913-2000), Richard Wilbur (born 1921), Daniel Hoff-
man (born 1923), James Merrill (1926-95), Anthony Hecht (born 1923), and such woman
authors as the feminist Adrienne Rich (born 1929), discussed in a separate section below,
and the New Englander Maxine Kumin (born 1925). Roethke was a professor of English
at the University of Washington. His poetry shows the influence of such literary predeces-
sors as Whitman, Dickinson, and Eliot; but his father's profession gardening proved
equally important. The organic life of the greenhouse became a central symbol in Roethke's
poems, which explore the lost unity of life (The Lost Son and Other Poems, 1948).
Roethke's quest led him more and more into metaphysical areas, and such works as Praise
to the End (1951) and The Far Field (1964) record voyages into his own soul to find his
place in God's creation. Jarrell, a Tennessean, and Shapiro, a native of New Jersey, both
took part in World War II and are best remembered for their war poetry. Jarrell's matter-of-
fact style is highly symbolical. He has shown his sympathy for the suffering in the dramatic
verse tales collected in Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and in the poems of The Seven-
League Crutches (1951). Shapiro's verse is more intellectual and distinguished by a precise
style and simple form. His V-Letter and Other Poems (1944), written on the Pacific front,
won him the Pulitzer Prize. Richard Wilbur has remained faithful to the elegant traditional
forms in The Beautiful Changes (1947) and Ceremony (1950). The poems in Things of This
World (1956) display an equal interest in physical objects and abstract beauty. While many of
Wilbur's contemporaries engaged in 'political' poetry in the late 1960s, he continued to write
detached and witty poems (Walking to Sleep, 1969). Daniel Hoffman is the distinguished
author of several books of poetry and the editor of the Harvard Guide to Contemporary
American Writing (1979). His carefully measured verse places the search for the meaning of
life in the context of ritual and myth (An Armada of Thirty Whales, 1954, and The City of
Satisfactions, 1963). Hoffman's later poetry, collected in Broken Laws (1970) and Brotherly
Love (1980), a sequence of poems on William Penn and Philadelphia, provides evidence of
his technical virtuosity and his unobtrusive humanitarianism. James Merrill, like Wilbur,
wrote poetry with a polished surface and in traditional forms. In such works as First Poems
(1951) and the trilogy Book of Ephraim (in Divine Comedies, 1976), Mirabell: Books of
Number (1978), and Scripts for the Pageant (1980), which invite comparison with Pound's
Cantos and other long poems, he has preferred the couplet, the quatrain, and the sonnet
sequence. Thus "The Broken Home" (1966) consists of a series of sonnets, some "broken"
into unconventional proportions and rhyme schemes; here is the first part of this poem:
Crossing the street,
I saw the parents and the child
At their window, gleaming like fruit
With evening's mild gold leaf.
In a room on the floor below,
Sunless, cooler a brimming
Saucer of wax, marbly and dim
I have lit what's left of my life.
I have thrown out yesterday's milk
And opened a book of maxims.
The flame quickens. The word stirs.
Tell me, tongue of fire,
That you and I are as real
At least as the people upstairs.
Merrill's book-length trilogy, published as The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), is an
epic in seventeen thousand lines and one of the major achievements of modern poetry. In
the 1980s, he published two further collections of poetry, Late Settings (1985) and The
Inner Room (1988). Anthony Hecht's formalist commitment consists in an elevated diction,
sophisticated metrical arrangements, and literary allusions best demonstrated in A Summoning
of Stones (1954). In 1968, he received a Pulitzer Prize for The Hard Hours, another collec-
tion of allusive poems indebted to Wallace Stevens, Matthew Arnold, Eliot, Ransom, and
Tate. Hecht's The Venetian Vespers (1979) voices a stronger pessimism and anarchic emo-
tions. In 2000, Anthony Hecht was honoured with the Frost Medal by the Poetry Society of
America. The following year saw the publication of his eighth collection of verse, The
Darkness and the Light, with poems drawing on classics or containing short translations of
classical poems, and with a discernible influence of the Bible, e.g., in such pieces as "Saul
and David" and "Judith". The 44 poems that make up the book carry a smoky bitterness and
a flavour of experienced wisdom.
Finally, Maxine Kumin has preserved the mature technical competence of her early Half-
way (1961) and has become more concerned with the environment and the people in the
places where she has lived (Europe and New Hampshire). Up Country (1972) and The Re-
trieval System (1978) ask questions about life, nature, human beings, and homey things in a
modest style. Later poetry collections include Closing the Ring (1984), Nurture (1989), and
Looking for Luck (1993).
In opposition to the intellectual and allegedly "academic" art of the formalists, a few move-
ments beginning in the late 1950s demanded more spontaneity in the creation of poetry. One
of the most influential writers was Charles Olson (1910-70). After teaching at Harvard, he
was rector of the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina between 1951-56.
Olson brought together a group of avant-garde artists who came to be known as the Black
Mountain School. Olson himself is better known as a theorist than as a poet and explained
his view of poetry in the essay Projective Verse (1950). According to Olson's poetics, which
developed some thoughts of Pound and William Carlos Williams, a poem is "a high-energy
construct" that must discharge energy at all points and in which "the perception must im-
mediately [] lead to a further perception". In this process the spontaneous rhythm of the
poet controls and orchestrates the "kinetic field" of the poem. This meant a dismissal of ab-
straction and intellectual aspects in favour of a sort of neo-Romantic primitivism.
Olson's "projective" or "open" verse was varied by a number of poets at his college Robert
Creeley (1926-2005), Robert Duncan (1919-88) and others such as Denise Levertov (1923-
1997) who contributed to the journals Black Mountain Review and Origin. Thus Creeley's
poems are brief, laconic, and often epigrammatic statements in free-verse improvisations
that deal with the problems of erotic and marital love. His best work is contained in For
Love (1962), while Words (1965) and Pieces (1968) are less successful and suffer from the
extreme reduction in technical means. Unlike Creeley, Duncan wrote highly allusive poems
that stand in a mystical-visionary tradition. Duncan wanted to develop the fantastic dimen-
sion of the unconscious in order to intensify reality. His Poems 1953-56 (1958) were fol-
lowed by two long sequences, his major work, entitled The Opening of the Field (1960) and
Passages (1966). Bending the Bow (1968) continues this line of writing which owes much
to Pound and Olson. His two final volumes of poetry, Ground Work: Before the War (1984)
and Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987), contain major poems written over a fifteen-year
period. Denise Levertov has shown in such collections as Here and Now (1957), The
Jacob's Ladder (1961), and O Taste and See (1964) that she shares Duncan's interest in
mysticism and Creeley's tendency to record passing phases of awareness. But she transcends
the Black Mountain School with her strong preference for ordinary events in daily life. "The
Willows of Massachusetts" (1966) indicates her intense perception mellowed by mystery.
Animal willows of November
in pelt of gold enduring when all else
has let go all ornament
and stands naked in the cold.
Cold shine of sun on swamp water
cold caress of slant beam on bough,
gray light on brown bark.
Willows last to relinquish a leaf,
curious, patient, lion-headed, tense
with energy, watching
the serene cold through a curtain
of tarnished strands.
Her social protest and opposition to the Viet-
nam War found expression in less convincing
and occasionally sententious poems (To Stay
Alive, 1971), but her perception has widened
David Hockney, A Bigger Splash. 1967 in such books of poetry as The Freeing of the
Dust (1975), Life in the Forest (1978) and
Candles in Babylon (1982). In her more recent collections Breathing the Water (1987)
and A Door in the Hive (1989) one still notices the influence of magic realism in her
visionary style.
In 1956 Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) attracted attention with his sensational Howl. It was fol-
lowed in 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's (born 1919) A Coney Island of the Mind. Both
authors were central figures among the San Franciscans or Beats. The Beat movement,
whose members became known for their prose and poetry, used some ideas of Olson's in
protesting against the commercial "American way of life" and the establishment. The poet
Kenneth Rexroth (1905-82) initially welcomed and promoted some younger anti-formalist
poets in California, but they soon outgrew his patronage and formed a loosely connected
group of writers. Apart from Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, the best known poets of the Beat
movement were Gregory Corso (1930-2001), Gary Snyder (born 1930) and James
Broughton (1913-99). The term "beat" alludes to several ideas of these poets: it implies
"beaten", i.e. dejected and lost, but also rhythm. The poetry of this "lost generation" of World
War II contains accusations of, and satires on, post-war America as well as new ways and
forms of expression. A dynamic free verse inspired by jazz blended several themes, such as
leftist politics, Oriental mysticism and the worship of sex. Ginsberg listened back to Blake
and Whitman, but also to Hebrew poetry, when he wrote his long flowing lines that impress
with their quality of sound. His Howl became the Bible of Beat poetry. The poem is an
outcry against, and a diagnosis of, modern America. The opening of Howl provides an idea
of Ginsberg's style that draws on Hebrew prophecy and an oral tradition suggesting de-
clamation. But Ginsberg also employs the jargon of the mass media, the slang of the "beat-
niks", and surrealist images.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysteri-
cal naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry
dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the super-
natural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contem-
plating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated []
Ginsberg thus brought an apocalyptic and prophetic dimension, and a more orally oriented
style, to an American poetry that had been a written and scholarly art. In Kaddish (1961), a
sort of free-verse elegy, Ginsberg commemorated the life and death of his mother. He then
moved on to the cultural criticism of modern life and the exploration of mysticism and
hallucinations in Planet News (1963), The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1972),
and Mind Breaths (1977). Plutonium Ode contains his poems written between 1977-80.
Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights Press made possible the publication of avant-garde Beat
poetry, and Corso wrote in a similar style and with the same critical-satirical attitude toward
the America of the 1960s. Ferlinghetti's major collection, mentioned above, and Starting
From San Francisco (1961) contain images suggested by paintings and were influenced by
jazz rhythms. His poems display the aesthetics of the Beat movement and of abstract ex-
pressionism in a language that is both "hip" and slangy. In the following poem, for example,
he retells the central Christian myth of the life of Christ in the diction of the Beats, thus
foregrounding the story by debunking it to make us reflect on its message:
Sometime During Eternity [] (1958)

Sometime during eternity
Some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hip
so who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad
And moreover
He adds
It's all writ down
On some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won't even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
[]
They stretch him on the Tree to cool
And everybody after that
is always making models
Of this Tree
[]
Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead.
Ferlinghetti is also a painter. In the spring of 1990 he had a large retrospective exhibition of
his paintings at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In the poems collected in When I
Look at Paintings (1990), he provides personal and highly insightful readings or ekphrases
of famous paintings (reproduced in the book) ranging from William Hogarth and Goya to
Robert Motherwell. The painter's vision also marks his collection of lyric poems and others
he produced between 1997-2000 (including his time as San Francisco's first poet laureate,
1998-99); entitled How to Paint Sunlight (2001) they give evidence, in the first part of the
book, of his love of the West Coast (e.g., Big Sur), and of his undiminished surrealistic and
humane view of America recorded during his travels.
While Ferlinghetti seems to be inspired by music and painting, a musical influence also
shaped the more violent and aggressive verse of Corso's Gasoline (1958), Bomb (1958),
The Happy Birthday of Death (1960), and Elegiac Feelings American (1970), which all pit a
prophet-poet against a despicable America of industrialists, technocrats, and warmongers.
The underlying confessional pessimism and the satirical tone of the Beat poets are elements
they share with other post-war movements in poetry with the "Deep Imagists", the New
York Poets, and especially with the "Confessionalists".
The group of poets known as "Deep Imagists" clustered around the journals of Robert Bly
(born 1926) and Robert Kelly (born 1935). Apart from these two poets, James Wright
(1927-80), and James Dickey (1923-97), also a novelist, were associated with this move-
ment. What they looked for were archetypes of the unconscious, "deep images", that rise
from the poet's uncommon, powerful feelings and create a lost order for the reader. Ex-
amples of this kind of verse are Bly's poems in The Light Around the Body (1967), which
contains mystical verse as well as political poems against the Vietnam war, and Sleepers
Joining Hands (1973). Since his period of protest in the 1970s, Bly has continued to edit a
journal that changes names with each decade and has published many collections of verse
suggesting an influence of Carl Jung and writers whose works he translated into English
(e.g., Knut Hamsun, Rilke, and Lorca): see Bly's In the Month of May (1985), The Moon on
a Fencepost (1988) and Out of the Rolling Ocean (1988).
The New York Poets are the most radically antiformalists. The nucleus of the group Frank
O'Hara (1926-66; see Selected Poems, 1973, which won the National Book Award), John
Ashbery (born 1927), Kenneth Koch (born 1925-2002; see Selected Poems, 1985; and On
the Edge, 1986) was influenced by European and New York painters and by contemporary
French free verse. They reject logical and coherent presentation. Line, syntax, and stanza
are less important than immediacy, open forms, and unconnected images, making this kind
of poetry difficult to read. One of the more accessible collections is Ashbery's prize-winning
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). Held in free verse, the title poem of this collection,
which won the Pulitzer Prize and some other awards, probes artistic self-representation and
self-reflection, as the speaker records his thoughts about Francesco Parmigianino's (1503-
40) self-portrait in a mirror, the (art) historian Giorgio Vasari's contemporary comments on
it, and his own observations. In his more recent works, he has become as introspective as
the poets of the confessional school (see A Wave, 1984; and April Galleons, 1988). In Flow
Chart (1991), he picks the material for his verse from daily routine, such as TV watching,
telephone calls, and other activities. In the following poem, from A Wave (1984), the
speaker ponders about the meaning of everyday life and the deliverance from daily routine
as he observes those around and with him:
Brute Image
It's a question of altitude, or latitude,
Probably. I see them leaving their offices.
By seven they are turning smartly into the drive
To spend the evening with small patterns and odd,
Oblique fixtures. Authentic what? Did I say,
Or more likely did you ask is there any
Deliverance from any of this? Why yes,
One boy says, one can step for a moment
Out into the hall. Spells bring some relief
And antique shrieking into the night

That was not here before, not like this.
This is only a stand-in for the more formal,
More serious side of it. There is partial symmetry here.
Later one protests: How did we get here
This way, unable to stop communicating?
And is it all right for the children to listen,
For the weeds slanting inward, for the cold mice
Until dawn? Now every yard has its tree,
Every heart its valentine, and only we
Don't know how to occupy the tent of night
So that what must come to pass shall pass.
Hotel Lautramont (1993) offers another collection of meditative lyrics. Ashbery finished
the millennium with a book of poetry (Your Name Here, 2000) that continues to examine the
themes that have preoccupied him of late age and its inevitable losses, memories of child-
hood, and the transforming magic of dreams in everyday life. Still rather obscure, these
poems invite the reader to personalize them with their own associations and memories.
With the publication in 1959 of Life Studies Robert Lowell (1917-77) introduced a new
type of "confessional" verse that influenced a number of poets in at least two generations.
They include the brilliant John Berryman (1914-72), W. D. Snodgrass (1926-2009; Heart's
Needle, 1959, and After Experience, 1968), and two women poets, Anne Sexton (1928-74),
and Sylvia Plath (1932-63), discussed further on in this chapter. Also opposed to formalism,
these poets revealed painful truths about themselves, partly as a therapy for real or imagined
psychoses and partly because they felt that the age called for a new clinical analysis of the
self. Their improvised stanzaic forms and odd syntax and metrics suggest the influence of
Pound, the Black Mountainists, the Beats, and William Carlos Williams's Paterson. Lowell
and Berryman rank among the best post-war poets in America. Lowell came from an old
New England family and studied in Louisiana and at Harvard. He converted to Roman Ca-
tholicism in 1940 and was a conscientious objector. His early poetry Lord Weary's Castle
(1946) and The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) shows his reading of John Crowe Ransom
and Allen Tate. It is still rather traditional verse that attacks the atheism and materialism of
the age. Lowell then produced poetry closer to the rhythm of speech as he wrote the auto-
biographical Life Studies (1959) which records his mixed feelings about his New England
childhood, his relations with his parents, the failure
of his first marriage, and his alcoholism and treat-
ment in a psychiatric ward. For the Union Dead
(1964), of which a part is quoted below, continues
his psychological exploration of time past and pre-
sent: in this case a bronze relief commemorating the
deaths of black soldiers in the Civil War serves as a
starting point.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange. Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
Robert Lowell as seen by David Levine and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,

propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
After 1970 Lowell reduced his subjectivism and found a more sober rhetoric. In History
(1973) he published a series of revised "public" poems tracing life from the beginning of the
world to the present, while his more private and confessional poems appeared in For Lizzie
and Harriet and The Dolphin (1973), a collection of sonnets on his third marriage. Lowell's
last book, Day by Day (1977), is very much in the confessional tradition. It records his ex-
periences in England and at Harvard and new marital difficulties, the whole interspersed
with a few poems about his childhood. Lowell was the dominant and most honoured poet of
his generation.
Like Lowell, Berryman can be considered as a "confessional" poet who dealt in his verse
with identity crises, sexual problems, and religious issues. The son of John Smith, a banker
who committed suicide, Berryman adopted the name of his stepfather. His childhood was
restless. He was brought up a strict Catholic but fell away from the church. In his later life
he taught at various universities, including Harvard and Princeton, and, after an unsuccessful
attempt to return to the Catholic Church, he killed himself by jumping from a bridge in
Minneapolis. Berryman is remembered for two outstanding works. The first is Homage to
Mistress Bradstreet published in 1953 in Partisan Review, and as a book in 1956, in which
he merges his own consciousness with that of the Puritan poet and reflects on their kinship.
Some of the 57 stanzas of the poem are highly erotic as Anne Bradstreet confesses about her
personal erotic feelings and experiences and as Berryman imagines her as his mistress.
Berryman's major works, however, are his 77 Dream Songs (1964), His Toy, His Dream,
His Rest (1968), and Henry's Fate (1977). Dream Songs is a series of almost 400 18-line
poems concerned with the persona Henry that allows Berryman to hide behind masks and to
borrow identities. Although he always denied that the work is autobiographical, insisting
that Dream Songs is "essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named
Henry", the mask is at times all too obvious. As Berryman admitted, the work is indebted to
Stephen Crane and Whitman's Song of Myself. The speaker in the various poems, Henry (or
"Mr. Bones") assumes a number of roles including that of a white American who affects
being a black man. The identities merge with Berryman's own, and the effect is that of
psychic vaudeville and, despite Henry's grief, entertaining and self-mocking comedy. In No.
14 of Dream Songs Henry starts speaking as a "white" American, then changes into a black
speaker and, finally, Berryman joins in, too, as the poem ends in a surrealistic image.
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,

Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
These poems are beyond doubt among the best verse of
the post-war era and are far superior to the works Berry-
man wrote shortly before his death, such as Love & Fame
(1970) and the posthumously published Delusions, Etc.
(1972) which reflect his reactivated Catholicism and
foreshadow his suicide.
Some of the poetry written by women can also be charac-
terized as confessional in the sense that it inquires into
Anne Sexton seen through the role American society has prescribed for women. The
Arthur Furst's lens poetic reactions of women writers range from the very
personal or confessional to radical, feminist visions and
views of life. To the former belong Sylvia Plath (1932-63) and Anne Sexton (1928-74).
Plath was the wife of the British poet Ted Hughes and focused on mental disorder (she
suffered from depression throughout her life) and death (Ariel, 1965; Crossing the Water,
1971; Winter Trees, 1972). She committed suicide in 1963. Like Plath, Anne Sexton studied
under Robert Lowell and also suffered a series of mental breakdowns culminating in her
suicide in 1974. In her poems, Sexton laid bare the intimate traumas of her life while ob-
viously using writing as a rebellion against the dark forces threatening to overwhelm her
(see To Bedlam and Part Way Back, 1960; All My Pretty Ones, 1962; Live or Die, 1966;
The Death Notebooks, 1974; and The Awful Rowing toward God, 1975). Adrienne Rich
(born 1929) has advanced from the formalism of The Diamond Cutters (1955) to the more
personal and feminist stance of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963). To some extent,
her verse reacts to the radical changes in her life. She had three sons with a Harvard
professor, engaged in radical anti-war politics in the 1960s, and separated from her husband
in 1970. In 1976, she entered into a lesbian relationship with Michelle Cliff, editing the
journal Sinister Wisdom with her. One notices in Rich's poems published after 1970 how the
tone gets angrier as she shows the plight of a raped woman in a police station in "Rape". But
she is also capable of more quiet feminist verse, as in the wonderful "Aunt Jennifer's
Tigers", which is no less accusatory in its subtle hints at the oppressive aspect of marriage:
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band

Sits heavily on Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
In her later books of poetry such as Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time's Power:
Poems 1985-1988 (1989), and An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 (1991),
Rich has written more directly and from a feminist angle on her experiences as a woman, a
lesbian, and a Jew in an America she still considers oppressed by masculinity.
The approach of the major confessional poets (Lowell and Berryman) has left an impact on
a younger generation of writers. Thus the autobiographical dimension, often projected onto
a persona (as in Berryman's verse) is very important in the work of Frank Bidart (born
1939; see The Book of the Body, 1977; The Sacrifice, 1983), Robert Pinsky (born 1940; see
History of my Heart, 1984), Dave Smith (born 1942; see Cuba Night, 1990; Selected
Poems, 1992; and The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems 1970-2000, 2000), and
Louise Glck (born 1943; see The Wild Iris, 1992, which won the Pulitzer Prize). Glck
was appointed US Poet Laureate for 2003-2004 and has since published remarkable verse in
Averno (2006), an intertextual exploration of mythological figures, and A Village Life
(2007), focusing on the fictional characters and the topography of a vaguely Mediterranean
village.
The most important schools that have emerged in American poetry since the 1970s are prob-
ably the "New Formalism" and the so-called "Language Poetry". In the 1980s, when the free
verse of Pound, Eliot and William Carlos Williams had almost become an orthodoxy in
American university writing courses, the New Formalists returned to traditional metres and
forms and to narrative in a revolt against Modern-
ism and an attempt not only to produce clarity and
music, but also to make their works accessible to a
larger audience. The plain style of the New Forma-
lists is reminiscent of Ben Jonson and is indebted
to the aesthetics of Yvor Winters's teaching at
Stanford University. The qualities of the new
school the depiction of emotion, the use of col-
loquial language in traditional poetic forms, and
the acceptance and integration of American pop-
ular culture are best exemplified in the verse of
Dana Gioia (born 1950) who has been much con-
cerned with suburban New York and the land-
scapes of California (see Daily Horoscope, 1986,
and The Gods of Winter, 1991) and, as a theorist,
has also defended the New Formalism (see his Can
Poetry Matter?, 1992); in Timothy Steele's (born David Levine's portrait of
1948) love lyrics (see Sapphics Against Anger, Gjertrud Schnackenberg. 2001
1986); and in Gjertrud Schnackenberg's (born
1953) elegies to her father (see, for example, "Supernatural Love", in The Lamplit Answer,
1985). Schnackenberg writes in a deliberately palimpsestic fashion, superimposing texts one
on the other and thus weaving her new text in the postmodern manner described by Roland
Barthes. Thus the first stanza of her poem "Darwin in 1881" (1982) appeals to the reader's
knowledge of (texts about) the great English explorer and naturalist Charles Darwin and
Shakespeare's drama The Tempest, comparing Darwin's experience of the Galapagos islands
with Prospero's stay in an imaginary island in the Mediterranean:
Darwin in 1881
Sleepless as Prospero back in his bedroom
In Milan, with all his miracles
Reduced to sailors' tales,
He sits up in the dark. The islands loom.
His seasickness upwells,
Silence creeps by in memory as it crept
By him on water, while the sailors slept,
From broken eggs and vacant tortoise shells.
His voyage around the cape of middle age
Comes, with a feat of insight, to a close,
The same way Prospero's
Ended before he left the stage
To be led home across the blue-white sea,
When he had spoken of the clouds and globe,
Breaking his wand, and taking off his robe:
Knowledge increases unreality.
The pleasure this poem provides derives, on the one hand, from its formal beauty and
rhythmic quality (e.g. internal and end rhymes) and, on the other hand, from the fact that it
plays with Shakespeare's text, which is quoted verbatim in lines 6-7. In a similar manner,
Schnackenberg, in her more recent A Gilded Lapse of Time (1992), fuses her personal
history with Dante's journey described in The Divine Comedy in a poem that is rich in allu-
sions to great monuments of literature, art (Mantegna), and to historical personages
(Augustus, Herod, Stalin, Tiberius). In The Throne of Labdacus (2001), she uses spare
couplets to explore moral responsibility and the limits of art in a book drawing on the story
of Oedipus but whose real hero is the god Apollo reacting to the story told in Sophocles'
drama (see also her Supernatural Love: Poems 1976-1992, 2001).
In direct opposition to the New Formalist poetry, the representatives of L=A=N=
G=U=A=G=E Poetry, which is more of a theory-generated method of poetic composition
rather than a school, have written theoretical essays trying to resolve the contradictions in
the work of Frank O'Hara and the New York School and in the verse of the Beat poets.
More urban and more intellectual than the New Formalists, the Language poets have written
under the influence of Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, and William Carlos Williams. Trying to
create a new American poetry, they prefer open forms (e.g., free verse), they emphasize the
written and visual dimensions of poetry, and they employ avant-garde techniques, such as
"cut-up" methods derived from Dada and Beat artists, to disrupt conventional narrative and
syntax in an attempt to foreground language as a medium and the indeterminacy of meaning.
The verse of the Language poets has been collected in anthologies (see The L=A=N=
G=U=A=G=E Book, 1984; and In the American Tree, 1986), and the best known represent-
atives among the first two generations are Charles Bernstein (born 1950), Susan Howe
(born 1937) and Ron Silliman (born 1946). Two reasons may explain the fact that most
anthologies of modern or postmodern American verse do not contain the works of these
authors. To begin with the Language poets have explored the borderland between visual and
verbal representation while stressing language as a sign system whose conventional refer-
ences they intend to break. This makes them an odd case between art and poetry. Secondly,
they tend to theorize even while producing poetry. In fact, their verse aims at two targets. On
one level, which is the poetic-linguistic target, they are concerned with sound and graphic
arrangement while stressing the personal experience of language in prose poems. On a sec-
ond level, which is political or ideological, the Marxist-feminist poets intend to change what
they perceive as the false consciousness of their readers. Susan Howe is an important figure
among the first generation of Language poets. Also an artist, she has produced word col-
lages and has focused on American history and historiography while trying to give voice to
the marginalized and to minorities in history and society. Thus she has dealt with the
appropriation of the "Other" and the unknown in the American conquest of the West (The
Western Borders, 1979), with the confrontation of cultures in a poetic analysis of Melville's
marginalia in his books (The Nonconformist's Memorial, 1993), and with gendering and the
power of various forms of discourse (which exclude women) in A Bibliography of the
King's Book, or, Eikon Basilike (1989). Eikon Basilike is the title of the book King Charles I
had published on the day of his execution by Oliver Cromwell. Howe's poetic use of this
book probes the problem of authorship and divine and royal authority in the graphic juxta-
position on the page of lines from King Charles's book and texts by other writers, including
John Milton and Thomas More.
Susan Howe's iconotext Eikon Basilike

Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman belong to the second generation of Language poets.
They share with Howe a concern for the socially disadvantaged, but they prefer the language
realism of their prose poems to formal experiments as they try to explore new fields of
reality in the poetic treatment of the plight of the homeless, of AIDS victims and the
sexually discriminated. The third generation, sometimes also referrred to as "Post-Language
poets", is more mystically oriented and perhaps best represented by the works of Lew Daly.
Daly has explored the materiality of language in such highly intertextual works as e.
dickinson on / a sleepwalk with the / alphabet prowling around her / (a poem for two
voices) (1990), in which lines from Dickinson's verse alternate with lines containing letters
and single words that seem to have no syntactic or semantic connection.
The terms "school" or "movement", which please literary historians more than poets, cannot
hide the fact that there are differences and varying approaches among the authors discussed
above and others who wrote after World War II. Thus it is difficult to categorize the eminent
poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). Like Rich, she was a lesbian, but never wrote about this
aspect of her life; and like Rich she was alienated, living with a Brazilian architect in Rio de
Janeiro before returning to the United States in the 1970s to teach at Harvard University.
Her poetry displays feminist aspects, for example when she describes the experience of a
young girl with her aunt in a dentist's waiting room ("In the Waiting Room", 1976), yet her
verse transcends feminist concerns, for Bishop's subjects are memory, loss, displacement,
and epiphany found in the smallest details of life and nature. Close to Robert Lowell in her
message and to Emily Dickinson in theme and subject, she has come to be regarded as
among the major poets of the twentieth century (see The Complete Poems 1927-1979, 1983).
If Bishop has to be grouped somewhere, one could count her among the great number of "in-
dependents" who were or still are at work in America. For the sake of justice, the names, and a
few works, of the most accomplished independent poets must at least be mentioned here. They
include William Stafford (1914-93), Ann Stanford (1916-87), A(rchie) R(andolph)
Ammons (1926-2001), Galway Kinnell (born 1927), William S. Merwin (born 1927; see
The Rain in the Trees, 1988; The Vixen, 1996; and The Pupil, 2002), Michael Benedikt
(born 1935), C. K. Williams (born 1936), Douglas Crase (born 1944), and Larry Levis
(1946-96). Two unusual voices are those of August Kleinzahler (born 1949) and Brad
Leithauser (born 1953). Kleinzahler was born in New Jersey and lived in various countries
before settling in San Francisco; his poetry reflects keen and lively observations of everyday
life obviously written under the influence of the New York poets and painters (e.g., Frank
O'Hara and Jackson Pollock), Thom Gunn, and cool jazz (see Live From the Hong Kong
Nile Club: Poems 1975-90, 2001). Leithauser, in Darlington's Fall (2002), returns to the
narrative poem rarely used in the postmodern period in the story of an American
boyhood in the Midwest. Written in ten-line stanzas, this is a remarkable poetic narrative
formally and structurally influenced by the prior examples of Lord Byron and James
Merrill.
But the white man's and woman's voices are not the only ones in American poetry. The Lan-
guage poets discussed above have made readers more aware of what could be termed ethnic
poetry. Jerome Rothenberg (born 1931) has coined the term ethnopoetry for his collections
of songs and verse from various cultures, e.g., American examples in Shaking the Pumpkin
(1972), and eastern Jewish and Polish examples in Vienna Blood (1988). Since many of
these poems derived from oral and tribal cultures need to be read out, often showing dialog-
ical patterns (Rothenberg calls them event poems), they share a performative aspect with
postmodern lyrics and rap songs and especially with the poetry of the Native Americans dis-
cussed below. While America is not quite a melting pot (for the races do not really mix
there), there is a great ethnic variety which has found expression above all in the poetry of
blacks, native Americans, chicanos, Jews, and Asians.
Black poetry has blossomed since the Harlem Renaissance brought to prominence the verse
of Countee Cullen (1903-46; see his On These I Stand, 1947), and Langston Hughes
(1902-67). Both authors wrote poems about black life in conventional poetic forms. Thus
Cullen caught a black boy's first experience of racism and social exclusion in the short poem
"Incident" (1925):
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.
Hughes also experimented with free verse, jazz, and blues rhythms. His large body of
poetry, from The Weary Blues (1926) to Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) and The
Panther and the Lash (1967), contains verse of two modes: there are lyrics about the way it
feels to be black in America, and there are poems of racial protest. Here is an early example
whose refrain is an ironic echo of a Southern minstrel song that was popular after the Civil
War.
Song for a Dark Girl
Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree.
(Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer.
(Break the heart of me)
Love is a naked shadow
On a gnarled and naked tree.
Younger black poets have abandoned traditional "white" forms of poetry and prefer a
mixture of the styles and techniques of Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown (1901-89),
one of the two major folk poets of the Harlem Renaissance and an important rival of
Langston Hughes. The younger poets go back to Hughes and Brown and also integrate free
verse and the forms employed by the Beat generation. The Black Power movement of the
1960s helped create a poetry of ethnic pride in which form and technique are less important
than the message, which is often politically aggressive. Writers like Le Roi Jones (born
1934), who calls himself Imamu Amiri Baraka, and Don L. Lee (born 1942), now Haki
R. Mahubuti, shed their "white" American names to underline their Afro-Arab origins and
to assert their black identity. Apart from these two, the most distinguished black poets are
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), Nikki Giovanni (born 1943), Robert Hayden (1913-
80), Mari Evans (born 1923), Sonia Sanchez (born 1934), and Lucille Clifton (born
1936). A good example of the aggressive and politicized verse of the radical 1960s is Sonia
Sanchez's "to blk/record/buyers", a poem held in black slang, in which she contrasts the
music and behaviour of white Americans (expressed in a song by the Righteous Brothers)
with black anger and protest:
don't play me no
righteous bros.
white people
ain't rt bout nothing
no mo.
don't tell me bout
foreign dudes
cuz no blk/
people are grooving on a
sunday afternoon.
they either
making out/
signifying/
drinking/
making molotov cocktails/
stealing
or rather more taking their goods
from the honky thieves who
ain't hung up
on no pacifist/jesus/
cross/ but
play blk/songs
to drown out the
Shit/screams of honkies. AAH.
AAH. AAH. yeah brothers.
andmanymoretogo.
As this brief list shows, many of the younger poets are women. The women's verse, too, is
conditioned by rage and disappointment. Examples can be found in the poetry of Audre
Lorde (1934-1992), who voiced her black woman's anger not only as a female poet but also
as a mother, a daughter, a feminist, and towards the end of her life, a lesbian (see Chosen
Poems Old and New, 1982). Gwendolyn Brooks's early poetry (Annie Allen, 1949; The
Bean Eaters, 1960) depicts the ordinary aspects of black life in compassionate portraits of
impoverished ghetto-dwellers. But her verse changed radically when she met black activists
in 1967. In the poems of Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1970) and Beckonings (1975) she
speaks mainly to, and for, black people, replacing the former traditional forms with jagged
phrases of anger and defiance that are explicitly political. In this she resembles the militancy
of both Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni. Baraka came from the slums of Newark, New
Jersey. He received a master's degree in German from Columbia University and considers
the Beat poets, Pound, Williams, and Charles Olson the most influential sources for his own
verse. Frustrated with his attempts to help create an integrated American society, he left his
white wife and turned into a black militant for whom poetry like prose and drama is a
means to destroy America as it is. His outrage found a first expression in The Dead Lecturer
(1964). The subsequent books, Black Art (1966), Black Magic (1969), It's Nation Time
(1970), and Hard Facts (1975), advocate his revolutionary ideas in verse that owes much to
the oral tradition. Baraka's revolutionary spirit had not abated by the 1980s when he pub-
lished further poetry celebrating the black spirit (see Reggae of Not, 1981; and Thoughts for
You, 1984). Nikki Giovanni's poems, published in Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968) and
Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978) are richer in human feeling. She shares Baraka's mili-
tancy but makes better personal statements, especially when she discusses black individuals
like Aretha Franklin and Angela Davis. A notable later collection of poems by Giovanni is
Those Who Read the Night Winds (1983). Unlike his contemporaries, Robert Hayden de-
spised ethnocentric poetry. His best work is contained in Selected Poems (1966) and Ayle of
Ascent (1975). Based on the black experience, his verse makes use of verbal and poetic de-
vices rather than socio-political commentary. Even younger poetic voices are those of Rita
Dove (born 1952) and Essex Hemphill (1957-95). Dove is the first black American to be
named poet laureate of the United States, an office she held from 1993 to 1995, and the first
African American since Gwendolyn Brooks to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Ini-
tially rooted in her own personal history, her poems also explore black family relationships
cast into the realm of Greek myth. In Mother Love (1995), one of her recent collections of
poems, Dove has Persephone resurface in a modern Paris bistro, where she meets her moth-
er, Demeter (the speaker and Dove's mask). Described in a series of sonnets and distanced
by the screen of Greek myth, the mother-daughter relationship is thus seen from a new angle
(see also her Thomas and Beulah, 1986, and Grace Notes, 1989). The experience of black
gays, including the slow death of AIDS, has been cast into angry and blunt poetry by Essex
Hemphill who wanted to confront his readers with what he termed "the ass-splitting truth"
(see his Conditions, 1986, and Ceremonies, 1992).
The best work of the black poets is illuminating and fresh and most convincing when politi-
cal or social attitudes are grounded in personal experience and expressed in black speech
the street and city "jive" in the oral tradition and in music. The lyrics used by the Rap and
Gangsta Rap groups are a good case in point. There are a few white rappers, such as Emi-
nem, alias Marshall Mathers, who grew up in a black quarter in Detroit and is best known for
his aggressively obscene and occasionally homophobic lyrics. But even Eminem has ad-
mitted his debt to his producer, the black hip hop legend "Dr. Dre". Emerging from the black
urban centres of the 1970s and 1980s, and in the case of Gangsta Rap from prisons, this new
form of poetry cum music (now mostly consumed in the form of videos, thus adding a visual
dimension) draws on such varied sources as game chants and songs, but also on trickster
toasts and boasts, chanted sermons of black churches, the scat singing of jazz musicians,
disc-jockey's patter, and the jive poetry of Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka. The rappers
speak musically as it were, relying on reggae music and the irreverent and sexualized talk-
sing styles of such musicians as James Brown, Sly Stone, and George Clinton. Rap is
characterized by extremely deft rhymes and highly percussive stylized verse interacting with
the previously recorded music. Rap performers like P. Diddy (formerly Puff Daddy), Ice
Cube, T. I. ("the king of Southern rap"), and 50 Cent, to name just a few, go back to verna-
cular sources and employ a language that in Gangsta Rap is often deliberately obscene and
offensive (see Ice-T's Rhyme Pays, 1987, and the various albums produced by Snoop Dogg).
Impressive street poetry of the surrealist kind can be found in Ghostface Killah's album
Fishscale (2006) while Boots Riley's political hip hop group "The Coup" presents a witty
picture of blacks caught between paranoia and a violent wish to enjoy life, between private
disaster and public claims to political power. Some of the songs are even too explosive for
radio stations, which have refused to air them. The rappers describe sexual experiences and
imagined conquests along with fantasies of power and richness. As in other postmodern art-
forms, however, there is also a whimsically comic and self-mocking dimension to Rap which
is most obvious in the implicit parodies of "cool" behaviour. Groups like N.W.A. (Niggahs
with Attitude) may use brutal sexist and even anti-Semitic diction, but their lyrics contain
both realistic and parodic elements, as they teach their listeners (tongue-in-cheek in the best
examples) about the severe, violent nature of life in the otherwise undescribed realm of the
black urban underclass. Some rappers are even prophetic or political in the sense that they
urge their audience to awaken to new levels of spiritual and ideological consciousness. Here
are two examples. The first is the second "stanza" (if such a term may be used for the lyrics
of a song mostly consumed in the form of a video clip one of the postmodern intermedial
art forms that have emerged in the 1980s and 1990s) of "Don't Believe the Hype", recorded
by Public Enemy in 1988:
Don't believe the hype
Yes was the start of my last jam
So here it is again, another def jam
But since I gave you all a little something
That we knew you lacked
They still consider me a new jack
All the critics, you can hang 'em
I'll hold the rope
But they hope to the pope
And pray it ain't dope
The follower of Farrakhan
Don't tell me that you understand
Until you hear the man
The book of the new school rap game
Writers treat me like Coltrane, insane
Yes, to them, but to me I am a different kind
We're brothers of the same mind, unblind
Caught in the middle and
Not surrenderin'
I don't rhyme for the sake of riddlin'
Some claim that I am a smuggler
Some say I never heard of ya
A rap burglar, false media
We don't need it, do we?
It's fake, that's what it be to ya, dig me?
Yo, Terminator X, step up on the stand and show people what time it is, boyyyyy!
The second example is the middle section of "The Evil That Men Do", recorded by Queen
Latifah in 1989. In their accusatory and angry tone these lyrics are reminiscent of the
politically engaged black poetry of the late 1960s. There is, however, some irony in the fact
that what originally may be social and personal protest has been totally absorbed by the
American capitalist industry of entertainment. While most of the rappers and gangsta rappers
become millionaires and entrepreneurs in a very short time and often in their early twenties
(e.g., in addition to those mentioned above, Jim Jones and Jay-Z), TV stations like MTV and
record companies market the songs for a world-wide audience hardly interested in the sad
social conditions of the American underclass trying to vent their anger and frustration:
Situations, reality, what a concept
Nothin' ever seems to stay in step
So today here is a message for my sisters and brothers
Here are some things I want to cover
A woman strives for a better life
But who the hell cares
Because she's livin' on welfare
The government can't come up with a decent housin' plan
So she's in no man's land
It's a sucker who tells you you're equal
(You don't need 'em
Johannesburg cries for freedom)
We the people hold these truths to be self-evident
(But there's no response from the president)
Someone's livin' the good life tax-free
'Cause some poor girl can't find
A way to be crack-free
And that's just part of the message
I thought I had to send you
About the Evil That Men Do.
As a new postmodern art form integrating poetry, music and film/video, rap is part of the
vernacular tradition of African-American literature. Together with church songs, blues, bal-
lads, sermons, and stories, rap constitutes an important part of black expression in late
capitalist America. Distinguished by an in-group, defensive, and aggressive character, it was
originally produced for blacks but is now bought and sold as exotic material by a large
(white) audience in America and Europe.
Rap lyrics are embedded in music and a performative context which they share with a re-
lated art form, performance poetry. Only partly claimed and respresented by African-Amer-
icans, slam poetry first reared its head in Chicago in 1986. It is only the latest development
in a series of poetry movements in the United States that embrace performance. Finding its
cultural realization in an interaction between poet, text, and audience, performance poetry
has been produced in audio and visual forms by Jerome Rothenberg and Allen Ginsberg
(discussed above), and more recently by the African-Americans Gil Scott-Heron (born
1949), also a musician and political activist, and the dramatist and poet Ntozake Shange
(discussed in the chapter on drama below). Other performance poets/artists are Patricia
Smith, and the internationally known Laurie Anderson (born 1947). Taking on the issues
of commodity culture, Anderson much like her contemporary Cindy Sherman in art de-
characterizes and deconstructs herself both as a singer/poet and as a woman by filtering her
voice and foregrounding her role as performer. Her performances are a kind of pop pastiche
addressing every aspect of American culture, and with a poetic dimension that refers to her
texts as well as to her music (see/hear her recordings, Bright Read, 1995; and Laurie Ander-
son: Life on a String, 2001). Anderson's musical orientation derives to some extent from the
example of John Cage (1912-92), by far the most influential postmodern American com-
poser and pianist whose Empty Words (1973) has been described as text-sound poetry. The
fact that most readers/listeners would probably categorize Anderson as a singer indicates the
interesting status of performance poetry between genres and media. Like rap, it is a variety
of postmodern lyrics cum music that has fascinated a growing audience of aficionados.
The American Indians have found in N(avarro) Scott Momaday (born 1934) a poet and
novelist who has chosen the white man's language for his charming poems published in
Angel of Geese (1974), The Gourd Dancer (1976), and In the Presence of the Sun (1992).
Momaday is the only child of a Kiowa father and a mother who was part Cherokee. He has
been a university professor for many years (he also taught at German universities). His poet-
ry recalls the geography, the myths, and the speech patterns of his native tribes in a style that
is both unpretentious and powerful. Other native American writers of great skill are Leslie
M(armon) Silko (born 1948; see Laguna Woman, 1974), who grew up between native Ame-
rican, Mexican, and white cultures in New Mexico, and James Welch (1940-2003), who is
half Blackfoot and half Gros Ventre. In Riding the Earthboy 40 (1971) he has recorded the
modern literate Indian's feelings when confronted with American nature, as in "There Is a
Right Way":
The justice of the prairie hawk
moved me; his wings tipped
the wind just right and the mouse
was any mouse. I came away,
broken from my standing spot,
dizzy with the sense of a world
trying to be right, and the mouse
a part of a wind that stirs the plains.
Since the 1970s, a growing chorus of native Amer-
ican poets9 both older and younger writers have
addressed the central issues concerning postmodern
life inside and outside the reservations. These issues
include Indian mythologies, the disappearing cul-
ture of native Americans, and the anger and the
sadness provoked by the suffering of several gene-
rations. Thus Louise Erdrich's (born 1954) verse
has focused on Chippewa myths and the problems
of adolescent natives (see Baptism of Desire, 1989)
while her fellow poet Joy Harjo (born 1951), a
Creek, has described Indian survival in contempor-
Quincy Tahoma, In the Days
of Plentiful. 1946 ary America (She Had Some Horses, 1983; and In
Mad Love and War, 1990). Together with Sher-
man Alexie (born 1966), better known as a writer of fiction (see the short stories and poems
collected in his Water Flowing Home, 1996; and The Summer of Black Widows, 1996),
Simon J. Ortiz (born 1941) is one of the contemporary stars of ethnic poetry. Coming from
a Pueblo Indian background, Ortiz has celebrated the resistance of native Americans to
European culture (see After and Before the Lightning, 1994; From Sand Creek: Rising in
This Heart Which is Our America, 2000). The strong oral element that always provides a
9 Apart from those discussed in the text above, also see the works of among others the
Spokane Gloria Bird, the Sioux Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, the Cree Connie Fife, the Cherokee
Diane Glancy, the Cheyenne Lance Henson, the Mohawk Judith Minty, the Osage Carter
Revard, the Cherokee Vickie Sears, and the Onondaga/MicMac Gail Tremblay.
background for native American poetry is especially obvious in the works of the Mesquakie
Ray A. Young Bear (born 1950) who has recorded and performed the songs of his tribe.
Remarkable female voices celebrating Indian culture and exploring the female experience
are those of the Navajos Luci Tapahonso (born 1953; see Seasonal Woman, 1982; A
Breeze Swept Through, 1987; and Blue Horses Rush In, 1997) and Nia Francisco (born
1952; see Carried Away by the Black River, 1994), and the Oneida Roberta Hill
Whiteman (born 1947; see Star Quilt, 1984; and Philadelphia Flowers, 1996). Some of the
Indian writers share their poetic agenda with their white colleagues as they turn away from
native American culture to explore the larger American scenery; these poets include the
Choctaw Jim Barnes (born 1933), who has written about the feelings created by the loss of
home and the experience of exile (see The Sawdust War, 1992); the Mohawk Maurice
Kenny (born 1929), who employed the style and genres of seventeenth-century-Jesuit
writings in his Blackrobe: Isaac Jogues (1982), and the woman poet Ai (born 1947), who
teaches in Oklahoma and discloses no biographical information. In her collection entitled
Fate (1991), Ai addresses American popular culture and urban terror in poems that are
shockingly realistic about the poverty and brutality of under-class life. Among those who
speak in the poetic monologues are James Dean, Alfred Hitchcock, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy
Hoffa, Lenny Bruce, Elvis Presley, and such anonymous Americans as the protagonist of
"The Cockfighter's Daughter":
I found my father
face down, in his homemade chili
and had to hit the bowl
with a hammer to get it off,
then scrape the pinto beans
and chunks of ground beef
off his face with a knife.
once he was clean I called the police,
described the dirt road
that snaked from the highway
to his trailer beside the river.
the rooster was in the bedroom,
tied to a table leg
[]
I was careful not to get too close,
because, though his beak was tied shut,
he could still jump for me and claw me
as he had my father.
The scars ran down his arms to a hole
where the rooster had torn the flesh
and run with it,
finally spitting it out.
[]
Ai's tone and approach have not changed in the aggressively realistic poems collected in
Vice: New and Selected Poems (2000).
Hispanic poets also constitute a fascinating ethnic group who have given expression to the
experience of Americans growing up, often in poverty, between two cultures and two or
more languages (e.g, Mexican-Spanish, a native Mexican language, and American English).
The first generation of Chicano (i.e., Mexican-American) poets were occupied with ques-
tions of identity and became involved in the liberation movements of the 1960s and '70s,
which saw the Chicano Renaissance with important collections of poetry, some of them bi-
lingual, by Alurista (born in Mexico in 1947; see Nationchild Plumaroja, 1969-1972,
1972); Abelardo Delgado (1931-2004; see Chicano: 25 Pieces of a Chicano Mind, 1969);
Ricardo Snchez (born 1941; see I Cry and Sing my Liberation / Canto y grito mi libera-
cin, 1973); and Tino Villanueva (born 1941; see Hay otra voz: Poems, 1972). While these
and other Chicano poets have continued writing into the 1990s, they were joined by a
second generation, among them a sizable number of women, who introduced the concerns
of their period e.g., women's emancipation, and the continuing problems of adjusting in a
world of two cultures. Prominent among these are the feminists Alma Luz Villanueva
(born 1944; see Mother, May I?, 1978; and Planet with Mother, May I?, 1993); Lorna Dee
Cervantes (born 1954; see Emplumada, 1981); and Lucha Corpi (born 1945; see Palabras
de medioda / Noon Words, 1980). The Chicano's contemporary multicultural world as seen
from the male perspective can be studied in the poetry of Gary Soto (born 1952; see The
Tale of Sunlight, 1978) and recent works of established poets such as Alurista (see Z Eros,
1995).
Chicanos make up about 60% of the 20 million Hispanics living in the United States.
Among the Latino poetic voices with a Puertorican or South American cultural connection
mention should be made of Piri Thomas (born 1928), whose lyrics describe the second-
generation experience of a Puertorican in Spanish Harlem (see Down These Mean Streets,
1967); Victor Hernndez Cruz (born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, in 1949), known for
his musical and humorous verse (see Mainland, 1973; and Tropicalization, 1976); and
Judith Ortiz Cofer (born 1952), one of the major Puertorican poets in the United States.
Also a novelist and essayist and a professor at the University of Georgia, she has often com-
mented on the discrimination suffered by Latinos. Her poetry collections provide a sort of
double vision of general human concerns hope, belief, dreams, and happiness as she ap-
proaches them from the different perspectives of two languages (see Terms for Survival and
Reaching for the Mainland, 1987; and the poems and essays in The Latin Deli, 1995; and
The Year of Our Revolution, 1998).
The civil rights movement and the upheavals before and during the Vietnam war also di-
rected public attention to the concerns of Asian-American writers. A milestone in this devel-
opment was the discovery of Chinese poems immigrants had written on the walls of the
buildings on Angel Island (the Pacific equivalent of Ellis Island) between 1910-1940; the
more than 130 poems were published in 1980 and 1991. Many Asian-American authors
have written both prose and poetry. What is remarkable about their works is that they reject
the myths of American mainstream culture while looking for an alternative, third-world
way. This is the case in the poetry of the Japanese-American David Mura (born 1952; see
After We Lost Our Way, 1989), in the lyrics of the Malaysia-born Shirley Geok-lin Lim
(born 1944; see Modern Secrets, 1989), and in the verse of Lawson Fusao Inada (born
1938; Before the War: Poems as They Happened, 1970) and Jessica Tarahato Hagedorn
(born 1949; Danger and Beauty, 1993). Marilyn Chin (born 1955) draws on jazz, Buddhism,
Chinese history, and literature, but also on American sources while expressing her scepti-
cism about all kinds of ideology (see Dwarf Bamboo, 1987; and The Phoenix Gone, the
Terrace Empty, 1994), while the rejection of cultural stereotypes both Asian and American
in the search for identity has marked the poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (born 1947;
Empathy, 1987), Diana Chang (1934-2009; What Matisse is After, 1989), and Cathy Song
(born 1955), who was born in Hawaii of a Chinese mother and a Korean father (see her
School Figures, 1994).
For American poetry, the year 2000 was certainly not a watershed. Witness The Best of
American Poetry (2007), edited by David Lehman and the American poet Heather McHugh,
a collection that assembles works by long established poets (e.g., Robert Creeley, Galway
Kinnell, and Richard Wilbur) and poems in a variety of tonal registers by younger writers
such as Nicky Beer (born 1976), Louis E. Bourgeois (born 1970), Mike Dockins (born
1972), Ben Lerner (born 1979), Danielle Pafunda (born 1977), and Kary Wayson (born
1970). They address subjects ranging from "Bush's War" to hypocritical political correct-
ness (in language), from social and personal to political issues, often in a manner that en-
gages with traditional forms and classic poets. Thus Billy Collins (born 1941 and US Poet
Laureate from 2001 to 2003) rebels against "polite poetry" and what he sees as language
policing in the United States in a poem entitled "The News Today". Published in 2006 as a
reaction to a new bilingual edition of the satires of Catullus, it praises the jovial obscenities
and the aggressive verse of the Roman poet Catullus, appealing to him in equally obscene
modern English towards the end of the poem:
Nobody does it quite like you do, Catullus,
you insulting, foulmouthed cocksucker,
and I am thrilled to hear that once again
your words have been ferried to the shores of English,
you mean-spirited pain in everyone's ass.
Without you, Catullus,
a pedestal in the drafty hall of the greats
would be missing its white marble bust.
And so I hail you, Catullus,
across the wide, open waters of literature,
you nasty motherfucker, you flaming Roman prick.
Meghan O'Rourke (born 1976), the literary editor of Slate and a poetry editor at The Paris
Review, writes poems stitched together out of disconnected observations (reminiscent of
John Ashbery's approach) and probing the question of how public spectacle shapes indi-
vidual experience (see her Halflife, 2007). In "Peep Show" (written in 2002), she explores
erotic and romantic aspects of watching and its representation:
Peep Show
Tokens in the slot:
ka-shot, shot, shot.
A figure in the darkness.
The tin crank
of canned do-wop.
Someone is always watching
don't you think?
Duck, turn, and wink.
Bodies at a distance
that's what we are,
raises, renovations, Florida,

dinner by the sea.
Look at you.
The waves go swiftly
out of sight
A long ellipsis
of glaciers swallowing the sun
come quick, no time for this,
the girls in the thongs
are glancing at the clock.
Among the younger poets, Joe Wenderoth (born 1966; see his No Real Light, 2007) is one
of those who have reacted to the horrible consequences of the wars waged by George W.
Bush in what the former president saw as a crusade against terrorism. When Wenderoth wit-
nessed the decapitation on video of Nick Berg in 2004, an American Jewish businessman
abducted and killed by Iraqi insurgents, he reacted with "The Home of the Brave", a poem
that juxtaposes downright slaughter, American slogans and national pride:
The Home of the Brave
after the Nick Berg decapitation video
The home of the brave is a small room.
At first, it mimics us.
Armed men stand side by side.
They are aware of their power.
They have concealed their identities.
Only their leader speaks,
and he speaks at length,
reading from a prepared statement,
foregrounding their intentions
with weak rhetoric,
belief in God.
His comrades fidget and remain silent.
When the screaming begins,
the camera shakes
with a new honesty
mimicry is done with now
the men bear down,
and the home of the brave
is what we cannot understand,
what we cannot endure,
as long as we are free.
If new developments can be recognized at all in the new millennium, they might be de-
scribed as an opening up in two directions to an international influence and a certain
democratization of poetry in the so-called poetry slams. The first can be noticed with the ap-
pointment in 2007 of Charles Simic (born 1938) as US Poet Laureate Simic also received
the prestigious Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets at the same
time. Formerly held by such outstanding poets as Louise Glck, Rita Dove, and Robert
Frost, the temporary position as poet laureate in the United States was thus first given to a
writer not born in America. Simic grew up in Yugoslavia, then moved to Paris and on to the
United States to join his father. It was in Chicago, where he went to school, that Simic be-
came a poet. Although English is not his first language, his grimly realistic, sometimes sur-
real and highly ironic poems have won him many awards and accolades, among them the
Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for The World Doesn't End (1989) and the Griffin Poetry Prize in
2005 for Selected Poems 1963-2003 (2004).
With the growing popularity over the last two decades of the poetry slams, poetry has,
fortunately, also lost some of its reputation as an exclusive and difficult literary medium for
the elite. During these public recitings (and performances) of verse, an audience (sometimes
a jury of experts and a lay audience) judges the performers. The Chicago poet Marc Smith
(born 1949) is credited with initiating poetry slams at the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago
in November 1984. In July 1986, the event moved to its permanent Chicago home, the
Green Mill Jazz Club; and in 1990, the first National Poetry Slam took place in San Fran-
cisco, with teams from both coasts. The event has grown as of 2008, it features approxi-
mately 80 certified teams each year, taking place over five days of competition. As was to
be expected, such public recitings (and judgments) spread abroad and have also become
rather popular in Europe.
3. Drama
The most gifted American playwright around 1900 was the Chicago university professor
William Vaughn Moody (1869-1910). His The Great Divide (1906), originally produced
as A Sabine Woman, was written in the wake of realism. It is concerned with the relations
between Ruth Jordan, a modern representative of inherited Puritan traditions and inhibi-
tions, and Stephen Ghent, the free individualist of the Western frontier.
Change in the commercially oriented American theatre came with the impulses from new
dramatic workshops at several universities. The leading and influential figures in these
workshops were Brander Matthews (1852-1929) at Columbia, who held the first profes-
sorship in theatre; William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943) at Yale, and George Pierce Baker
(1866-1935), who taught at Harvard and Yale and whose students included the dramatist
Eugene O'Neill and the novelist Thomas Wolfe. Inspired by the activities at the universities,
a number of drama groups sprang up all over the country. Experimenting with style and pro-
duction, they introduced new themes and proved highly important for modern American
theatre. The more influential groups included the Neighborhood Playhouse, founded in
Greenwich Village, New York, in 1915, the Washington Square Players (1915), later called
Theatre Guild, and the Massachusetts Provincetown Players. It was this last group, started in
1916, that began to perform O'Neill's early one-act plays. In the 1920s, the Theatre Guild of
New York and the Provincetown Players dominated the dramatic scene. They concentrated
on experimental drama and developed a variety of genres, such as expressionist, realistic,
poetic, and social-political plays. Playwrights who distinguished themselves in poetic drama
included the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (Aria da Capo, 1919, and Two Slatterns and a
King, 1921, written for the Provincetown Players), and especially Maxwell Anderson
(1880-1959) and Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982). Anderson worked with the New York
Group Theatre, run by Lee Strasberg, beginning with such realistic plays as the moving
anti-war drama What Price Glory? (1924, written in collaboration with Laurence Stallings).
Anderson's Night Over Taos (1932) is a verse drama about a nineteenth-century family in
New Mexico, while Winterset (1935) is his most impressive attempt in this genre. Based on
the much publicized Sacco-Vanzetti case10, it is a symbolic verse tragedy exploring the is-
sues of guilt and revenge. After a series of less successful verse dramas on historical and
biblical themes, Anderson again dealt with a moral issue, evil in the character of a child, in
his last play, The Bad Seed (1955).
MacLeish began with plays concerned with social issues, e.g. Panic (1935). With J. B.
(1958) he produced his best verse drama. Set in a circus tent, it is a modern treatment of the
trials of the biblical figure Job. But verse drama never really became popular, although out-
standing poets like Wallace Stevens (Carlos Among the Candles, 1917) and Robert Lowell
wrote in the genre.
A different kind of drama that was
especially promoted by New York's
Group Theater11 was concerned with
social and political issues. Typical
examples are Clifford Odets's (1906-
63) propagandist Waiting for Lefty
(1935), about a taxi drivers' strike,
and Awake and Sing (1935), which
deals with the American economic
crisis of the 1930s as experienced by
a Jewish family in New York. Gain-
ing a reputation as the leading prole-
tarian playwright at the time, Odets
was less concerned with the working
class than with what he saw as the
"fraud" of the middle class, which is
Walker Evans, Country Store. 1936 portrayed in his plays as deprived of
economic security and increasingly
aware of the falsity of the American Dream (see also his Golden Boy, 1937, revised as a
musical in 1964, and Rocket on the Moon, 1938). Less Marxist in their message, but still
firmly on the side of the American underclass, were Elmer Rice (1892-1967) and John
Howard Lawson (1895-1977). Rice experimented with naturalist elements in his didactic
plays of social criticism. The Adding Machine (1923) attacks the monotony of working-class
life in the machine age, and Street Scene (1930) links crime with the social conditions in the
slums. Lawson's most important plays are the expressionistic Processional (1925), which
10 In 1921, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were charged with killing a paymaster and his
guard in a robbery of a Massachusetts shoe company's payroll. Although both produced witnes-
ses to prove that they were not involved in the crime, the prejudice against them (they were
draft dodgers, anarchists, and agitators) prevailed and they were executed in 1927. Much of the
evidence against them was later proved to have been fabricated by the prosecution. Many books,
including numerous works of literature, have been written about the two men and their fate.
11 A splinter group made up by insurgents from the Theatre Guild, this existed between 1931-41,
under the leadership of Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford. Also supported
by O'Neill and Maxwell Anderson, it produced all the plays of Clifford Odets and those of
many other playwrights.
he termed a "jazz symphony of American life", and The International (1928), a dramatic
treatment of a future world revolution achieved by workers.
Other playwrights, while also concerned with human problems, put special American scenes
and themes in the foreground. Paul Green (1894-1981) grew up in close contact with blacks
on his parents' farm in North Carolina. For the Carolina Playmakers at the University of
North Carolina he wrote a number of one-act plays and longer dramas about blacks and poor
whites, some of them in black dialect, such as In Abraham's Bosom (1927) and The Field
God (1927). Southern moral corruption, avarice, and neurosis are the themes of Lillian
Hellman's (1905-84) melodramatic plays, The Little Foxes (1939) and Another Part of the
Forest (1946). With Watch on the Rhine (1940) and The Searching Wind (1944) she tried to
alert liberal Americans to the dangers of fascism. More successful with the theatre-going
public was William Inge (1913-73), a Kansas-born dramatist whose plays about ordinary
people from the Midwest were made into films (Come Back Little Sheba, 1950; Picnic,
1953; Bus Stop, 1955). Inge's best achievement, The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, 1957, is a
symbolic treatment of solitude in a family.
Rather than dramatizing social injustice, Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) turned to the heart
and home of America. His experimental Our Town (1938) became internationally known.
It is an idyllic and sentimental play on the life of an average family in Grover's Corners,
New Hampshire. Wilder had Our Town performed on an almost empty stage. Other nov-
elties include the use of pantomime and the participation of a "stage manager" who intro-
duces the scenes. The three acts, "Daily Life", "Love and Marriage", and "Death", focus on
the behaviour of an average family in basic human situations. If the play has a message, it
lies in the young wife's (Emily) experience upon returning to life for a day: people are too
concerned with themselves to see what is really important in life in this world.
Inspired by James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) is
set in a country destroyed by war and introduces an apocalyptic note. Representing mankind,
the members of the Antrobus family survive all catastrophes in this play because they are
God's children.
Playwrights such as Anderson, Rice, Hellmann, Odets, and Wilder continued to produce
plays after 1945 and thus belong to two periods of the American theatre. But it was Eugene
O'Neill (1888-1953) who became the dominant playwright during his life; he continues to
exert influence through his innovative work. O'Neill was of Irish descent. When he joined
the Provincetown Players in 1916, he had already had an eventful life: educated in several
Catholic schools, he was suspended from Princeton University for bad behaviour; he
married and divorced; he went to sea and worked as a reporter in London before spending a
year in a tuberculosis sanatorium. There, he found time to read widely. Among other
authors, he studied Marx, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, Jack London, Joseph Conrad, and
the Greek tragedians, and he wrote his first one-act plays. He became acquainted with the
new drama groups at Harvard, in New York and Massachusetts, producing his plays for sev-
eral stages. By 1936 he had had his first success on Broadway12 and won a Nobel Prize in
that year. O'Neill was twice divorced but enjoyed a happy third marriage. But after 1931 he
12 A long street in Manhattan. Its theatrical district around 42nd Street (Times Square) became the
centre of the commercial theatre in the 20th century. The term is also used for the commercial
theatre in general.
experienced a physical breakdown, writing his last works while suffering from Parkinson's
disease. With the introduction of new techniques, O'Neill modernized the American theatre:
Ibsen's and Strindberg's realism, the psychology of Freud and Jung, colloquial speech, masks
as used in Greek and Roman theatre, music, and symbolism. Rejecting Benjamin Franklin's
American ideology of optimism, O'Neill was a convinced determinist and assessed human
existence and the meaning of life.
In some twenty early one-act plays he experimented with naturalism and symbolism. Thus
Fog (1914) and Thirst (1916) feature shipwrecked people, in a boat and on a raft, represent-
ing mankind, while The Moon of the Caribbees (1918), another "sea play", beautifully cap-
tures the atmosphere of a wild tropical night and an orgy of alcohol and sex involving sailors
and black girls. Between 1917-1924 O'Neill produced a number of works that made theat-
rical history. Beyond the Horizon (1920) was his first successful play on Broadway and won
him a Pulitzer Prize. It is a naturalistic study of a woman torn between two men. Tracing the
gradual ruin of three people, O'Neill tried to cast doubt on the American idea of "the pursuit
of happiness". Anna Christie (1921) is less sombre. It evokes realistic scenes of life at sea
and of prostitution in the story of captain Christopherson and his daughter, Anna, a prosti-
tute. During this period O'Neill also wrote plays with strong expressionistic elements. The
Emperor Jones (1920), for instance, presents eight scenes in which the Negro Jones, the
"emperor" of a West Indian island, talks in self-revealing monologues about his present and
past life in America and Africa, while being hunted by his own rebellious men. They find
Jones and kill him. The expressionistic means of the beating drum accompanies and under-
lines the desperate aspects of Jones's flight and increasing fear. The Hairy Ape (1922) exem-
plifies O'Neill's deterministic view of life in an expressionist drama.
The symbolic plot of the play is concerned with Yank, a strong but unintelligent ship's stoker,
who must recognize that technological progress perverts human strength. Yank and his fellow
stokers on a transatlantic liner are shown as the ultimate products of the machine age. A female
visitor to the stokehole is shocked by the lurid atmosphere and Yank's unashamed brutality.
Yank gradually becomes aware of his posi-
tion and, once arrived in New York, reacts
with anger as he insults genteel strollers on
Fifth Avenue. Arrested and sent to prison,
Yank is advised to join the International
Workers Union, but when the labour organi-
zation rejects him, he goes to the zoo to see
the ape, the only creature he feels close to.
Fully aware now of his rejection by society,
he tries to take revenge by setting free the
gorilla, and the beast brutally crushes him.
With All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924)
O'Neill returned to a more naturalistic
approach. It treats of the tragic marriage
Edward Hopper, Room in New York. 1932 of a black man to a white woman and
makes use of symbolic scenery and a
chorus. Also naturalistic is Desire Under the Elms (1924), a tragedy of human and sexual
passion on a New England farm. In this play the trees are symbols of both protection and
threat. O'Neill also alludes in this tragedy to classical Greek drama and theatrical arche-
types. Greek drama, both formally and thematically, had an undeniable influence on
O'Neill's plays. Thus he experimented with the Greek device of masks. They are employed
symbolically in his adaptation of Coleridge's long poem The Ancient Mariner (1924), and in
the plays attacking modern American materialism, such as The Great God Brown (1926),
where the masks are symbols of falsity. In Marco's Millions (1928) Marco Polo takes on
features of an American businessman, and the verse drama Lazaras Laughed (1927) pre-
sents Elizabethan pageants and masked choruses. O'Neill's most daring formal experiment is
Strange Interlude (1928). It uses the stream-of-consciousness technique in an effort to com-
bine both epic and dramatic forms in a new theatrical form that achieves its ironic effect by
juxtaposing the words of the actors with what they really think in asides.
The year 1931 saw the performance of the first of O'Neill's three outstanding tragedies,
Mourning Becomes Electra. It is a trilogy that adapts the Greek Oresteia13 to the American
Civil War while employing Freud's ideas of neurosis and anticipating French existentialism.
Set in a small New England town and concerned with the Mannon family, the tragedy focuses
on the consequences of past guilt and a malignant fate. The three parts (I. The Homecoming; II.
The Hunted; III. The Haunted) show how the Mannons are haunted by the sins of their an-
cestors. In part I, Colonel Mannon (Agamemnon) returns from the war to find out that his wife
Christine (Clytemnestra) loves Captain Brant, an illegitimate member of the family. Christine
kills her husband. Her daughter Lavinia (Electra) vows to revenge the murder. In part II, Orin
(Orestes) returns home and is informed about the tragic events by his sister Lavinia. Orin kills
Brant and drives his mother to suicide. The final part deals with Orin's suicide and Lavinia's
decision to mourn for the rest of her life in order to do penance for the sins of her family. All
the characters in this tragedy are motivated by passions and complexes. Modern psychology
turns Greek mythology into human and American problems and thus makes this one of the most
convincing expressionistic plays.
Before he produced his next great tragedy, O'Neill wrote a pleasant New England folk com-
edy, Ah Wilderness! (1933). The Iceman Cometh was finished in 1940 but not performed
until 1946. Indebted to Ibsen and Gorky14 and based on O'Neill's personal experiences, this
tragedy is a moving treatment of the illusions of human life.
Set in the realistic atmosphere of a New York bar, the play presents a number of failed and
disillusioned characters who drown their problems in alcohol. The salesman Hickey always
entertained the group in the past during his visits. He now returns and tells his friends to face
the truth, thus bringing despair to the group. Hickey confesses to the murder of his wife. Re-
lieved of his psychological burden, he is taken away by the police while his drunken com-
panions return to their illusions.
Another tragedy, with stronger autobiographical features, is Long Day's Journey into Night.
It was finished in 1941 and performed in 1956. The play is essentially a psychological study
of a disintegrating family in which the reckless father makes it impossible for his wife to
13 A trilogy of plays by Aeschylus (525-456 BC), describing the return of Agamemnon to Argos
after the Trojan war; his murder by his wife Clytemnestra; the vengeance of Agamemnon's
children, Orestes and Electra; the pursuit of Orestes by the Furies; and Orestes' trial and even-
tual release by the gods.
14 Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), Russian writer and dramatist. He was self-educated, read widely,
and became a supporter of the Communist Russian government. His best-known works are,
among his novels, The Mother (1906-07) and Childhood (1913); among his plays, Philistines
and The Lower Depths (both 1902).
create a home for their two sons. The dialogue, characterized by attacks and accusations,
reveals the past and the hopeless present, as the mother becomes an addict and the sons turn
into cynics. In the 1940s, O'Neill wrote several other pessimistic plays about human despair:
A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943; performed in 1957), Hughie (performed in 1958) and
the two posthumously published plays, A Touch of the Poet (1957) and More Stately
Mansions (produced in 1967). O'Neill's most convincing plays are the short pieces written at
the beginning of his career and the two tragedies, The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's
Journey into Night. With his technical experiments and his preference for the marginal and
the pathological in human life, O'Neill exerted a profound influence on American theatrical
conventions. Not all of O'Neill's experiments with verse drama, interior monologue, and
chorus can be termed successful in their effect. But in his powerful "sea plays" he did for
American drama what Melville did for the novel. O'Neill's masterful explorations of man's
attitudes towards religion and mythology have a poetic force that has helped them to stand
the test of time and literary judgment.
It would be totally misleading to equate American theatre with the great names championed
by literary criticism. Broadway, that magic street on the island of Manhattan in the city of
New York, has become a label for popular and successful plays. It was in the commercial
theatres on Broadway that such popular comedies as Abie's Irish Rose, by Anne Nichols,
were put on and, in many cases, ran for years: first produced in 1927, Nichols's play had
2,500 performances. By 1950, the kind of commercial theatre that is associated with Broad-
way had a stranglehold on the drama market. Success depended on the question whether a
play "made it" on Broadway. To be sure, the commercial theatres also welcomed the works
of outstanding post-war playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. However,
as commercially oriented ventures, the Broadway theatres generally preferred lighter theat-
ricals, such as farce and the vastly popular musical comedies. Farce featured types, rather
than complicated characters, and frenetic action. The heyday of farce was the 1920s and
1930s, when the plays of Samuel Nathaniel Behrman (1893-1973), George Kaufman
(1889-1961), George Abbott (1887-1995), Samuel Spewack (1899-1971), and Moss Hart
(1904-61) were in vogue. Apart from Nichols's comedy, the plays most cherished by theatre
audiences were Clarence Day's Life with Father (1939), Spewack's Boy Meets Girl (1935)
and Joseph Kesselring's Arsenic and Old Lace (1941). Post-war farcical comedies have
come from the pens of Garson Kanin (born 1912; e.g., Smile of the World, 1949), Samuel
Taylor, the novelist Saul Bellow (Under the Weather, 1966), and the popular Neil Simon
(born 1927; The Last of the Red Hot Lovers, 1969). Many of Simon's comedies, and some
by playwrights connected with the off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway theatres, have been
filmed or served as scripts for Hollywood movies.
Until the mid-1970s, when British productions began to dominate the market, Broadway
theatres continued to be especially known for their musicals and folk-operas. An early ex-
ample of the folk-opera is Porgy and Bess (1935), based on DuBose Heyward's novel and
play, with music by George Gershwin15. Starting with Oklahoma (1943), by Rodgers and
Hammerstein, the 1940s and '50s saw one successful musical after another: Cole Porter's
15 George Gershwin (1898-1937), American song writer and composer, best known for his musi-
cal comedies (Show Girl, 1929), a piano concerto with jazz orchestra, Rhapsody in Blue (1924),
and an orchestral poem, An American in Paris (1928). The folk-opera Porgy and Bess is his
most ambitious composition.
Kiss Me Kate (1948; an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew), South
Pacific (1949), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), Lerner and Lowe's My Fair Lady (1956),
an adaptation of Shaw's Pygmalion, and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957), which
transposes the story of Romeo and Juliet to the context of ethnic gang fights in the slums of
New York. These were followed by The Sound of Music (1959) and Fiddler on the Roof
(1964). The spirit of the 1960s, with its rebellious youth culture, found expression in the
internationally successful Hair (1968, by McDermot, Ragni, and Rado). Later contributions
that originally came from off-Broadway theatres include musicals by the innovative com-
poser Stephen Sondheim, such as A Little Night Music (1973) and Pacific Overtures (1976),
the outstanding works by Fred Ebb and John Kander (Cabaret, 1966, and Chicago, 1975),
and such spectacular shows as the all-black Bubbling Brown Sugar (1975).
Among the new playwrights who dazzled Broadway in the late 1940s were Tennessee
Williams (1911-83) and Arthur Miller (1915-2005). Thomas Lanier Williams expressed
his deep love of the South by adopting "Tennessee" as a first name in 1939. He grew up in
Mississippi and worked in New Orleans and St. Louis. As a homosexual in a society that
still saw gayness as essentially immoral and (in most states of the USA) punished it as a
crime, he developed a critical outsider's view of society. He studied the works of Freud and
Jung, and the novels of D. H. Lawrence. Williams considered Eros a magic and powerful
force. His heroes and heroines are almost all neurotics, suffering from some sort of sexual
complex that renders them incapable of dealing with reality. Tennessee Williams advocated
what he termed "plastic theatre", i.e., poetic-symbolic plays stressing non-realistic elements
(light effects, musical leitmotifs, and symbols) in addition to their psychological realism.
His first Broadway success came in 1945 with The Glass Menagerie.
The title of this play refers symbolically to the non-realistic world of the fragile heroine, Laura
Wingfield. Like her collection of glass animals, Laura, a crippled, romantic girl, leads a life of
seclusion and illusion with her mother Amanda and her brother Tom. All the characters in The
Glass Menagerie suffer from complexes and hang on to particular illusions: the mother con-
stantly recalls her youth as a Southern belle, the brother dreams of escaping from his family, and
Laura's "gentleman caller" Jim is dominated by his all-American fiance. Disappointed and left
alone by Jim, Laura retreats further into her private world of illusions. The psychologically
realistic characters, the tense atmosphere, and the poetic symbols (the horn of Laura's glass uni-
corn breaks when she tries to dance with Jim and they bump into the table) demonstrate Wil-
liam's personal dramatic lyricism.
Another fragile woman in need of illusions, but also of men, is the heroine in A Streetcar
Named Desire. It was produced in 1947 and won Williams a Pulitzer Prize.
This tragedy is set in the slums of New Orleans. It traces the gradual psychological disintegra-
tion of the neurotic Blanche DuBois, whose telling name is an ironic cover for her true nature.
Morally and financially at the end of her tether, Blanche arrives at the squalid home of her sister
Stella. In order to keep up appearances and to avoid facing the tragedy of her failed life, Blanche
plays the Southern gentlewoman and recalls the good old days she spent with her sister on their
parents' plantation. It is revealed that Blanche had been married but had taunted her homosexual
husband until he committed suicide. Trying to compensate her empty life with sexual experi-
ences, she was dismissed from her teaching job because of an affair with a young student. In the
small and dirty home of her younger sister, Blanche's affected refinement is contrasted with the
animal maleness and the brutality of Stella's husband, Stanley Kowalski. When Stanley's friend
Mitch falls in love with Blanche, Stanley tells him the truth about her sordid past and eventually
rapes his sister-in-law in a fit of violent lust. Returning from the hospital with a newly born
baby, Stella refuses to believe Blanche's story and has her committed to a mental institution.
Technically, this is one of Williams's best plays, combining as it does a realistic New Orleans
atmosphere with symbolic action and characterization.
In many of Williams's plays, women fail because their need for love and human tenderness
is not fulfilled; instead, they are offered sex, as in Summer and Smoke (1948), or illusions,
as in The Rose Tattoo (1950). Throughout his life, Williams suffered from the fact that he
could not openly live his homosexuality. Towards the end of his career, he actually dressed
as a woman, and it seems that he had a particular gift for rendering fragile, sensitive women
in his plays.
Apart from sexual problems, Williams also focused on such themes as the survival of the
outsider and the quest for the meaning of life. After the "dream play" Camino Real (1953),
in which a former boxer encounters a great number of personages from history and litera-
ture, Williams wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). The issue of sex is again central to this
play dealing with a family conflict on a Mississippi plantation.
Again, a woman is cast as the major character: Maggie, the "cat" and wife of the alcoholic ex-
football player Brick. But unlike Williams's other heroines, Laura and Blanche, Maggie is
neither weak nor unrealistic. Faced with scheming and false relatives who are out to inherit the
plantation from the vulgar and ruthless Big Daddy Pollitt, Maggie remains honest in her strug-
gle to cure her husband and to convince Big Daddy that Brick and herself are worthy inheritors.
The family tensions come to a head on Big Daddy's sixty-fifth birthday. Maggie tells her hus-
band that she slept with his closest friend Skipper because both needed the warmth Brick's
ideally pure relationship could not provide, and that she drove Skipper to suicide by making
him face his latent homosexuality. Big Daddy makes Brick see that his flight into alcoholism
stems from the disgust with himself for not having helped Skipper; and Brick, in revenge, tells
his father that he (Big Daddy) is dying of cancer. Brick's brother Gooper and his wife Mae fail
to secure the plantation from Big Daddy's wife, and Maggie, determined to make Big Daddy
happy and to inherit the land, announces that she and Brick are expecting a baby.
In a series of plays Williams then continued to explore his basic themes: loneliness, frustra-
tion, lust, perversion, violence, and destruction. With one exception, Orpheus Descending
(1957), none of these (Suddenly Last Summer, 1958; Sweet Bird Of Youth, 1959; The Night
of the Iguana, 1962) reached the artistic skill of his earlier work. Williams's Orpheus
Descending (a reworking of a pre-
viously unsuccessful play entitled
Battle of Angels), transposes to a
violent, corrupt South the Greek
myth of Orpheus descending into
the underworld to liberate his lov-
er Eurydice.
The tragedy dramatises a Southern
society in which corruption seems to
be endemic and in which brutal mat-
erialism finds a correspondence in
animal sexuality and racism. The
Orpheus of the play is Val Xavier, a
guitar player with an animal vitality.
Walker Evans, Chicago. 1946 He tries to liberate Lady, married to
Jabe Torrence, the old and ill owner of a dry goods store. Of Italian descent, Lady has already
lost her father to a group of violent racists, and her lover, to a society hostess. She must now
learn that Jabe was among her father's killers. When Jabe is informed that she is pregnant by
Val, who has tried to bring her back to life, he murders her and frames Val, who is tortured to
death. Written before the Civil Rights movement actually attacked southern bigotry and racism,
this is an unusually political play. Death, decay, and disease provide the imagery for a drama
holding the mirror up to the face of an American South that is violent, inhuman, racist and
incapable of love.
In the 1960s, Tennessee Williams personally suffered the fate he had allotted to Blanche
DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Already dependent on drugs and alcohol, he had a
personal and artistic debacle. His brother committed him to a mental hospital where he came
close to dying in the violent ward. The plays he wrote after this experience were often brutal,
apocalyptic, and replete with death motifs. They rework his familiar themes but lack the
balance of the great plays and suffer from pathos and overdone aberrational psychology (see,
for instance, Red Devil Battery, 1975; Vieux Carr, 1977; A Lovely Sunday for Crve Coeur,
1978; and Clothes for a Summer Hotel, 1980, about the life and marriage of F. Scott Fitz-
gerald). Again, there was one exception first produced in 1967 as Two Character Play, it
was a play that finally appeared as Outcry (1973) and presents Williams's final assessment
of the role of men and women in this world.
It presents two actors (an allusion to the illusions of life), a brother and sister deserted by their
company and trying to sort out the relations between art and life. The play was produced in the
full knowledge of Beckett's nihilistic Theatre of the Absurd and in the wake of Williams's ex-
perience of the treatment of patients in a mental hospital. Significantly, the actors are ex-pa-
tients from a psychiatric ward, a fact which provides a second level of meaning. They play out
their lives before an empty auditorium while like Beckett's vagabonds in Waiting for Godot
trying to overcome their fear in and through performance. Their masks become the only reality
nothing is certain anymore, including identity and gender, for the characters bear names that
are ambivalent. As the androgynic actors escape into illusion as the only life they have, the
theatre becomes a trope representing both prison and hope.
With his five outstanding plays discussed above, Williams proved one of the two most im-
pressive American playwrights of the post-war decades.
In the same year in which Williams caused a sensation with his Streetcar, Arthur Miller
became known with the production of All My Sons (1947). Miller has written plays that are,
in his own words, "an expression of profound social needs". Of Jewish descent, Miller was
born in New York. During the Great Depression his father lost almost all his property, and
Arthur Miller had to work as a truck driver and waiter before earning a BA at the University
of Michigan in 1938. He took part in World War II and has lived on the East Coast and in
Hollywood, where he made headlines as the last husband of Marilyn Monroe. Miller's All
My Sons shows the influence of Ibsen and O'Neill. It is the tragic story of an airplane manu-
facturer and war profiteer whose defective products cause the deaths of many young men as
well as his son's suicide.
With Death of a Salesman (1949) Miller attempted a fusion of realism and symbolism in an
expressionistic tragedy that does not follow chronological sequence but moves between the
past and the present.
The hero of the play, Willy Loman, is a travelling salesman. Looking back at his past, he real-
izes that he has ruined his life and disappointed his sons and his wife. Miller shows this process
in a series of flashbacks and representations of Willy's consciousness that are related to the
technique of the modern novel. Dismissed by his boss, Willy deliberately kills himself in a car
accident to provide his family with the life insurance money. His son Biff realizes that his
father's dream of success is based on a myth the American Dream which sustains American
capitalism. Essentially, Miller's play is a condemnation of the American belief in personal and
economic success. As Death of a Salesman shows, this dream is often realized at a horrible
personal sacrifice.
Arthur Miller's approach as a "social dramatist" is most obvious in The Crucible (1953). It
draws a parallel between the witchcraft trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Mass., and the
political excess of Senator McCarthy's witch hunt for communists in the 1950s. Since this
play, Arthur Miller's socialist sympathy has gradually developed into a profound questioning
of social morality. His moral concern is as obvious in A View From the Bridge (1955), a
tragedy of workers and illegal immigrants in the New York docks, as it is in After the Fall
(1964), an autobiographical scenic report in which Miller also alludes to his marriage with
Marilyn Monroe, who committed suicide in 1962. Similarly, Incident at Vichy (1964) is
concerned with individual responsibility. It features human types in the story of several
Frenchmen arrested by the Nazis in 1942. Arthur Miller's later plays indicate his post-
Freudian preoccupation with the problem of original sin. In The Price (1968) two brothers
analyse guilt and responsibility while judging their past, and in The Creation of the World
and Other Business (1972) Cain rejects both God and the devil but cannot get rid of evil.
The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977) returns to the themes of his early plays in its concern with
intellectual and personal freedom and the issue of political and moral guilt; and The Ameri-
can Clock (1980) studies an American family in the Depression. His plays of the 1980s,
although trying non-realistic forms of representation, suffer from too much didactic doctrine.
Unlike his early works, they illustrate the playwright's moralistic intentions too obviously
instead of presenting convincing characters with realistic motivations. Miller abandoned his
moralizing in the 1990s, producing plays in London's West End (The Ride Down Mt.
Morgan, 1991, about the memories of an insurance broker) and attacking the "zeitgeist" in
The Last Yankee (1993), a one-act-play set in a mental institution representing the USA in
total intellectual and moral decline. In Broken Glass (1994), he attempted to link the marital
crisis of a Jewish couple in Brooklyn with the holocaust in Nazi Germany. His final play of
the 1990s, Mr Peters' Connections (1998) is about the loss of community in postmodern
America. The play cannot deny its autobiographical connection as an old man, Mr Peters,
finds himself in a disused New York nightclub, encountering those close to him, living and
dead. Trying to make sense of his life, the old man repeatedly asks, "what's the subject?",
but he cannot find answers and realizes that his life has just been a series of events swept
away by the passing years.
American drama received a new impetus in the mid-1950s from the playwrights that came
from what has been termed the off-Broadway movement and from regional theatre. While
Broadway was more and more concerned with pre-tested works and ceased to exist as an
initiator of new plays, exciting new drama came from the playwrights who wrote for the
experimental theatres in Greenwich Village, New York. As can be expected, they soon
moved on to theatrical success on Broadway. These dramatists include Arnold Weinstein,
Jack Richardson, William Hanley, Murray Schisgal, and three playwrights who were to
become internationally known: Edward Albee (born 1928), Jack Gelber (1932-2003), and
Arthur Kopit (born 1937).
Albee has been influenced by Tennessee Williams, European experimental plays, and the
theatre of the absurd. His one-act play, The Zoo Story, was first produced in Berlin in 1959.
It demonstrates Albee's method of mingling realism with fantasy in order to question con-
formity and to express the tragedy of alienation. The Zoo Story presents a young homosexual
who is disgusted with the world and manages to trick an ordinary New York citizen into
killing him. After completing several less impressive short works, Albee wrote his master-
piece, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962).
This is a realistic play about a social evening in the lives of two college professors and their
wives. In a psychologically painful "showdown", recalling Strindberg's concern with the strug-
gle between the sexes, George and Martha torture and abuse each other verbally until they
finally achieve a kind of catharsis: They abandon the illusion that they have a son, an idea that
sustained their marriage. Implicitly also attacking the American dream16, Albee leads his char-
acters from hate and guilt and disappointment to the destruction of illusion and the acceptance
of reality.
Tiny Alice (1964) is a symbolic drama Albee termed a "mystery play". A play most readers
and critics found very difficult to understand, it has as its protagonist the richest woman in
the world who corrupts a Catholic lay brother and eventually arranges to have him killed.
Edward Albee's subsequent works (A Delicate Balance, 1966; All Over, 1971; and The Lady
of Dubuque, 1980) reflect his continuing preoccupation with reality and illusion in the
European absurd tradition, with a remarkable streak of pessimism. Albee's plays of the
1980s were neither a public nor an artistic success as his characters became pure constructs.
This changed with Three Tall Women (1994), which won him the Pulitzer Prize. Containing
a subtle autobiographical connection in its exploration of the life of Albee's stepmother, the
play returns to his former absurd, humorous, view of life in the story of three women, aged
91, 52, and 26, who give us their personal views that eventually become one human view of
the process of ageing. As an adopted child, Albee has returned, time and again, to the psy-
chological dimensions structuring family relations in America. For example, in his early The
American Dream (1961), which should be seen/read together with the related The Sand Box
(1960), he gave us an absurd comedy about a stereotypical middle-class American Mommy
and a Daddy who torture their adopted son to death because he would not grow into the
"American Dream" type boy they longed for. In The Play About the Baby (1998), involving
two couples (one perhaps an older version of the other) and their representations of a reality
for each other, he returned to the major subjects of his previous plays the desire to assume
a subjectivity through language, domestic anguish, and sexual frustration and the attempts
to compensate for it.
At the time of its first production in 1959 Jack Gelber's The Connection caused a great stir.
Produced by an avant-garde group called Living Theater, it is an anti-illusionist play, with
jazz music, showing the lives of drug addicts as though they were real. The audience is in-
cluded in the plot, as the actors beg money for their drugs and improvise on stage. But like
Albee's dramas of the 1970s and '80s, Gelber's next plays (The Apple, 1961; Square in the
16 This term has no clear definition or denotation. It refers to the Declaration of Independence and
the rights of man mentioned there, such as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This
happiness implies the freedom of the individual to do what he/she likes best, and includes the
possibility of financial success.
Eye, 1965; The Cuban Thing, 1968; Sleep, 1972; and Jack Gelber's New Play: Rehearsal,
1976) did not live up to the great expectations he built up with his first success.
Arthur Kopit made headlines with Indians (1969). The play demythologizes Buffalo Bill17
and presents scenes from his life and that of Sitting Bull. The play denounces US politics,
from the wars against the Indians until Vietnam, as cruel and inhuman. Kopit has satirized
the American mother cult in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm
Feelin' So Sad (1962), which also makes fun of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo as
well as of absurd drama. In his following career as a playwright, Kopit never abandoned his
characteristic blend of black and absurd humour, compassion for the marginalized and ill in
society (as in Wings, 1977, about a woman who has suffered a stroke), and political engage-
ment (in End of the World, 1984, about the nuclear arms race).
In the early 1960s a new movement set in that reacted against the commercialization of
Broadway and off-Broadway theatres. New experimental theatres were established, such as
Caff Cino, La Mama Experimental Theater Club, and Theater Genesis. Together with some
regional theatres outside New York, they became known as off-off-Broadway. Simultane-
ously, the very organization of theatres was changed by the more radical groups that founded
the so-called "performance theatre". This accorded actors a greater say and stressed non-
verbal means of communication and improvisation (including texts). Groups called Living
Theatre, Open Theatre, and Performance Group organized themselves in New York and
eventually had a vast international influence. The Performance Group was created in 1967
and initially run by Richard Schechner. When it was later reborn as the Wooster Group,
under Elizabeth LeCompte, it changed its targets from political to more literary concerns,
aiming at the deconstruction of literary texts. Playwrights who have worked in the perfor-
mance movement are Jean Claude van Itallie (born 1936), closely associated with the
Open Theatre (see The Serpent, 1968, produced by the Open Theatre), the caricaturist Jules
Feiffer (born 1929; see Little Murders, 1966, produced in 1968), Terence McNally (born
1939), Ronald Ribman (born 1932; see Harry, Noon, and Night, 1965), and the internation-
ally known David Rabe (born 1940), Sam Shepard (born 1943), and David Mamet (born
1947). Like their off-Broadway contemporaries, these authors have written about the am-
biguous connection between American myth and reality and the impact on the individual of
structural social violence as generated in the family, the army, and in social institutions.
In this context, it was David Rabe who made the Vietnam War the subject of his early
plays. Rabe served in Vietnam, but his plays with a Vietnam background are not simply
anti-war dramas; they stress the disorientation of the individual in a society that, like the
protagonist in Sticks and Bones (1971), has gone blind:
The major character, David, returns from Vietnam blinded, mentally wounded and unable to
forget the horrors of the war experience. In a bitter satire on the public, middle-class, reaction
of the United States to the war, Rabe shows how David's family is unable to face the truth.
Instead of offering real help or therapy, they "help" their son to commit suicide. To drive the
bitter message home that neither family nor country are ready to face the consequences of the
17 Nickname of William F. Cody (1846-1917), a frontier scout who served in the Civil War and in
the battles against the Sioux. He acted in Western melodramas and, in 1883, started his famous
"Wild West" show which, together with the dime novels about his adventures, is partially re-
sponsible for his popular reputation.
war for the individual, Rabe named his characters after The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, a
popular radio and TV situational comedy of the 1950s.
In Rabe's The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), the central character, Pavlo, initially
insecure and kind, is turned simultaneously into a soldier who can kill and give first aid.
Ironically, Pavlo dies an unheroic death from a grenade thrown by a drunken fellow soldier.
Rabe returned to the Vietnam experience in Streamers (1976), which is again less about the war
than about violence in America. Set in an army barracks early in the war, it focuses on the lives
of some soldiers for whom service in Vietnam is a constant threat. Profoundly neurotic and
alienated from each other, they kill their fellow soldiers in a bout of drunkenness while un-
veiling the inhumanity of the system in which they are forced to live.
The Vietnam experience seems to have made Rabe susceptible to the suffering of the mar-
ginalized and the suppressed in society. Like Mamet's dramas, Rabe's later plays also ex-
plore the lives of those who have become victims of the American dream. Thus In the Boom
Boom Room (1973) juxtaposes the essential trust sought by the heroine, a go-go dancer,
with the humiliation and torturing she experiences at the hands of her parents, friends, and
husband. Criminals are the central figures in Rabe's Goose and Tomtom (1982), a black
comedy about two jewel thieves set in a violent and degrading world, and in two related
plays, Hurlyburly (1984) and Those the River Keeps (1991). The former is a grim comedy
about Rabe's disillusioning experience as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Ostensibly decent
citizens, the characters in Hurlyburly eventually come across as morally corrupt and hardly
different from criminals.
This caustic comedy focuses on a group of individuals in Hollywood who serve an industry they
despise, trade women like cattle, and drown the evidence of decline and approaching apocalypse
in drugs and alcohol. The four men in the play have failed marriages while the women have sex
for fun. There is no personal trust and allegiances shift according to circumstances. The Ameri-
can society we glimpse is one in which religion, culture, and personal relations are without
meaning. As the central character, Eddie, looks for coherence and meaning in this junkyard of
an America, he despises those who swim with the tide and finds himself defending the anarchic
violence of Phil, a criminal psychotic. Eddie finally decides not to follow Phil, but the play
demonstrates that there is no escaping from a capitalist America whose destiny is decided by
what Rabe sees as crooks on Wall Street, in politics, sports, and the Hollywood film industry.
With Those the River Keeps (1991) Rabe wrote a prequel to Hurlyburly, returning to Phil,
who dies in the first play, and uncovering his past and that of a hoodlum in an America
devoid of meaning and comfort. At heart a moralist, Rabe has blended his rage and ethical
stance with more compassion in A Question of Mercy (1998), which presents an anguished
debate about a doctor's dilemma in consenting to collaborate in the mercy killing of a man
dying of AIDS.
If Rabe is a moralist confronting his audience with the violence and injustice produced by
American society, David Mamet shares this view and Rabe's focus on the disadvantaged.
But in his early plays, he chose a more humorous approach. Mamet grew up in Chicago,
known as the industrial hub of the American mid-west and for its lurid past as the home of
notorious gangsters. As prolific a playwright as Sam Shepard, Mamet has written dramas
representing a tough, masculine world of petty crooks, con men, seedy salesmen or eccen-
trics. The language he employs is muscular, tough street slang, with occasional obscene
dimensions. Like Harold Pinter (one playwright he has acknowledged as influential for his
own work), Mamet is interested in the fact that ordinary language can be funny but also
masks violence and basic human drives. Thus in Duck Variations (1972) two loquacious old
men on a park bench discuss life while talking about ducks; and in Sexual Perversity in
Chicago (1974), another early one-act play, the alleged friends of a young couple use cynical
language to separate the lovers. With American Buffalo (1977), performed on Broadway,
Mamet had a breakthrough.
Set in a Chicago junkshop, a symbolic image of America, the play features three small-time
crooks planning to steal a collection of valuable rare coins. But their attempts are foiled by their
incompetence and distrust of one another. Two main themes are highlighted by this piece the
need for the individual to belong to a group, and the way even small-fry hoodlums imitate the
attitudes and practices of American big business. Thus Teach, one of the crooks, talks about
"free enterprise" and the freedom of the individual. Most of the characters in the play ape the
language of American business while demonstrating how they fool themselves and how the
American dream is based on lies.
With the subject of this play, Mamet had found his major theme. Social criticism lies at the
heart of most of the works that followed: The Water-Engine (1977) demonstrates how an
inventor is killed because big business is afraid of losing money; and Edmonton (1982)
presents the allegorical story of a middle-class New Yorker who leaves his family to experi-
ence life in the city's alternative subculture marked by violence and corruption. Mamet
received international recognition with Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), a postmodern answer
to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
The protagonists are immoral salesmen of dubious land and real estate developments (the title
of the play suggests a Scottish estate and hence something which, in America, is impossible
or, at best, a dream). They are con men attempting to seduce their customers into investing into
projects with little chance of making money. The salesmen are desperate to succeed for two
reasons (which again reflect the business world of America): they receive high bonuses for their
(illicit) deals, and success raises their self-esteem and their status among the salesman. Carrying
on where Arthur Miller left off, Mamet represents an American business world of shark-like
salesmen, ruthless employers, bemused investor victims, and isolated human beings. The lan-
guage used is that of an all-male world, with its hard-hitting, sarcastic, and competitive obsceni-
ties. A dramatic fable about Reagan's America of the 1980s, when greed was proclaimed to be
good for the economy, when fortunes were made and lost in a day (until the stock market
crashed in October 1987), Glengarry Glen Ross exposes the myths of capitalism and the lan-
guage it uses to disguise its aims.
Like Rabe and Shepard, Mamet also worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood (he created the
film script for Cain's remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1981, and he wrote the
screenplay and directed House of Games, 1987). Like his fellow playwrights, he realized
that Hollywood plays an essential part in maintaining the American dream precisely because
it produces such dreams even though the producers themselves are cynics and nihilists.
Mamet's reaction to Hollywood was Speed the Plow (1988), which excoriates the American
dream city and its denizens. The characters are shown as emotional and intellectual cripples
completely dominated by the game of power and success from which they cannot escape.
While this play still had a humorous dimension in the self-delusion of the "big players" who
think they can beat the system, Mamet's Oleanna (1992) is a downright serious play.
It tackles the ticklish issue of political correctness (p.c.) and sexual harassment in the context of
feminism at an American university. The play shows how an inadvertent attitude by a professor
(who, according to the version of the female student, does not provide sufficient attention when
asked for help and sexually harasses her) can be used to change academic power relations, as
the professor is accused of sexism, is denied tenure and finally ruined. The female student and
her feminist group triumph because power is being used to satisfy emotions, and emotions are
employed strategically to obtain power. The play provoked violent reactions among New York
audiences (where during performances male spectators shouted, "hit the bitch") since in its
depiction of the occasionally brutal battle of the sexes it touches a nerve in American academe
and society at large.
Social pressure exerted by superiors or institutions is also the subject of Mamet's The
Cryptogram (1994), which shows the effects on the psyche of a boy harassed by his mother,
her friend, and the separated father. Mamet has pursued his exploration of the corrosion of
communality and community long since decayed in three linked plays entitled The Old
Neighborhood (1997), which also betrays a fascination with Jewish identity. He ended the
decade of the 90s with a Wildean comedy, Boston Marriage (1999).
Like Mamet, Sam Shepard has made excellent ironic use of American vernacular and
jargon, and like Rabe he has focused on the violence inherent in American culture. In his
early plays, however, he differs from his fellow playwrights in his handling of plot, which is
rarely logical (in fact, some plays are, as we now know, drug-induced); and his use of myth
and American popular culture is quite unique. He also shares with Robert Wilson (discussed
below) an insistence on visuality and images in the theatre which are closely linked to the
psychic states of his characters. Also a musician and an actor, Shepard has drawn on Holly-
wood movies, especially westerns, TV, jazz, and rock music. His career as a writer began
off-off-Broadway, but he then had most of his plays premiered in Europe or at San Fran-
cisco's Magic Theatre, a small theatre with an intimate atmosphere. His first three-act play is
entitled Operation Sidewinder (1970). Helping to give prominence to the rock band in which
he played, it pits the spiritual world of the Hopi Indians against the destructive scientism of
America while interweaving music and popular Hollywood film genres such as science
fiction, the western, and the thriller. Shepard's The Tooth of Crime (1972), first staged in
London, England, juxtaposes the "styles" (language, behaviour, fashion) of an established
pop star with those of a newcomer. Both plays demonstrate how much the author was drawn
to the Beat movement (Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti). The plays that followed are
held in a more realistic fashion, and one notices the additional influence on Shepard of
Samuel Beckett, Brecht, and O'Neill as he approaches the subjects that were to occupy him
for a long time dysfunctional families, the myths of the West, and the individual's search
for roots. The Curse of the Starving Class (1978) is reminiscent of the social realism of
Odets and Miller in its presentation of a lower-middle-class family without ideals and living
in a rootless capitalist society. Shepard's Buried Child (1978) seems to offer an escape from
rootlessness as two young people visit the farm of the man's parents but what they find is
the same physical and mental decay also portrayed in Seduced (1978), based on the life of
billionaire Howard Hughes. With True West (1980), Shepard wrote one of his outstanding
plays. It is, to some extent, his revenge on Hollywood where, like Rabe and Mamet, he had
worked as a screenwriter (he had parodied Hollywood kitsch in Angel City).
Weaving together his favourite subjects the myths of the West, neurotic characters as victims
of dysfunctional families, and American rootlessness one of the play's many ironies is the fact
that a "true" depiction of the West is to be achieved in a Hollywood movie to be produced in
the course of the plot. Set in a suburban home in what Shepard calls the temporary world of Cali-
fornia, it involves a successful Hollywood scriptwriter, Austin, who is bullied by his older
brother Lee, a semi-derelict petty thief. With a constant threat hovering around his person, Lee
persuades his younger brother to work on his idea for a Western movie and secures a commis-
sion from Austin's producer. The two brothers seem to change personalities, as Lee tries to enter
the world of Hollywood illusions and Austin tries to escape to the desert, where his brother had
come from. Lee's idea of the Western movie gains symbolical meaning as we learn that the plot
involves two men, both afraid but not knowing of the other's fear, in the desert, one hunted by
the other and the other not knowing where to go. The decay of the real (California) American
West as well as the myths associated with the old frontier are thus central to this play which de-
mystifies and demythologises much that is held sacred in American thinking.
Shepard's next play, Fool for Love (1983), caused a
sensation because its ostensible subject, the passion-
ate and essentially tragic love of one of the charac-
ters, Eddie, for his half-sister May, broke an Ameri-
can taboo. Although containing quite a few realistic
elements, one recognizes in this play the voice of
Beckett, since Eddie and May (like Beckett's tramps
in Waiting for Godot) both hate and need each other
while giving us a showdown in a symbolical motel
room on the edge of the Mojave desert (a nowhere
and anywhere). There is also an additional non-real-
istic element in that a third character, the father, is a
fantasy who exists only in the minds of Eddie and
May (a device familiar from Pinter's Old Times).
Shepard thus explores archetypal patterns of behav-
iour and the nature of love as his characters look for
meaning and roots in their lives, a search that also
inspires the violence represented and discussed in A
Lie of the Mind (1985). In this play a woman is al-
Duane Hanson, The Housewife. most beaten to death by her jealous husband. When
1970 they return to their families, they almost perish in the
double bind of compassion and egoism they en-
counter among their family members, and the young woman begins to torture the gentle
brother of her violent husband. In Shepard's dramas of the 1990s, one notices a change of
emphasis. From the treatment of the wars of the sexes and fragmenting families, he moved
to an analysis of the pressures institutional, social, political exerted on men. Thus States
of Shock (1991) is a moving one-act play about a Vietnam veteran and an invalid; it is
dominated by the nightmares of the characters, one of them again imagined by the others. In
Simpatico (1994), Shepard's homage to the film noir, the identities of the co-conspirators in
a criminal enterprise are placed under increasing pressure as the guilt of the past (another
important theme in Shepard's plays) catches up with them. The play has a rather complicated
plot but is interesting for its psychologically fascinating characters and absurd situations. One
of Shepard's more recent plays also gives women more room to speak and develop a world
view he has been criticized for dealing mainly with the world or the viewpoint of the
American male. In When the World was Green (1996), an old man waiting for his execution
in prison is interviewed by a young woman. As the two circle one another, Shepard's familiar
themes are being discussed (the guilt of the past in a vendetta probably also involving the
young woman's father killed by the old man) as man and woman find it problematic to find or
keep a true identity. In his last plays written in the twentieth century, Shepard expresses a
greater concern for interconnectedness and mutual understanding, though marital and family
break-ups still hover in the background. Eyes for Consuela, produced in New York City in
1998, has at its centre Henry, an American businessman who has taken refuge in a Mexican
hotel deep in the jungle. As Henry reflects on his life that he sacrificed to the pursuit of the
American dream (power, prestige, money), he also wages an emotional battle with a spectral
presence (ghosts have become increasinly important in Shepard's recent plays) and his captor,
the villager Amado who provides an alternative (if also not persuasive) world view. Sur-
prisingly, there is a sort of happy ending when Henry experiences an emotional conversion
and decides to seek reconciliation with his wife in Michigan. In The Late Henry Moss,
Shepard's last work of the twentieth century produced at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco
in 2000, the major character Henry Moss is a ghost. His return allows Shepard to ex-
amine the problematic condition of the American family and its wayward members. The play
presents competing versions of reality and conflicting accounts of what precisely happened
to Moss, as Shepard inquires into his favourite subjects heredity, legacy, and legitimacy
among those who lived in Henry Moss's orbit. In the new century, Shepard has not lost any
of his political engagement. With The God of Hell (2004) he produced a violent political
satire aimed at George W. Bush's America in its ideological and economic confusion.
In the 1980s and 1990s, innovation in American drama came from regional theatres and
playwrights connected with off-off-Broadway as Broadway itself was now given over to lav-
ish musicals or superficial comedies. Broadway put on what proved financially successful
this is one of the reasons why avant-garde playwrights had their works premiered in other
American cities or, like Robert Wilson (discussed below), moved to Europe where they
found theatres that were willing to try the new and the provocative.
Due to the marginal role of drama in the academic syllabus, American theatre in the post-
modern period has been associated mainly with playwrights with an international reputation
Miller, Albee, Kopit, Mamet, and Shepard. But as Christopher Bigsby reminds us, a host
of major talents has been working in the shadows of the big stars.18 In the brief survey of
contemporary drama (1980s and 1990s) that follows here, some of these playwrights must
be briefly introduced for two reasons: either because they breathed new life into established
dramatic genres or forms or because they have made major contributions to the proliferation
of the American theatre as such. Thus John Guare (born 1938), together with Christopher
Durang (born 1949; see his absurd comedies Beyond Therapy, 1981; and Baby with the
Bathwater, 1983), has reanimated the theatrical satire in farces and black comedies border-
ing on the absurd. Guare's best pieces, both produced in off-Broadway theatres, are The
House of Blue Leaves (1971), in which the insanity of the wife (called Bananas) of a piano
player is treated from a comic angle; and Six Degrees of Separation (1990), about a young
black who claims to be the film actor Sidney Poitier's son and thus cons his way into the
family of a white couple. Immensely varied and by no means restricted to comedy, Guare's
18 Contemporary American Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), viii.

Bigsby dedicates a chapter each to John Guare, Tina Howe, Tony Kushner, Emily Mann,
Richard Nelson, Marsha Norman, Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, and Lanford Wilson; and
he lists as playwrights deserving more attention, Constance Congdon, Christopher Durang,
Maria Irene Fornes, A.R. Gurney, Romulus Linney, Donald Margulies, Terrence McNally,
Rochelle Owens, Wallace Shawn, and Megan Terry. In his Modern American Drama 1945-
2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Bigsby provides brief critical discus-
sions of the dramatic works of Terrence McNally (368-373); Lanford Wilson (373-80), John
Guare (380-85), A.R. Gurney (389-98), Richard Nelson (398-404), Wallace Shawn (404-411),
Paula Vogel (411-18), and Tony Kushner (419-24).
work includes absurdist sketches, lively farces, surreal comedies, and powerful poetic dra-
mas (see his Nantucket trilogy, 1982-84).
Playwrights who first produced their work beyond Broadway and outside New York and are
counted among the "new realists" include Richard Nelson (born 1950) and Lanford Wil-
son (born 1937). Beginning his career in America, for more than a decade Nelson had his
plays first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, thus making him barely visible in
America where he emerged in the late 1970s. Nelson sees himself as a political playwright
and has written on American utopian impulses and the way social reality often impedes
them. His Conjuring an Event (1976) unmasks the way in which journalists produce facts
and events on which they are supposed to report; and in Vienna Notes (1978) he shows how
a US senator constructs history while dictating his memoirs. Among Nelson's plays of the
1980s, two stand out Between East and West (1985) and Principia Scriptoriae (1986).
Both address the question of the writer's (the Latin word for writer is scriptor) and artist's
role in a time of radical change, the first in the story of an migr Czech couple trying to
adapt to life in New York, and the latter provides an ironic view of the change of totalitarian
attitudes (left and right) in a South American country. The first Nelson plays accepted by
off-Broadway theatres were those satirizing American and British cultural differences
Some Americans Abroad (1989), which ridicules American academic tourism, and New
England (1994), about a group of British exiles in America. His recent plays on serious poli-
tical issues were also first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company. They include Colum-
bus and the Discovery of Japan (1994), likening Columbus to an artist and story teller little
interested in the real world; and The General from America (1996), which literally exposes
the histrionic and unheroic aspects of the American War of Independence. Lanford Wilson's
dramatic career began at Caff Cino, a small off-off-Broadway coffee-house in Greenwich
Village, New York, where he developed his neo-realist approach. In a trilogy entitled 5th of
July (1978), Talley's Folly (1979) and Talley and Son (1981) he reached Checkovian dimen-
sions of subtle character representations in his panorama of the American crises of the 1960s
and 70s (including Vietnam) as experienced by a middle-class American family in Missouri.
Later plays interweave social and political issues. Whereas the trilogy is an affecting portrait
of the collapse of American idealism into self-interest, Angels Fall (1982) provides a posi-
tive note in that the characters stranded in a New Mexico church during a nuclear alert learn
to approach their problems with some hope. Wilson's dramas of the late 80s and 90s have
taken a different direction into the personal and sentimental. He portrayed a love story set in
New York's artistic bohemia with crude passion and excoriating language in Burn This
(1987) and returned to the subject of Vietnam as a wound in America's psyche in Redwood
Curtain (1992), the suspense story of a Vietnam veteran, Lyman Fellers, who has retreated
to the redwood forest of northern California and is tracked down by an Asian-American girl,
Geri Riordan, in search of the soldier she believes to be her father. Though the veteran is not
the father, the two characters finally save one another.
From the vantage point of the turn of the millennium, one clearly recognizes the emergence
of three important concerns in American drama. One is politics/ideology (e.g., the Vietnam
War and the American dream) as treated, for example, by Kopit, Rabe, and Lanford Wilson.
The others are ethnicity (in plays by blacks, Chicanos, and native Americans), and gender
(dramas focusing on gay or feminist issues). As formerly silent (or, as they would argue,
silenced) social groups, including women, have seized the word and the pen in drama, they
produced works that, through their insistence on racial and sexual issues, also gained politi-
cal and ideological dimensions. In that sense they reflect to some extent what has been
going on in society at large (the women's liberation movement, the gay movement, et al.).
The gay theatre in America has its origins in the 1960s. It would have been impossible to
treat homosexuality openly on the stage before that decade; one playwright who suffered
from this fact was Tennessee Williams. The first gay pieces featured male homosexuals and
tried to use the theatre as a forum for gay issues. Examples can be found in the plays of
Martin Duberman (born 1930; Metaphors, 1968; Payments, 1971), Robert Patrick (born
1937; One Person, 1968), and Mart Crowley (born 1935; The Boys in the Band, 1968).
Most of these playwrights wrote for off-off-Broadway theatres, some of them (Ronald
Tavel, Charles Ludlam, and Kenneth Bernard) producing what has been termed "the theatre
of the ridiculous", i.e., avant-garde plays distinguished by daring formal and stylistic experi-
ments. Typical dramas of this kind are Tavel's Bigfoot (1970) and Ludlams's Turds in Hell
(1969). In the context of the radicalisation of the civil rights movement, gay drama also
became more aggressive. Thus Ronald Tavel's The Ovens of Anita Orangejuice: A History
of Modern Florida (1978) militates against Anita Bryant's campaign against the gay rights
law by showing how that campaign leads to the lynching of young Cuban homosexuals.
Others celebrated or flaunted homosexuality; an example is Kenneth Bernard's The Sixty-
Minute Queer Show (1977). Gay drama acquired a new dimension with the spreading of
AIDS and the dying of a great number of people in the gay communities in the 1980s. Play-
wrights were among the victims too. Thus Charles Ludlam, known for his parodies (see
Salammbo, 1985), died in 1987, aged 44. AIDS as a deadly serious new issue in the
double sense of the term was treated by such dramatists as William Hoffman (born 1939;
As Is, 1985), Larry Kramer (born 1935; The Normal Heart, 1985), and Harvey Fierstein
(born 1954; Safe Sex, 1987). They focused on the fear, the desperation, and the sadness that
arose among the gays as they had to face the deaths of their friends and the daily danger of
infection. It was Tony Kushner (born 1956) who produced the best plays about AIDS. A
playwright who sees himself consciously as a gay dramatist and who works in the wake of
Brecht's anti-realism and foregrounding of theatricality, Kushner acquired an international
reputation with two pieces collectively called Angels in America.
Set in 1985, when AIDS was an urgent social and moral issue but not yet a political priority, the
first of the two plays, Millennium Approaches (1990), was termed by Kushner "a gay fantasia
on national themes". A collage of scenes, dreams, and visions (including the appearance of an
angel) presented in a realistic manner, the piece goes beyond the serious presentation of gay is-
sues, containing discussions of politics, law, religion, racism, and anti-semitism in America. At
the centre of the action are Prior Walter, dying of AIDS, and his terrified lover Louis Ironson,
who is unable to offer consolation. They interact with other characters, such as Roy M. Cohn, a
closet homosexual and the lawyer who was instrumental in the execution of the Rosenbergs19,
19 The execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage in 1953 took place in the heated
cold-war atmosphere created by the demagogic tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The trial of
the Rosenberg couple, former members of the Communist Party, was connected with the
Manhattan Project, a top secret effort of Allied scientists working in Los Alamos to develop an
atomic bomb. When a Soviet spy in this group, Klaus Fuchs, was arrested in 1950, the FBI
investigated on the basis of Senator McCarthy's allegation that the US government was infil-
trated by Communist spies. David Greenberg, Julius Rosenberg's brother-in-law, accused both
Julius and Ethel of espionage for the Soviets. Many years after the trial, it was revealed that the
prosecution pressured Greenberg to commit perjury so that Ethel Rosenberg could be charged
too. Unlike her husband, she was innocent. Both were convicted in 1951 and sentenced to death.
apart from working as assistant to the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy. Casting Prior as a
challenge to humanity, the play shows how the political system ignores his human need. In that
sense, it goes beyond the concerns of the gay community, unmasking an America suffering
from the lack of communitarian impulses that produces a sickness of the spirit.
The second play, Perestroika (1992), was written in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the end of the Cold War. Using Gorbachev's term for the reconstruction of a true demo-
cratic socialism, Kushner has his characters find their way back to reality with the hope of a
better future on the horizon. Showing devastation and a willingness to keep moving in the face
of devastation, Kushner's drama offers an account of the failure of American utopianism while
retaining a small utopian impulse in an America that is also resistant through its mingling of
religions, races, and genders.
One of the reasons for the international success of Kushner's plays is the fact that he is able
to describe the illness of modern, post-capitalist society inside and outside America, both
contemporary and past (see his play on the rise of the Nazis in Germany, A Bright Room
Called Day, 1991) from the vantage point of a writer who is marginal in several senses: he
comes from the South, he is Jewish, and he is a confirmed homosexual with Marxist lean-
ings. Kushner has moved beyond the concerns of gay drama in Slavs! (Thinking About the
Longstanding Problems and Virtue of Happiness) (1994), a bleak view of the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the continuing corruption in the new capitalist order symbolized by the
dominant metaphor of radiation. Capitalist corruption and greed at an earlier stage in history
are also the subject of his Hydriotaphia or the Death of Dr Browne (1997). Essentially a
contemplation of death and its implications, it is set in England in 1667 and inspired by the
figure of Sir Thomas Browne. The play has the author of Hydriotaphia (1658) cling tena-
ciously to life on his death bed while death, in person, and the society of his day and age
impatiently await his demise in order to get his soul and his money. Shot through with black
humour and farcical elements and turning the arguments of Browne's treatise against him-
self, this play is avowedly Brechtian and Freudian (Browne suffers from terminal consti-
pation) in its approach and message.
Before the feminist wave of the 1970s, women playwrights had few chances to make an im-
pact on the American theatre. This changed in the 1970s with the rediscovery of earlier
women playwrights, the opening of feminist theatres run by women theatre groups, and the
emergence of a genuine women's drama in the United States.20 To some extent, the women
playwrights emerging in the late 60s and early 70s were inspired by the example of such
first-generation pioneers as Lillian Hellman (1905-84), discussed above, and the black
writers Lorraine Hansberry (1930-65), Alice Childress (1920-94), and Adrienne Kennedy
(born 1931), discussed in the section on ethnic drama below. While not all of the women
playwrights emerging during the second-wave feminist movement in the 1970s had a poli-
tical, feminist, axe to grind, one finds an overall focus in their plays on the experience of
American women. Among the theatre groups founded by women (e.g., New York Theatre
The court decision was followed by two years of world-wide battle and appeals (including the
intervention of the pope), but to no avail the Rosenbergs were executed in the electric chair in
1953, the innocent Ethel virtually burning to death. Like the Sacco and Vanzetti case (1921-27),
this is a dark chapter in the history of American legal justice.
18 For a detailed recent survey of these developments, see Brenda Murphy, ed. The Cambridge
Companion to American Women Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
especially part 3, "New Feminists".
Strategy and Women's Theatre Council) key members were Adrienne Kennedy, Rochelle
Owens (born 1936), Megan Terry (born 1932), and Mara Irene Forns (born 1930). In
their dramatic exploration of women's experience, they have chosen different strategies. On
the one hand, this experience was demonstrated in theatrical case studies as it were of histor-
ical figures, as in Rochelle Owens's Emma Instigated Me (1976), on the feminist Emma
Goldman, or Megan Terry's Mollie Bailey's Traveling Circus, Featuring Scenes from the
Life of Mother Jones (1983), which juxtaposes scenes from the life of the workers' leader
Mother Jones with others from the life of the fictional Mollie Bailey to demonstrate
women's fight for their rights. On the other hand, playwrights like Tina Howe (born 1937)
have chosen entirely fictional characters to portray the problems women face when they
assume various roles beyond the traditional ones of daughter, girlfriend/wife, and mother.
Howe has been especially concerned with the woman as artist, dealing with that issue in
Museum (1976), about a sculptor, The Art of Dining (1979), concerned with a chef and a
writer, Painting Churches (1983), dealing with the trials of a woman painter, Coastal
Disturbances (1986), focusing on a photographer, Approaching Zanzibar (1989), about a
performance artist, and One Shoe Off (1992), in which the major female character, Dinah, is
a costume designer. One of her latest plays, Pride's Crossing (1997), is about the passion of
old ladies, a memory drama featuring Mabel Bigelow, who once swam the English Channel
but then faced a life marked by disappointment and regret. Critics agree that Painting
Churches is Howe's best play.
A three-character study of an artist who helps her elderly parents to move house in New
England, this play dramatises the multiple roles of women in this case those of the female
painter and daughter. A talented portrait artist, Mags agrees to help her ageing parents if they
agree to sit for a portrait. As the play advances, the house is progressively emptied while the
portrait takes shape. Mags undergoes a profound change, accepting her father's declining mental
state and her mother's growing desperation while
the parents finally also accept her daughter as an
artist.
Mara Irene Forns (born 1930), who was born in
Cuba and emigrated to the United States at the age
of 15, has also been concerned with the problem of
acquiring or asserting a female identity. In her ex-
plicitly feminist play Fefu and Her Friends (1977),
the action, set in a New England country house in
1935, can be seen symbolically. The protagonist
Fefu attempts to persuade her handicapped friend
Julia that she does not need a wheelchair. The play
acquires a dream-like and ironical dimension in
that Fefu uses brutal force and needs to persuade
herself of her courage by shooting a rabbit in the
event she apparently shoots Julia too, thus assert-
ing her own identity. This dimension of magic
realism transcending and transforming "reality"
marks most of her feminist plays (see also The
Conduct of Life, 1985; and A Matter of Faith,
1986).
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #15. 1978
The problems of the postmodern female psyche have been assessed by Marsha Norman
(born 1947) and Beth Henley (born 1952), each from a specific angle. Norman's major
concern emerges in a play produced in 1977 and entitled Getting Out, in which the reactions
of a woman released from prison are incorporated by two characters, one docile (Arlene)
and the other rebellious (Arlie). Norman became known nationwide with a play produced
on Broadway, 'night, Mother (1982), which was also filmed. Exemplifying her psychologi-
cal realism, this piece presents a sort of showdown between mother and daughter as the
daughter a victim of life in many respects in that she has "failed" as daughter, wife, and
mother announces her impending suicide to her mother while reaching a degree of honesty
and respect she had never experienced before. In comparison, Henley's plays are distin-
guished by an additional dimension of grotesque humour. Her best dramas are Crimes of the
Heart (1978), also performed on Broadway and made into a movie, and The Miss Fire-
cracker Contest (1980). The first deals with the alleged crimes of three sisters which prove
to be misunderstandings and are presented from a humorous angle, and the second gains its
humorous dimension through the bizarre characters surrounding the protagonist.
Said to be her best play, The Miss Firecracker Contest is set in Brookhaven, Mississippi, and
features Carnelle, who competes in a beauty contest her beautiful cousin Elaine won years
before. This offers Henley the opportunity for a feminist critique of beauty pageants and similar
rituals reducing women to commodities. When her former lovers call out her nickname, "Miss
Hot Tamale", Carnelle loses the pageant which was to transcend her reputation for promiscuity
and establish her true worth. Despite the humour provided by Elaine and Carnell's lovers, there
is a bitter message about the conditioning of women in that Carnelle has no insight and decides
to carry on.
If there is any development with this generation of feminist and women playwrights, it can
be seen in the fact that as the feminist movement attained several of its targets in the fight
for women's rights in America in the 1980s21, many women dramatists abandoned their
gender-bound and female-oriented issues to cover issues of a wider social concern. In fact,
in some of the plays produced by women in the 80s and 90s, women themselves appear in
the roles of oppressors and victimisers. This is the case in Rochelle Owens's Three Front
(1988), a satire on social conditions, and Marsha Norman's Sarah and Abraham (1988), a
satirical study of the world of a small theatre that replicates the world at large.
With the fierce ideological gender battles fought with some success in the 1960s and 70s, a
battle in which women's drama had an important part, the women playwrights born after
1950 e.g., Emily Mann (born 1952), Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006), and Paula Vogel
(born 1951) could start from a different basis where women's drama had come into its
own. Two examples seem significant in this context. In the 1980s, Beth Henley, Marsha
Norman, and Wendy Wasserstein were awarded the Pulitzer Prize; and Paula Vogel's char-
acterisation of her person she calls herself a female playwright who is (also) gay an-
nounces a changed intellectual climate; twenty years ago, she would have called herself a
lesbian female playwright. The younger women dramatists thus tend to see both their role
and that of their women characters in a larger social context that is less charged by ideologi-
cal concerns even though the lives of and possibilities for women are still among the major
21 A comparison between the United States and Germany of women working in teaching positions
at university or in the police forces, to take just two examples, shows how much American fem-
inists have achieved and how much there is still to be done in Germany, where the lack of kin-
dergardens and the entire school system still disadvantage women to an enormous degree.
themes. Examples can be found in Emily Mann's documentary plays. Her Still Life (1980)
thus features a Vietnam veteran whose suffering affects both his wife and his mistress, and
the point of the play is less the suffering of the women than the fact that human communi-
cation in postmodern, traumatised America seems to be impossible. In Execution of Justice
(1984), performed on Broadway, Mann focuses on the treatment of homosexuals in San
Francisco in the context of a real trial that took place there in 1978. In Having Our Say
(1995), also a successful Broadway play, one could see the destiny of the Delany sisters, the
children of a former slave and the first Episcopalian bishop in America, as central, but
equally important is the issue of race and racial equality in America. Racism and fascism in
America are at the centre of her Greensboro (1996), another documentary she sub-titled "A
Requiem". This mass for the dead in the form of a play is for the five members of the Com-
munist Workers' Party in Greensboro, North Carolina, who were killed while demonstrating
against the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. If the crime went unpunished,
Mann produced a memorial for the courageous dead.
The new approach in feminist drama is perhaps best demonstrated in the plays of Wasser-
stein and Vogel that blend the female experience with a Jewish American viewpoint.
Wendy Wasserstein has written plays since the 1970s. Most of these are comedies drama-
tising female lives in a way that produces both laughter and serious reflection. In Uncommon
Women and Others (1975), she showed in a case study of five women six years after their
graduation that American society provides opportunities for traditional (mother, housewife)
and uncommon (career women) female roles and makes life difficult for those women in
between. In Isn't It Romantic (1981), the protagonist Janie, faced with the alternative of a
friend who wants everything (husband, children, and a career), opts for the difficult road of
an independent life. Wasserstein's most remarkable achievement is The Heidi Chronicles
(1988), a comedy which provides a subtle and humorous critique of the myth of the Ameri-
can superwoman in the context of the women's movement. As the major character lives
through the decades of American feminism, from the 50s and the political movements of the
60s down to the materialist 80s, Wasserstein deconstructs the idea of the new American
woman while providing a view of feminism that is both nostalgic and critical. After an ex-
cursion from post-feminist America to the London of 1989 in The Rosenzweig Sisters
(1992), in which three Jewish women from Brooklyn finally reveal their inner lives to each
other at the birthday of the eldest in London, Wasserstein returned to the feminist battle in
America with An American Daughter (1996), her first play to be produced directly on
Broadway. Based on the media harassment experienced by Zoe Baird22 and Hillary Clinton,
this is part morality play and part political satire. It takes a hard and condemning look at the
media's destruction of the woman nominee for Surgeon General while also assessing the
predicament of two different kinds of women and the new generation of feminists. In 1998,
Paula Vogel earned the Pulitzer Prize for her How I Learned to Drive. Like Wasserstein,
Vogel has been writing plays since the 1970s. Coming from a Jewish-Catholic family in
which her father deserted the family when she was ten, and her gay brother left when she
was sixteen, Vogel announced her lesbianism at seventeen. It seems understandable that
some of her plays focus on non-traditional families, but she has also dealt with social issues
such as AIDS, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and the feminization of poverty. Her plays
22 In 1994, Zoe Baird, a corporate lawyer, nominated for the office of Attorney General, was
forced to withdraw after it emerged that she and her husband had hired illegal aliens as domestic
help.
are also highly intertextual, engaging as they do with canonical or established literary fig-
ures. Thus in Desdemona (1979) Vogel enters into a conversation with Shakespeare as she
features a Desdemona who is sexually aggressive and vulgar, shaping her own destiny in-
stead of existing only in relation to Othello, who remains off-stage. Behind Vogel's The
Oldest Profession (first produced in 1988),
about five elderly women revealed as prosti-
tutes, lurks David Mamet's Duck Variation,
as the women remind one of the old men in
his play discussing life and death. Similary,
Vogel's And Baby Makes Seven (1984 and
again in 1990) aims at Edward Albee's Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf in that it deals with
the creation of a fantasy child. This comedy
displays Vogel's characteristic ingredients
not only intertextual plays with previous and
contemporary giants in literature and culture
(in this case, also with Sigmund Freud), but
also slapstick scenes, black humour, and the
paraphernalia of good comedy (accidental en-
counters, confusions, unwitting unmasking of
Walker Evans, Minstrel Show Bill. 1936 the soul). Vogel achieved national promi-
nence with The Baltimore Waltz (1992).
This was provoked by the death of AIDS in 1988 of her brother Carl. Focusing on a substitute
Paula Vogel called Anna, who discovers that she is suffering from Acquired Toilet Disease,
Vogel's ironic version of AIDS, the play is an unsentimental, darkly funny, homage to her
brother. The action takes place in one moment of shock, as in Ambrose Bierce's short story "An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", as Anna, in a kaleidoscope of thirty scenes, registers her
brother's death and their experiences through her memory. Containing a European tour of
brother and sister, it starts and ends in a Baltimore hospital (hence the title) and the reconciled
Anna finally dances with her brother in a last fantasy. Avoiding sentimentality, this is not an
AIDS play, although it does contain attacks on the failure of politicians and doctors to respond
to it, but one in which invention and humour are pitched against the Grim Reaper.
Vogel's best play after an exploration of dysfunctional families and domestic violence in
Hot 'N' Throbbing (1993), which features a woman pornographer and extreme violence, is
the prize-winning How I Learned to Drive (1997).
Touching a national nerve and a taboo in dealing with paedophilia, Vogel again introduces inter-
textual dimensions (e.g., allusions to Nabokov's Lolita, and, through Peck, to Gregory Peck in To
Kill a Mockingbird) that help to make the audience accept not only a controversial theme but also
a major character with negative empathy. The title of the play refers to the driving lesson Peck, a
man first seen in his forties, gives to his young niece, L'l Bit, to whom he is sexually drawn.
Interested in the psychology of both characters, Vogel explores the human need of love, the
danger inherent in this emotion, and the consequences of behaviour determined by it. The play
moves back from the time when L'l Bit is almost eighteen to earlier periods as Peck enacts sexual
intimacies distanced by a background of sacred music. Both characters are presented as lonely,
isolated, individuals with no hope and future. Peck is clearly in love with the little girl but abuses
her; and the girl finds solace with her uncle and learns to use her power over him. In a projection
forward, the young woman remembers seducing a young man on a bus, as the play probes again
the nature of power involved in seduction. Perhaps the ending of the piece is a gesture to
American public expectations, as Peck perishes by drinking himself to death and L'l Bit survives
while reconciling herself to her life. But Vogel avoids simple morality lessons in depicting the
relationship as a complex matter. If there is a lesson, it is to be seen in Li'l Bit's taking respon-
sibility for her own life symbolized by her driving her own car with the dead Peck sitting in the
back seat. The play is thus also a love story of sorts as it makes us see what is often involved (but
not openly admitted) in love the loneliness traded for comfort, intimacy sought and frustrated,
selfishness giving way to selflessness, the lure of the forbidden, and the betrayal of trust. It is a
play that, for its courage alone, deserves the Pulitzer Prize it was awarded.
Moving women to the centre of the narrative and foregrounding women's experience and
concerns, the dramas of Wasserstein and Vogel, both Jewish playwrights, are best consi-
dered as feminist theatre rather than ethnic drama. The latter is also a child of the 60s, as
America became aware of its multiculturalism and ethnic groups e.g., blacks, Chicanos,
and native Americans also began to define their identities through drama. Excepting
Yiddish drama in America, the theatre of African-Americans probably has the longest
history. Among its pioneers are the poet Langston Hughes and a number of women with a
double concern women's rights and black civil rights. In the 1930s Langston Hughes
(1902-67) wrote a series of plays (see Mulatto, 1936) that focused on life in black commu-
nities and avoided strident social criticism. Plays by black playwrights with a feminist con-
cern include pieces by Lorraine Hansberry (1930-65), Alice Childress (1920-94), and
Adrienne Kennedy (born 1931). Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was produced on
Broadway and portrays the generational conflict in a black family in a Chicago ghetto. In her
second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964), she changed her approach. Set in
Greenwich Village, this work has a Jewish hero and only one black character and views the
problems of blacks and black women within the larger framework of American society.
Adrienne Kennedy was concerned with racial issues seen from a female viewpoint in her
Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962). Influential for a whole generation of black writers with her
expressionist and surreal plays, Kennedy has continued to explore the experience of black
women in a society that limits their possibilities in such works as Movie Star Has to Star in
Black an White (1976), in which an African-American woman compares her roles as daugh-
ter, mother, wife, and playwright to scenes from popular movies starring white actresses.
Racial violence and its social origins are at the centre of Kennedy's The Ohio State Murders
(1990).
A change in black drama came with the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s, as a socially
committed and propagandist black theatre emerged in which the feminist black pioneers still
had a strong voice. Apart from Kennedy, Alice Childress (1920-94) must be mentioned as a
playwright who contributed to the emancipation of black women in such plays as Wedding
Band (1966; again in 1972), about an interracial love affair, and Wine in the Wilderness
(1969). The gay novelist and playwright James Baldwin (1924-87) moved from the drama-
tization of black religiosity in The Amen Corner (1964) to the propagandist Blues for Mr.
Charlie (1964), which deals with social and sexual issues in the race conflict between
blacks and whites. Baldwin's black hero in this play opened the way for the militant drama
of Le Roi Jones (born 1934) and Ed Bullins (born 1935). Under his new African name,
Amiri Baraka, Jones used the dramatic form as a political weapon (Dutchman, 1964; The
Slave, 1966; Slave Ship, 1967). His The Motion of History (1976) puts his Marxist-Maoist
views into the words of black protagonists. Ed Bullins has been associated with the militant
New Lafayette Theater in Harlem, founded in the 1960s by Bullins, Robert Macbeth, and
Richard Wesley. Like Jones, Bullins has written for blacks, suggesting militant resistance to
the white American political system in such plays as The Electronic Nigger (1968), The
Gentleman Caller (1969), Four Dynamite Plays (1971), about life in the black ghetto, The
Fabulous Miss Marie (1970), in which the characters reveal their selfishness in interior
monologues, and The Taking of Miss Janie (1975), a controversial play staging the rape of a
white girl by a young black.
Playwrights producing works for the subsidized Negro Ensemble Company in New York,
which remained a showcase for black drama until 1990, have tried to reach a wider Ameri-
can audience. Among these writers, Douglas Turner Ward (born 1930; see Brotherhood,
1970) and Adrienne Kennedy, mentioned above, represent a Black theatre with roots in
American realism and avant-garde expressionism. Other black playwrights who have attrac-
ted critical attention are Philip Hayes Dean (born 1933; The Sty of the Blind Pig, 1971) and
Charles Fuller (born 1939; The Brownsville Raid, 1976; A Soldier's Play, 1981). Both
authors have written on American history from a decidedly black point of view. The causes
of feminism and black civil rights are still being upheld by Afro-American writers who are
not primarily dramatists (see, for instance, the plays by the poets Sonia Sanchez, and Rita
Dove; e.g., Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth, 1996) and such avant-garde playwrights
as Ntozake Shange (alias Paulette Williams; born 1948) and Suzan-Lori Parks (born 1963).
Shange has collaborated with other women playwrights (e.g., Emily Mann; see Betsy Brown,
1987) and created what she terms "choreopoems", some of them staged on Broadway. These
dramas combine performance elements, dance, music, and prose, focusing on the suffering
of black women (see For Colored Girls Who have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow
Is Enuf, 1974; Spell #7, 1979; Boogie Woogie Landscapes, 1980; and The Love Space De-
mands, 1991). Aware of the enormous power of language in shaping Afro-Americans'
thinking, Parks came to public attention in 1989 with Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third
Kingdom, which won an Obie Award23 in 1990. Her plays interrogate the black past and
present in America by subjecting language use (essentially the black demotic, often glossed
ironically as "foreign words and phrases") to a close subversive analysis. This is supposed
to uncover the presumptions, attitudes, myths, and values that both determine and express
Blackness in the United States (see her The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole
Entire World, 1990; The America Play, 1990; Devotees in the Garden of Love, 1991; and
Venus, 1996).
In the 1980s, however, despite the existence of black theatre companies, the black militant
theatre, with the exception of feminist drama, began to lose its impetus and its audience.
Some black playwrights found a new approach that was less overtly political and could ad-
dress larger audiences, including Broadway. The most powerful dramatic black voice of the
1980s was that of August Wilson (1945-2005). After producing propagandist one-act plays
in the 1960s and co-founding the Black Horizons Theatre in Pittsburgh, Wilson attempted a
dramatic history of the Afro-American experience, showing in a number of plays how the
lives and the culture of blacks have been used by capitalist, racist, America. Alluding to the
exploitation of Afro-American musicians (e.g., Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday), Wilson had a
breakthrough with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), which was produced on Broadway
and won the Pulitzer Prize.
23 Awarded by The Village Voice in New York City, this is Off-Broadway's highest honour. It was
first created in 1955.
Directly based on an experience in 1927 of the blues singer Ma Rainey, the play has the same
aims as those that followed it in Wilson's historical exploration of Black culture and history in
America it shows the richness of that culture (e.g., in its music), it explores the myths created
by and around it, and it demonstrates how the myths and the culture itself have constructed the
present. Wilson's 1984 drama, for instance, demonstrates how the rich musical culture of Afro-
Americans is being commercially exploited by white managers. Sturdyvant, the white owner of
Ma Rainey's record company, has neither respect for nor understanding of the products of the
"mother of blues". Blues music is shown to represent a way of life and the attitude of Afro-
Americans while for whites it means merely entertainment and money. While Ma Rainey is
aware of this (as was Billie Holiday and others after her) and accepts the situation, a younger
black musician kills the white manager who steals his songs and does not give him a chance to
record his works.
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and each of Wilson's plays that followed look at history in a
tangential way, i.e., they focus not on the historical events as such (e.g., the deportation of
Marcus Garvey in 1927) but on the lives of those directly concerned. Thus the background
of Wilson's Fences, 1985, concerned with an ex-baseball player who has to work as a gar-
bage collector, is the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s; Joe Turner's Come and
Gone (1988) returns to 1911 as the first generation of free-born Afro-Americans are looking
for a cultural identity; and The Piano Lesson (1989), which like Fences won both the
Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics' Circle Award, is set in the 1930s, presenting the story
of a brother and sister arguing over the legacy of a family piano in the larger context of
blacks as property owners. In his plays of the 1990s, Wilson has continued to shed dramatic
light on the history of black America in plays that have been criticised for the concessions
they seem to make to Broadway (happy endings, refusals to address political or racial issues
in radical ways), where he has been accepted as a successful playwright. Two Trains Running
(1992), for example, is set in the violent 1960s (when Martin Luther King and Malcolm X
were assassinated) but ends with the characters apparently able to find solutions for their
problems; and in Seven Guitars (1995), on the death of a jazz musician in the 1940s, the
flashbacks presented as scenes make up a sort of parallel, private, history to the one we
know from official records. This history offers both defeat and despair but also hope for
Afro-Americans.
Black drama is the best-known part of ethnic drama in America, which has tried to give
expression to and develop the identities of a great variety of communities and minorities
Asian-American, Chicano, and native American, to name just the most prominent. The
Asian-American theatre established itself with the founding in 1965 of an acting group in
Los Angeles entitled the East West Players. Other groups followed in San Francisco, Seattle,
and New York. Distinguished writers connected with this movement are Frank Chin (born
1940), David Henry Hwang (born 1957), and Philip Kan Gotanda (born 1951). Chin has
focused on racial stereotypes in The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and The Year of the
Dragon (1974). In his wake, Hwang has dealt with the survival tactics of Chinese immi-
grants fresh off the boat in FBO (1981), which won an Obie Award, and in Family Devo-
tions (1981), while the 1863 strike of Chinese labourers is the basis for his The Dance and
the Railroad (1981). His M. Butterfly (1988) won the Tony Award as best play of that year.
Combining Western theatrical styles with those of the Peking opera, it deals with both gen-
der and racial issues.
Based on a newspaper report about a trial in which a French diplomat and his lover, a Chinese
opera singer, were sentenced for espionage, the play focuses on the revelation during the trial
that the opera singer, whom the diplomat had believed to be a woman, was in fact a man. Bor-
rowing from Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly and Kabuki, in which men play the roles of
women, Hwang creates a new kind of work that addresses imperialism, racism, sexism, and
East-West gender relations.
After a series of badly received plays, Hwang ended the 1990s with Golden Child (1997),
which derives its themes from the stories of his maternal Chinese grandmother. The Jap-
anese-American experience in America includes the xenophobism in the USA after Pearl
Harbor. This and the more general trauma of immigrant experience has been treated by the
Japanese-American playwrights Philip Kan Gotanda (see Yankee Dawg, You Die, 1987, and
Ballad of Yachiyo, 1995) and Wakako Yamauchi (born 1924; see And the Soul Shall
Dance, 1977).
The Hispanic-American theatre was boosted by the creation in the late 1960s of Luis
Valdez's El Teatro Campesino in California. Plays of the Chicano theatre tradition that have
stood the test of time include Luis Valdez's (born 1940) Zoot Suit (1978), about the illegal
sentencing to death in 1943 of 17 Hispanic-Americans in the Los Angeles "Sleepy Lagoon
Trial" (the sentences had to be revoked in 1944); the Mexican-American Milcha Sanchez-
Scott's (born 1955) Roosters (1987), on the ritual importance of rooster fighting in Latin
America in a play marked by magic realism; and the Puertorican Jos Rivera's (born 1955)
Marisol (1992), concerned with violence and religion in urban America and also marked by
its magic realism. The fact that many Chicano plays are performed in Spanish indicates both
the importance of Latin American culture in the larger North American cities (New York,
Boston, Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles, all have their Spanish-speaking communities)
and the function of Spanish as a glue uniting immigrants from countries in the Caribbean
and Latin America. This is also reflected in the backgrounds of playwrights who have
emerged in Chicano theatre Eduardo Machado (born 1967) was born in Cuba; Jose
Rivera and John Jesurun (born 1951) came from Puerto Rico; and Lynne Alvarez (1947-
2009) was of Argentinian descent.
Native American playwrights profited from the creation in 1968 of the Santa Fe Theatre
project and, in 1972, of La Mama Experimental Theatre Club; several others followed (e.g.,
the Native American Theatre Ensemble and the Indian Performing Arts Company). Impor-
tant playwrights and remarkable dramas include Hanay Geiogamah (born 1945), a Kiowa
who has dramatised the pathology of a community threatened by alcoholism and self-de-
struction (see Body Indian, 1972; and 49, 1975); and the plays of the (Canadian) Cree Tom-
son Highway (born 1951), whose works describe the attempts of reservation Indians to
escape the hopelessness of their everyday lives (see The Rez Sisters, 1988; and Dry Lips
Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, 1989).
Another important development in contemporary American drama is performance theatre. It
has its roots in the experiments of the radical 60s (e.g., the play-performances of Jean-
Claude van Itallie) and in analogous movements in music and literature, such as the post-
modernist novel which ignores plot in favour of other elements. Combining poetry (or poetic
prose), music and theatrical elements, some performance artists deliberately tread the line
between the arts and have refused to be classified. To these belong the African-Americans
Gil Scott-Heron (born 1949), who has stressed the political implications of his productions,
and Ntozake Shange (discussed above), and the internationally successful Laurie Anderson
(born 1947; discussed in the poetry section above). Anderson has produced some works that
have a stronger theatrical leaning, e.g., Songs and Stories from Moby-Dick (1999), which is
her multimedia reaction to, and deconstruction of, Melville's mighty nineteenth-century
prose text. Interested in the impact of theatrical codes on the consciousness and uncon-
sciousness of the spectator, performance theatre does use texts, but they are often less im-
portant than those codes normally reduced to secondary rank in theatrical productions
light, images, props, movement, sound/music, and silence. The names connected with per-
formance theatre (now an international movement) in America are those of Richard Fore-
man (born 1937), Robert Wilson, and the members of the Wooster Group and the Structur-
alist Workshop. Marginalizing spoken texts and filling the stage with images that are both
poetic and magic, Foreman and Wilson have used actors as living sculptures in their at-
tempts to defamiliarize and create new ways of perception. Examples that caused interna-
tional attention include Foreman's Caf Amerique (1981) and Egyptology (1983) and, after
the founding in 1991 of his Ontological-Hysteric Chamber Theatre in New York, Samuel's
Major Problems (1993). Critics agree that, despite the resemblance of these pieces to post-
modernist novels, they do not quite exemplify the rigour of Foreman's theories. Robert
Wilson (born 1941) came to the theatre after exploring art and architecture. Wilson's perfor-
mances, often very long, stress non-verbal channels of communication and present collages
of moving pictures. Since the 1970s, he has commanded great international interest (see, for
instance, Einstein on the Beach, 1976) while working in France and Germany, among other
countries. In Wilson's The Golden Windows (1982), the images are based on an American
children's book, while CIVIL wars (1984) was a contemplation of war through history pres-
ented in images and collages accompanied by music. He collaborated with the German play-
wright Heiner Mller on a number of projects (e.g., The Hamlet Machine, 1990), but his
productions became incredibly long and expensive Overture to Ka Mountain (first pro-
duced in 1972) lasted for 24 hours in Paris and 168 hours in Iran and he avoided the
impending failure through lack of money by arranging international tours and performances,
which was an unusual step for avant-garde theatre. Wilson's remarkable performance plays
of the 1990s, for which he collaborated with writers and musicians (e.g., William Burroughs
and Tom Waits) include The Black Rider (1990), and Alice (1995). Equally interesting pro-
ductions were staged by Lee Breuer's Mabou Mines who reworked canonical texts or dra-
mas, turning them into parodies and ironic fables (see, for instance, The Shaggy Dog Ani-
mation, 1977, a parody of Hollywood's products; and the dramatic version of Beckett's
story-novel Imagination Dead Imagine, 1984), and the equally intertextual and intermedial
productions of the Wooster Group run by Elizabeth LeCompte and Spalding Gray. The
Wooster Group has based an entire series of their performance pieces on the plays of classic
American dramatists; T. S. Eliot and Eugene O'Neill provide the basis for the Rhode Island
Trilogy, 1975-78; and texts by Thornton Wilder and Arthur Miller were adapted in Route 1
& 9, 1981, and L.S.D. (Just the High Points), 1984. This metadramatic dimension is also a
hallmark of the productions of Michael Kirby's Structuralist Workshop that imposes a
"structuralist" performance strategy on realistic forms of presentation, as in First Signs of
Decadence (1985), which foregrounds traditional dramatic means and procedures (the
placing and allotting of space or positions to actors; the number of actors onstage; etc.).
Television has had a powerful influence on American drama. Soap operas, sit coms, and TV
movie series have shaped not only the minds of most Americans, even those of intellectuals,
but also the frames within which theatre is produced. Although some avant-garde American
playwrights with moral and/or political agenda (e.g., David Mamet and Sam Shepard) have
worked for the Hollywood and New York studios, they reacted to their experience with
deep irony and bitter sarcasm. This is so because they could experience at first hand how
TV keeps the bad side of the American dream (and false consciousness) going instead of
developing critical attitudes, and because American TV drama and the soap operas tend to
appeal to the lowest common denominator of response. Most TV productions in drama
come from the Hollywood studios and are subject to financial pressures that produce high
audience ratings but very little dramatic work with an artistic value, although it is worth
studying these productions for the highly influential stereotypes and the political ideology
they disperse. The influence of the superficial style of Hollywood drama is noticeable in the
plays of Neil Simon, Paddy Chayefsky (1923-81), and Frank Gilroy (born 1926), who
were experienced TV veterans before turning to the theatre.
Money makes the world go round. And as Hollywood can often offer more than other loca-
tions in America, it has attracted many talents, including European playwrights. Hollywood
has produced numerous dramatic TV genres: sit-coms (i.e. situation comedies) such as Archie
Bunker and Steptoe and Son; police and crime series such as Kojak, Western series like
Bonanza, and more recently, an impressive number of series concerned with the super-
natural and the paranormal. The best-known examples of American TV culture in the later
twentieth century are Dallas and Dynasty, which provoked one of the French TV channels to
produce a similar series in France. Both from cultural and psychological viewpoints it is
interesting to notice that in the 1990s TV seems to have fostered an interest in the paranormal
and the paranatural. The pilot film for X-Files was launched in September 1993, and the
hugely successful series that followed focused on mysterious, unsolved FBI cases linked to
alleged supernatural phenomena (demons, monsters, UFOs, aliens, or just plain evil). X-Files
spawned similar TV shows dealing with the supernatural. In March 1997, the teenage audi-
ence saw the first screening of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a series in which horror is matched
with romance; one of the characters, Angel, a vampire with a soul, later had an independent
series entitled Angel (1999-2004). Witchcraft features in Charmed, first screened in July 1998,
in which three sisters fight the powers of evil, primarily in the shape of demons. Such series
are certainly of interest in a broader cultural context as vehicles of particular American ideo-
logies. As such they have been studied by literary and university critics (for instance, as at-
tempts by the powers that be to divert attention from the horrible crime rates in the USA;
from the unequal distribution of property; from the fact that the prisons are filled with the
black underclass, and much else that is wrong in American society). But the series lack the
subtleties of dramatic art. There is a certain irony in the fact that TV is one of the two most in-
fluential media in the United States but that it is extremely difficult for serious and convincing
drama to emerge from the TV studios. The emphasis on commercial interests seems to be det-
rimental to good TV drama. The yuppie culture of the 1980s and 1990s found an echo, to some
extent, in such series as Seinfeld and Allie McBeal, which dramatise the social and psycho-
logical problems of the members of the American urban middle class; even the black middle
class has been catered for in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air starring, among others, Will Smith.
Allie McBeal, featuring a neurotic urban lawyer and her equally bizarre colleagues, seems to
have paved the way for less sentimental and more challenging TV series.
One of these is the exceptionally explicit and occasionally surrealistic The Sopranos. The series
started in 1999, has run for six seasons and has been exported to Europe. Starring James
Gandolfini and Edie Falco, it focuses on the daily life and crimes of a New Jersey American-
Italian mafia family headed by the choleric Tony Soprano (played by Gandolfini) and his dedi-
cated wife Carmela. A college dropout and the acting head of the Soprano family, Tony is
exceptionally introspective and tortured but also brutal and autocratic. His worst enemies are
his family his mother Livia, a bitter, conniving old lady capable of killing her own son; his
uncle Corrado Soprano, Jr (Uncle Jun), the aging patriarch beleaguered by the FBI; and various
unreliable cousins. Plagued by his blood and crime families, including his children Meadow
and AJ, Tony escapes into the arms of several lovers (e.g., Gloria Trillo, his amour fou; Irina
Pelstin, a suicidal illegal Russian immigrant; and Miss Reykjavik, an airline stewardess) and
seeks advice from a terrified psychoanalyst. Dr Jennifer Melfi is the only person who really
knows about Tony's angst. The series ended with some remarkable developments, as Tony
Soprano, now also beleaguered by his sister and her family, left his wife Carmela and returned
to her, was shot by his uncle suffering from Alzheimer's, and barely escaped death. Meanwhile,
Tony's children, Meadow and AJ, quite aware of their father's criminal dealings, try to carve out
lives of their own. The series is remarkable for the honesty with which it treats taboos (e.g., the
homosexuality of a Mafia member and the macho reaction of the "family" who eventually have
him killed), the end of the American dream, the brutality of the post-capitalist world, and the
real motives determining human behaviour sex, power, and the will to triumph. But we also
see the paranoia and the anxiety resulting from a totally hedonistic way of life.
The Sopranos was produced by HBO (Home Box Office), a cable TV station that has radi-
cally changed the landscape of American TV drama with just a few challenging series. As
HBO is not dependent on commercials, the writers and producers have been given great
liberty in both form and contents of their series and the result is impressive. One gets the
impression that the best talents in drama are working neither for Hollywood nor for the city
theatres but for TV. In addition to The Sopranos and Sex and the City, HBO has marketed
two outstanding series. One is Alan Ball's Six Feet Under, equally superb, and occasionally
profound and surrealistic, which lasted five seasons and 63 episodes (2001-2005).
Focusing on a dysfunctional family in Los Angeles, the Fishers who run a funeral home with an
enthusiastic Puertorican embalmer, the series touches on and breaks most taboos of American
society: above all else this is death, but also homosexuality (the younger brother David), mental
illness (the brother of Nate Fisher's girlfriend Brenda), drugs, sex, and violence. Each episode
starts with a death more outlandish than the previous, and then focuses on the lives of Ruth, the
widowed and stern but kind matriarch; her moody daughter Claire and her sons David (the
uptight boss of the business) and Nate, the lost son come home to help his brother, and the
various friends of the family members. These include Keith, David's black gay lover; Brenda,
Nate's mysterious and bizarre girlfriend; Ruth's Russian-born boss, and Claire's violent high-
school boyfriend Gabriel. For all its daring taboo-breaking that includes abandoning the rules of
traditional genres (it is neither a family soap opera nor a mystery series nor a sitcom), Six Feet
Under also integrates the more traditional elements of TV drama, e.g., sentimental parts (Nate's
brain tumour and his death, in the third episode of season 5; Ruth's husband George suffering
from Alzheimer's) and mystery (the disappearance of Nate's first wife). But the overall achieve-
ment of the series in its depiction of the American dream gone wrong and the almost Beckettian
presentation of human loneliness and desperation remains unsurpassed.
The other series broadcast by HBO is The Wire. It won international acclaim because it
dared, for the first time, to abandon the American dream and sentimentalism while showing
what the race for money and fame has done to the most important sectors of public life in
America.
Primarily written and produced by David Simon, a former police reporter, it is set in Baltimore,
Maryland, and originally ran in 60 episodes from 2002-2008. Each season addressed a different
section of the city of Baltimore, and the series finally provided a realistic, at times even natura-
listic, panoramic view of an urban American society that is also typical for other cities in the
way it shows how institutions have an effect on individuals. We are introduced to the drug
trade, to the port of Baltimore and the powerful trade unions, the city government and its
largely corrupt bureaucracy, the failed school system, and the cynical and remorseless print
media. Depicting police work and criminal activity, the show makes the point that even the best
police are not motivated by a desire to protect, but by the vanity of believing that they are
smarter than their adversaries; the criminals are shown with human qualities but as trapped in
their existence and The Wire does not minimize the horrible outcome of their actions.
Frequently described by critics as the best television series of all time, The Wire is outstanding
precisely because it offers a combination of uncommonly honest exploration of dysfunctional
institutions, socio-political themes and artistic ambition. Simon avoided big-name stars, and the
actors appear persuasive and natural in their roles (some of them prominent real-life Baltimore
figures). There is a broad ensemble cast, supplemented by recurring guest stars working in the
institutions featured in the show. The majority of the cast is African American (which accurate-
ly reflects the demographic situation in Baltimore) a rarity in American television drama. The
narrative structure is superb it has been described as novelistic with recaps of events pre-
ceding each episode and a "cold open" taking one right into the action. The music is naturally
integrated by emanating from the scenes (bars, street rap, R & B in cars) and the different
recordings of Tom Waits's "Down in the Hole" used as opening themes superbly fit the subject.
The series gains its Shakespearean quality through the opposition of characters on the side of
the law (e.g., Detective Jimmy McNulty and his superior Cedric Daniels) and those involved in
drug-related crime (e.g., in the first season, the drug king Avon Barksdale and his partner
Stringer Bell). Additional spice is added through the intrigues of shady figures in the police
department, the trade unions, and city hall. There are some unforgettable characters the junkie
and police informer Bubbles, the killer Omar Little, and a police chief, Major Colvin, with a
radical plan to legalize the sale of drugs. Central to the structure and plot of the series is the use
of electronic surveillance and wiretap devices by the police (hence the title of the show).
American drama written and staged after 2000 is marked by its diversity in respect of race
and ethnicity, gender, and political-ideological engagement. Surprisingly, the events of
September 11, 2001 did not produce a remarkable echo on the part of well-known play-
wrights. Sam Shepard is an exception with his aforementioned The God of Hell (2004), a
violent political satire on what Shepard saw as Republican fascism after the attack on the
World Trade Center. Aimed at George W. Bush's America in its ideological and economic
confusion, the play concerns a Wisconsin farmer and his wife, and how their peaceful middle-
class existence is destroyed by an ultra-patriotic government employee. But like other inter-
nationally known American dramatists (e.g., David Mamet, David Rabe), Shepard then re-
turned to more familiar themes and the demonstration of the ravages of capitalism on the
American psyche. Thus his Kicking a Dead Horse (2007) and Ages of the Moon (2009) are
much closer to Beckett in their exploration of existential angst the first about a former art
dealer alone in the desert and digging a grave for his dead horse, and the second about two
men discussing their failed lives while sitting, drinking, and fighting on a porch.
Given the fact that ethnic groups have their own axe to grind, it is understandable that Afri-
can American drama has preferred the pursuit of its long standing targets, and the same is
true to a large extent for Asian-Americans and Latino playwrights. August Wilson has
covered the twentieth-century black experience decade by decade in The Pittsburgh Cycle, a
remarkable ten-play sequence (see the brief discussion above). Wilson died in 2005, but
2007 saw the Broadway premiere of the last play in the series. While the first, Gem of the
Ocean, is set in the last century's opening years and featured elderly ex-slaves, the final
play, Radio Golf (2008), brings that century to its close with Harmond Wilks, grandson of
an ex-slave, running for mayor in Pittsburgh.
However, neither the mainstream playwrights nor those from the ethnic communities dis-
cussed above can be said to have made major contributions to American drama in the first
decade of the twenty-first century. It is TV drama that powerfully shapes the minds of
Americans, and it is in this genre that some outstanding works have been produced, espe-
cially by the independent channel HBO (see discussion above).
4. Prose Fiction
4.1 The Novel

The criticism of American society begun by Howells, Crane, and Norris continued with the
naturalistic novels of Theodore Dreiser, the realistic novels of social protest by Upton
Sinclair and the "muckrakers", and the attacks on self-satisfied middle-class life by Sinclair
Lewis and Sherwood Anderson.
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was the twelfth child of a poor Catholic German family that
emigrated to Terre Haute, Indiana. Largely self-educated, Dreiser became a journalist and
an admirer of the philosophical determinism as exemplified in the fiction of Zola and Balzac.
As the publishers of his first two books did not like his pessimistic view of American life and
his ridiculing of the Horatio Alger myth24, it took several years for his works to gain critical
attention. Sister Carrie (1900) describes the gradual moral corruption of the country girl
Caroline Meeber. Before finding a place in the theatre, Caroline becomes the mistress of
several men in Chicago and New York. Her last keeper finally marries her. But when finan-
cial difficulties arise, she leaves him and he finally commits suicide. Caroline pursues her
theatrical career, but fails to attain happiness. Dreiser's impersonal viewpoint, his realistic
treatment of sexual relations, and his social determinism provide explanations for the failure
of his characters, which was much criticized at the time. But he pursued his themes with
Jennie Gerhardt (1911), which chronicles the history of another fallen girl, and the trilogy
The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (1947). These three novels cover the
rise and fall of a brutal and egoistic "financier" in a plot that is suffocated by too many facts
and details.
Dreiser's outstanding novel is An American Tragedy (1925). It balances determinism with
an emotional identification with the tragic hero.
The novel is based on a sensational murder case and shows the development and moral crisis of
a young man obsessed with the ideas of material success and social prestige. When the hero
plans to kill his former mistress, who is now pregnant and thus an obstacle in his way to the top,
she accidentally drowns. The young man, Clyde Griffith, is arrested, tried and condemned to
death. In a long section on Griffith's imprisonment, Dreiser criticizes what he sees as an inhu-
man legal system and the society that had created it. Basically products of their milieu, Dreiser's
characters are driven by their hunger for money and power and remain lonely and unsatisfied
figures.
Dreiser's social protest in fiction was accompanied by the humanitarian idealism of the "muck-
rakers", a term coined by President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) to designate what he
considered noxious critics of corruption in politics and business. The leading "muckrakers"
David Graham Phillips (1867-1911), Robert Herrick (1868- 1938), and Lincoln Steffens
(1866-1936) published their criticism in their own journals and several newspapers. In prose
fiction, the movement was represented by such novels as Phillips's Susan Lennox: Her Fall
and Rise (1917) and the works of Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) is
a melodramatic description and a condemnation of the working conditions in the Chicago
stockyards. With the earnings from the book he founded a cooperative colony and unsuccess-
24 See the discussion of Horatio Alger's adventure books for boys in the section on children's liter-
ature below.
fully ran for public office. Sinclair wrote more than 100 works, ranging from social studies to
plays, short stories and novels, among them the eleven novels of the Lanny Budd series.
Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis aimed their criticism at the banality and hypocrisy
of middle-class life. A temporary member of Upton Sinclair's "Helicon Home Colony",
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) was a journalist and novelist who travelled widely in the USA
and in Europe. He refused to accept a Pulitzer Prize in 1926 and was awarded a Nobel Prize
in literature in 1930, the first American to receive this honour. Lewis died in Rome. He was
a fierce satirist and ridiculed such American values as optimism and the adoration of finan-
cial success. Lewis's first major novel, Main Street (1920), contrasts the intolerant and self-
satisfied citizens of provincial Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, with cultured big-city characters
in a satire of middlebrow and middle-class life in a typical small town of the Middle West.
With Babbitt (1922) Lewis created the prototype of the superficial and benevolent business-
man who prefers to adapt to society instead of following his own inclinations. While Bab-
bitt's entrapment in his pitiful environment still causes sympathy, Lewis was less under-
standing and more aggressive in his fictional attack on religious hypocrisy in Elmer Gantry
(1927), and on materialism in Arrowsmith (1925). Although excellent social satires, these
works lack convincing characters and are at times overplotted.
Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) was less satirical than Lewis and wrote sympathetic and
psychologically interesting studies of small-town people. His sketches in Winesburg, Ohio
(1919) recall Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology of 1915. Sherwood Anderson
was impressed by the works of Freud and D. H. Lawrence. The 23 stories of his Winesburg,
Ohio describe characters that are puzzled and frustrated. These psychological portraits are
written in a simple and intense style and are held together by the consciousness of an ob-
server/reporter, George Willard, thus creating a work that stands half-way between novel and
short story. In fact, Anderson's reputation rests on his short stories, but he also wrote a
remarkable novel, Dark Laughter (1925), which contrasts unrepressed blacks with spiritually
sterile whites.
After 1920, realism in American fiction continued along the line taken, on the one hand, by
Dreiser, Sinclair, and Lewis, and, on the other hand, in the experiments of the American ex-
patriates in Europe, the "lost generation", as Gertrude Stein called herself, Hemingway, and
her literary circle in Paris that, at one time or another, included such writers as cummings,
Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald.
The hardship and the human suffering of the Depression of the early 1930s is reflected in
the fiction of John Steinbeck and such neo-naturalists as James T. Farrell, John O'Hara and
Nelson Algren. Of the several novels of the Californian John Steinbeck (1902-68), some
are humorous picaresque studies of Mexican-Californian characters (Tortilla Flat, 1935;
Cannery Row, 1945). These works owe much of their style to the local colour movement.
Many of Steinbeck's novels have little literary value. Outstanding are his naturalistic works
emphasizing heredity and environment in the assessment of poor human "underdogs". Thus
Of Mice and Men (1937), held mostly in dialogue, is the tragic story of the dreams and
adventures of two itinerant Californian farm labourers, while The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
traces the suffering of the Joad family in the Depression as they migrate from the Oklahoma
dust bowl to California. Far from being the promised land, the West proves a great disap-
pointment, and the Joads are left with nothing but their hopes and dreams. The book was
made into a film by John Ford in 1940. East Of Eden (1952) is Steinbeck's treatment of
heredity and the power of evil. The actor James Dean made the film, and the novel, a great
popular success.
The proletarian naturalistic fiction of James
T. Farrell (1904-79) is decidedly more pessi-
mistic. Farrell's Studs Lonigan Trilogy (1932-
35) charts the negative influence of environ-
ment in the tragic life of an Irish Catholic in
the Chicago slums. Comparable works are
John O'Hara's (1905-1970) bitter satire
about a country club society in Appointment
in Samarra (1934) and Nelson Algren's
(1909-81) realistic fictional account of a
Texas boy's criminal career in Somebody in
Boots (1935). O'Hara and Algren wrote
more realistic novels after 1945. The best-
known works are Algren's fascinating pano-
rama of the Chicago underworld in The Man
With the Golden Arm (1949), and of a sim-
ilar setting in New Orleans during the De-
pression in A Walk on the Wild Side (1956).
Because of her pervasive influence on the
"lost generation", Gertrude Stein (1874-
1946) occupies an important place in Amer-
ican literature. As the heart and soul of a
group of European and American artists and
avant-garde writers in Paris (Picasso, Ma-
tisse, Braque, Apollinaire, and Cocteau25
were some Europeans she knew), she sought
to combine the psychology of her teacher
William James with Bergson's26 philosophy Walker Evans, Hale County, Alabama. 1936
and notion of time. Her revolutionary styl-
25 Pablo Ruiz y Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish painter, who settled in Paris in 1901 and, together
with Braque, developed Cubism in 1907. He produced many paintings and etchings and was
also a brilliant draughtsman.
Henri Matisse (1869-1954), the principal painter in the group of French artists called "Les
Fauves" (wild beasts) because of the violent colours they used.
Georges Braque (1882-1963), French painter and the classical representative of Cubism. He
specialized in still life.
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). French poet and critic and a prominent figure in the avant-
garde in early twentieth-century Paris.
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), French poet, novelist, dramatist, film director, and critic, and a leader
of the modernist movement in art, literature, ballet, music, and the cinema.
26 Henri Bergson (1859-1941), French philosopher and recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature
in 1928. In his several books he opposed scientific materialism and positivism. He established
the primacy of creative inner experience and distinguished between "real duration" and meas-
ured time. He also studied the aesthetics of comedy in Le Rire (1900).
istic and literary theories are related to dadaism (see her Composition as Explanation, 1926;
and Lectures in America, 1935) and broke with traditional ways of narration and plotting.
Stein suggested the use of a simple style, intentional monotony and repetition to express
what she termed "immediacy" or the actual present. Her theories proved of greater influence
than her novels (Ida, 1941; and the autobiographical The Making of Americans, 1925) which,
given her theories and experiments, are difficult to read. A good access to her life and work
is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), her own autobiography, written as though by
her lesbian friend and secretary. Stein's idea that fiction should express immediate experience
in a sober prose was taken up by Sherwood Anderson, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and Heming-
way.
John Dos Passos (1896-1970) studied at Harvard and in Spain and took part in World War
I in a volunteer ambulance corps. He recorded his growing disillusion and the inhumanity of
the military machinery in his pacifist novel Three Soldiers (1921). Dos Passos's early novels
give evidence of his leftist tendencies and of Gertrude Stein's literary theories. Manhattan
Transfer (1925) was his first experiment in the novel. It tries to capture the vast variety and
the pluralism of the world of the big city in a colossal portrait that involves some 50 charac-
ters in impressionistic and cinematic scenes. Similar in technique is his ambitious trilogy
U.S.A., consisting of The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936).
These novels combine narrative realism with biographies of contemporary public figures
and such experimental elements as montages of newspaper headlines, musical hits, and
"camera eye" semi-autobiographical impressions. They express his Marxist view of Ameri-
can society and his plea for a better social system. Although more concerned with social and
economic forces than with individual characters, the series remains an impressive work. In
his subsequent works (for example in District of Columbia, 1952) Dos Passos modified his
political views and abandoned his experimental technique.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), another member of the "lost generation" and of Gertrude
Stein's Paris circle, has gone down in literary history as the chronicler of the hedonistic Jazz
Age (the 1920s). Fitzgerald wrote many excellent short stories and dealt with the frenetic
and frivolous youth of the post-war years in This Side of Paradise (1920). His masterpiece
is The Great Gatsby (1925).
Told by Nick Carraway, Gatsby's neighbour on Long Island, this novel is concerned with Jay
Gatsby, who finances his huge mansion and fabulous entertainments by shady means. Gatsby's
attempt to regain the love of his youth, Daisy, now married to a brutal man of wealth, ends in
tragedy and murder. Fitzgerald draws a compelling picture of a society obsessed with money,
and of an idealist forced to live a superficial life to make his dreams come true. The promise of
the "American dream" is shown to be an illusion.
Fitzgerald provided a further fictional treatment of the theme of disillusionment in Tender Is
the Night (1934), which traces the eventual failure of a psychiatrist, Dick Diver, who cures
his wife Nicole from schizophrenia but spends his emotional energy in his multiple roles as
doctor, lover, and husband. Fitzgerald's final novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), remained un-
finished; it deals with Hollywood and the "American dream".
Ernest Hemingway's (1899-1961) fiction has been an influential source for European and
American writers. With some guidance from Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, and under the
influence of sober and practical newspaper styles (Hemingway worked for several papers in
America and as a correspondent in Europe), he developed a factual prose style that has
remained connected with his name. Like Dos Passos, Hemingway served as a volunteer in
an ambulance unit in Italy and was severely wounded. Between 1921 and 1927 he lived
mainly in Paris and then in Cuba and Florida. In the Spanish Civil War, which he covered as
a correspondent from 1936-1937, he sided with the republicans. In World War II he took
part in the invasion of Normandy in 1944. Hemingway's themes are courageous endurance
in the face of danger and death, and, increasingly toward the 1950s, an obsession with death.
Ernest Hemingway tried to live his own fiction. He covered several wars as a journalist; he
went on safaris in Africa and loved deep-sea fishing; he attended bull-fights (see Death in the
Afternoon, 1932); he engaged in boxing and knocked out adversaries and critics in bars;
he drank heavily and married four times. He was trying to prove his manhood, but his
flirtations with death led to paranoia. And when he realized that he could no longer write
with his former vigour and could no longer believe in his own act, he made a final gesture by
blowing out his own brains with a shotgun in 1961.
Ernest Hemingway was a master of the short story, and he also wrote a few good novels on
characters suffering bravely in a world without God. Hemingway gave great importance not
to psychological analysis but to seemingly simple gestures and everyday speech. There is,
however, a touch of romantic sentimentality in his lonely and disillusioned heroes. His first
novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926; published in England as Fiesta), portrays the cynical dis-
illusion of the "lost generation" in a group of hedonistic young people. They remain spirit-
ually deficient as they drown their disgust with life in alcohol and seek excitement in sex
and bull-fights. A Farewell to Arms (1929) is set in World War I. Partly autobiographical,
the novel is concerned with Frederic Henry, an American ambulance officer in the Italian
army, and his love for the English nurse Catherine. The two escape the tragedy of war, but
Catherine and her baby die during the birth of the child, leaving Henry alone in a strange
land. The stoic Henry found a successor in Robert Jordan, the American volunteer in the
Spanish Civil War and hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Although Jordan knows that
his mission is pointless, he does his duty and sacrifices his love and his life for the repub-
lican cause. He thus proves a heroic individual in a world of cynicism and chaos. The sen-
timental love story in this novel is balanced by realistic scenes of the inhuman war. When
Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, he had earned it with a number
of excellent novels and short stories, and with a few less important works (e.g., To Have and
Have Not, 1937; and Across the River and Into the Trees, 1950). His last outstanding piece
of fiction was The Old Man and the Sea (1952). In this long tale or novelette, the Cuban
fisherman Santiago loses the beautiful and huge marlin he has caught to the sharks. San-
tiago's courageous fight with the sharks lasts for two days and nights. In a symbolic contest
with the inhuman elements and forces of nature, the poor fisherman emerges as the quint-
essential Hemingway hero. Proud in defeat and losing in style, the old man proves Heming-
way's "macho" idea that a man may be "beaten but not destroyed". Hemingway's post-
humously published works include two novels. Islands in the Stream (1970) is a variation on
his major themes in the partly autobiographical story of an unhappy painter; and The Garden
of Eden (1986), first written in the 1940s, is concerned with the marital difficulties of a
young couple who break up over sexual problems.
Several writers of the 1930s were dissatisfied with the "proletarian literature" as represented
by Farrell, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck, and with the tough personal realism of Hemingway.
Writers such as Henry Miller, Nathanael West, and Djuna Barnes went beyond protest and
epic realism and found in a grotesque surrealism an adequate means of expression for their
despair and devastating criticism of the false illusions generated by the "American dream".
Nathanael West (1903-40) had an apocalyptic view of the world as hovering between
dream and nightmare. He saw modern America as a doomed Babylon. West died at an early
age in a car accident. His work, like that of Miller and the still vastly underrated Barnes,
received little notice when it was first published; but his novels have gradually gained much
positive critical attention. The son of Jewish immigrants, West spent some time in Paris in
the 1920s and took a deep interest in surrealism and in Kafka. His first novel is the occa-
sionally obscene fantasy The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931). It was published in Paris
and parodies literary styles and personalities while exposing human corruption. Yet West is
best remembered for the three novels he published in the following years. Miss Lonelyhearts
(1933) is a sad and bitter satire of a journalist who escapes into black humour in order to be
able to bear the suffering of the people writing in response to his newspaper column. A Cool
Million (1934), a parody of Voltaire's Candide27, fiercely attacks the Horatio Alger rags-to-
riches myth. West's most ambitious work, The Day of the Locust (1939), based on his know-
ledge of Hollywood as a film script writer, depicts in a surrealistic style the cruelty and the
misery beneath the glittering surface of a city which, to West, represented everything that is
sham and false in American society.
Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was born in New York, but spent several decades of her life in
Europe. She wrote two important experimental novels, Ryder (1928) and Nightwood (1935).
Held in the stream-of-consciousness technique, the first is concerned with the protagonist's
relations with his mother, his wife, and his mistresses. Nightwood portrays psychopathic
characters and tragic horror in a complex fiction that was highly praised by T. S. Eliot and is
being slowly recognized as a major contribution to American surrealism.
Henry Miller (1891-1980) explored another form of surrealism by pitting sensual life
against the urban nightmare of the twentieth century and America as he described and as-
saulted it in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945). In the 1930s Miller lived in Paris and
then settled in California. His fiction is essentially autobiographical, expressing his indi-
vidualism, his love of freedom, and his natural responses. Miller's books are marked by a
lyrical prose, confessional passages with frank sexual descriptions, and obscene dialogue
that caused his books to be banned in the United States up until the early 1960s. His novels
were thus published in the USA with a time lag of some 30 years. Tropic of Cancer (Paris,
1934; USA, 1961) is an intense and sexually uninhibited fictional account of the life of an
American expatriate in Paris, while Tropic of Capricorn (1939; USA, 1962) is concerned
with Miller's life in New York in a satirical form. His final autobiographical and confessional
series, The Rosy Crucifixion (made up of Sexus, 1949; Plexus, 1953; and Nexus, 1960), is
less outrageously obscene and was written when Miller was partially reconciled with
America. Also a prolific writer of stories and a critic, Henry Miller became one of the major
sources for the Beat movement. The energetic and obscene vitality of his novels is balanced
by his surrealistic and apocalyptic fantasy.
In addition to the realists, naturalists, and surrealists, a group of more traditional novelists
wrote in a manner inspired by Henry James's psychological realism and Hawthorne's ro-
mances. The cultivated settings and laboured moral problems in almost all of Edith
Wharton's (1862-1937) novels provide sufficient evidence of the thematic and stylistic
influence of the cosmopolitan Wharton's great idol, Henry James (see her The House of
Mirth, 1905; The Custom of the Country, 1913; and The Age of Innocence, 1920). Ellen
27 Philosophical tale by Voltaire, written in 1759 against the optimistic teaching of Leibniz. Es-
sentially, Voltaire's work attacks human utopias and illusions and warns against the dangers of
imaginary paradises.
Glasgow (1874-1945) deplored the end of the Southern aristocracy in her early sentimental
novels but then found a more convincing ironic realism in Barren Ground (1925), a social
satire in which the heroine, after the death of her father, restores the family's neglected farm.
Willa Cather (1873-1947) was born in Virginia and grew up in Nebraska. She dealt with
the hardships of men in a hostile environment and with the life of new settlers (see her O
Pioneers!, 1913; and My ntonia, 1918). Cather also wrote an outstanding historical novel
on the work of the Catholic Church and of two saints in New Mexico: Death Comes for the
Archbishop (1927).
Glasgow and Cather stand at the beginning of Southern literary realism. But there were also
novelists in the South completely opposed to realism. One of them was James Branch
Cabell (1879-1958). A Virginian and a belated romantic writer, Cabell created his own im-
aginary country and called it Poictesme, providing it with a history, geography, and mythol-
ogy, and peopling it with characters descended from the country's ruler, Dom Manuel, a
pessimistic comedian striving for unobtainable ideals in art and love. Among the many
pseudo-scholarly romances dealing with Manuel Jurgen (1919) is perhaps the best known.
It deals with a pawnbroker who becomes a duke, a king, and an emperor while visiting
heaven and hell and meeting mythical and fictional characters in a number of partly erotic
adventures. The pawnbroker finally returns to his former comfortable life.
Finally, George Santayana (1863-1952) and Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) remain to be
mentioned as writers outside the current of realism. Santayana was a philosopher and critic
who shared William James's idea of pragmatism while opposing German idealism. Santa-
yana's novel The Last Puritan (1935) shows the gradual retreat of Calvinism in New Eng-
land in an epic portrait of social and dramatic events. As a novelist, Wilder was indebted to
James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Wilder's The Cabala (1926) traces the growing corruption
of the Italian aristocracy after World War I as seen by an ironic yet fascinated American.
His novels are characterized by episodic structure and a mixture of classical-hedonistic and
Christian backgrounds. They try to explore philosophical and metaphysical problems, such
as the question of God's will in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), or that of God's exis-
tence in The Woman of Andros (1930). The Eighth Day (1967) and Theophilus North (1973)
are concerned with the meaning of man's life and future.
The two decades between the world wars also saw the first flowering of a Southern literature
that was to produce a rich harvest after 1945. "Southern literature" is a rather complex term.
It covers such movements as realism, the regionalism of the Southern "agrarians" John
Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren, and the symbolism and "Southern gothic" of Wil-
liam Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor; and it encompasses the work of such
diverse writers as Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, and Truman Capote. The extremes are
marked by Ellen Glasgow and James Branch Cabell. The best of Glasgow's work, such as
Barren Ground, is both regional and protest literature against social and economic injustice,
while Cabell is an aesthetician who looks back to Poe and has fascinated contemporary
Southern writers like Lytle and Walker Percy. Ellen Glasgow has found a successor in
Erskine Caldwell (1903-87). A native of Georgia, he has described the plight and sorrows
of poor whites and powerless blacks in a number of novels and short stories that have
attracted a wide readership. In Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933) Caldwell
showed an ugly and degenerate rural world dominated by religious fanaticism, sadism,
racism, sex, and alcohol. Tobacco Road was dramatized and proved a great success on the
New York stage. In many subsequent novels Caldwell has continued his fictional treatment
of the South (see, for instance, Trouble in July, 1940; and Jenny by Nature, 1961). The
elements of the grotesque and of horror relate these works to the fiction of Faulkner,
McCullers, and O'Connor.
There can be no doubt, however, that Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner are the towering
giants in the Southern fiction of the 1930s and, as far as Faulkner is concerned, even beyond
1945 and the limits of the Mason-Dixon line.28 Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was born in
Ashville, North Carolina, which was to become the "Altamont, Old Catawba" of his fiction.
Wolfe studied at the University of North Carolina and at Harvard, travelled widely in
Europe and died early of pneumonia. His epic and panoramic novels are autobiographical
and confessional in character. They
seek to capture the totality of the
world reality and imagination,
people, events and moods with an
enormous vocabulary and styles that
range from highly lyrical rhetoric to
prosaic reporting. Wolfe's unrestrained
formlessness led to huge sprawling
manuscripts that his publishers re-
duced to an acceptable size. Thus Look
Homeward, Angel (1929) began as a
manuscript of some 800,000 words
and covers the childhood and youth
(1884-1920) of the hero, Eugene Gant,
who gradually becomes aware of his
ancestral roots and of the limits of the
environment he intends to transcend.
Edward Hopper, Office at Night. 1940 In the sequence to this work, Of Time
and the River (1935), which covers
the years 1920-1925, Gant leaves his native South, entering the world of urbanity and fast
change in Boston, New York, Oxford, and France. When Wolfe died at a young age in
1938, several manuscripts were found which show his continued interest in covering the
modern world through the mind of a fictional hero who closely resembles himself. In The
Web and the Rock (1939), the protagonist George Webber searches for the "rock" of
strength while trying to escape the "web" of heredity and environment. Like Wolfe, Webber
travels to Germany. The continuation of this novel is You Can't Go Home Again (1940),
which deals with Webber's life after his return to an America suffering from the Depression.
Facing social and political problems abroad (Germany) and in America, Webber tries
unsuccessfully to return to his home town, describes his career as a novelist and, finally,
recognizes that "one cannot go home again", but that America could lead the way from
decadence to a new beginning. Thomas Wolfe's epic narratives of himself, of America and
life are very modern in their complex time scheme, incorporating the present, the past, and
the experience of both. They are equally complex in their presentation of documentary and
symbolic material.
28 The boundary or line, first surveyed by Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason (1763-67), which
later separated the Southern slave states from the free states. A related term is "Dixie", signi-
fying the Southern states of the US.
Like Wolfe, William Faulkner (1897-1962) turned a part of his regional Southern back-
ground into the locale for much of his fiction. The son of a rich and reputable Southern
family, Faulkner grew up in Oxford, Mississippi. He spent most of his life there, apart from
serving briefly in the British Royal Air Force in Canada in 1918, some time spent as a
reporter and bohemian in New Orleans and a brief visit to Europe in 1925. In New Orleans
Faulkner became interested in poetry and avant-garde writers, such as Eliot and Joyce, and
he met Sherwood Anderson, who helped him to publish his first novel. Faulkner was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. His novels achieve a unique combination of
realism, symbolism and modernist techniques. In Faulkner's fiction the settings, the char-
acters and their speech are distinctly Southern, but the suffering and the tragedy of his
heroes point to a more general human level.
His first two novels show him in search of a modern style and a modern definition of literary
art. Soldier's Pay (1926) is about a member of the "lost generation" returning from war, and
Mosquitoes (1927) is a satire on the artists of New Orleans. With Sartoris (1929, published
in its full text in 1973 as Flags in the Dust) he approached closer to his aim. It was for this
novel that he first created his fictional Yoknapatawpha County and its capital, Jefferson, and
introduced a complex group of characters he was to play with and develop through many of
his subsequent works.
Sartoris has as its hero the disillusioned Bayard Sartoris, yet another representative of the "lost
generation". Back from the war, he becomes estranged from his family in the process of ex-
periencing the isolation of the individual, the influence of the past on the present, and the decay of
the South's morality and traditions. Faulkner could use much of his own family background for
the story of the three generations of the Sartoris family that is told here. Bayard finally seeks a
manly death by testing an unsafe and new kind of aircraft. The novel contrasts the chivalric and
cultured manners of the Sartoris family with the commercial self-interest of the newly-rich
Snopeses.
After the completion of his great novels of the 1930s, Faulkner returned to the fictional ex-
ploration of the history of the Snopeses, a story of avarice, murder, and perversion, told in
the trilogy, The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959).
In the late 1920s and 1930s Faulkner produced several magnificent novels in which his use
of modernist techniques (stream-of-consciousness, collage presentation, time shifts) helped
to create some of the best fiction written in the twentieth century. The first of these works
was The Sound and the Fury (1929).
This novel presents the degenerate and perverted life of the Compson family, formerly genteel
Southern patricians, on their shrunken plantation near Jefferson, Mississippi. The first three
parts are written in the stream-of-consciousness technique, showing the events of three days as
reflected in the minds of three brothers: the idiot Benjy, who is 33 years old and incapable of
speech; the introverted, sensitive and neurotic Quentin, who is in love with his sister Caddy;
and the mean and dishonest Jason. The three interior monologues of the brothers are com-
plemented by an objective report from an outsider, the simple and goodhearted black servant
Dilsey Gibson, whose innocent character is set off against the perverted world of the whites.
The story, or rather the picture, that emerges after 106 fragments of recollection and mono-
logues provides a panorama of the South and records the progress of moral and human corrup-
tion among the Compsons. Quentin, a student at Harvard, is obsessed by his incestuous love for
his sister. When she is seduced by a stranger, he kills himself. Benjy is desolate when his sister
is forced to marry and leave home. He plays with her illegitimate daughter until she grows up
and runs away with a stranger. And Jason, proving the immorality of the Compsons, speculates
with the money Caddy sends for her child.
The title of the novel, taken from Shakespeare's Macbeth, alludes both to Benjy's monologue,
which is "a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", and to the nihilistic
mood of the whole work.
Joyce's influence on the technique in this novel is as remarkable as it is in As I Lay Dying
(1930), set among the poor whites. Fifteen characters, with 59 interior monologues, make
up the grotesque and tragi-comic tale of the transporting to Jefferson of the dead Addie
Bundren in her coffin. This turns out to be a ten-day trek ending in a fire and, for Darl, one
of the sons, in an asylum for the insane. With its numerous obstacles and bizarre events, the
trek proves a sort of symbolic procession through life, a comic and grotesque dance of death
and egoism around a coffin.
Faulkner's novels of the 1930s show a Southern world of hate, perversion, lust, and ob-
session. This kind of fiction came to be known as "Southern Gothic". Its typical exploration
of evil in historical, regional, and moral dimensions has occupied a number of Southern
novelists, notably Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery
O'Connor. An example of such "Gothic" fiction is Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931). He wrote
the book out of commercial interest, and its full text, with Horace Denbow as the central
character, only appeared in 1981. It is a crime novel of murder, rape, prostitution, and
lynching, and it found a sequel in Requiem for a Nun (1951) told partly in a dramatic form.
Faulkner's two great novels from the 30s, Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom!
(1936), again focus on human cruelty and perversion, but they also dramatize suffering and
love. Light in August has three interlocking sub-plots concerned with the search of Lena
Grove for the father of her child, with the tragic life and death of the mulatto and murderer
Joe Christmas, and with the intellectual and idealist Reverend Hightower, who destroys his
own life. With its mythical and biblical parallels, its complex treatment of racism and
Puritanism, and its modern narrative techniques, this is one of Faulkner's finest works. It is
matched by Absalom, Absalom!, also an extraordinary experimental novel which continues
the history of Yoknapatawpha in the historical and gothic story of Thomas Sutpen. Sutpen
is a poor white whose dreams of founding a rich and reputable family are destroyed by old
tragedies, personal guilt, and a cursed land. In this last of his modernist books Faulkner
interweaves history and psychological disorientation and perversion in an ultimately sym-
bolic panorama of sin and corruption in the South. Yoknapatawpha now had its dynasties
and genealogies, its histories and crimes and they occupied Faulkner in several subsequent
novels: The Unvanquished (1938), Intruder in the Dust (1948), the Snopes trilogy mentioned
above, his last picaresque novel, The Reivers (1962), and in numerous short stories.
Of Faulkner's numerous contemporaries and successors in the South only the most out-
standing novelists can be mentioned here. Robert Penn Warren (1905-89) has written a
superb novel, All the King's Men (1946). It deals with moral responsibility and political
power and is superior to his more recent fiction. Among women writers, Katherine Anne
Porter (1890-1980; see her novel Ship of Fools, 1962), Caroline Gordon (1895-1981),
Eudora Welty (1909-2001), and Flannery O'Connor (1925-64) are better known as short
story writers. Nevertheless, Welty's Delta Wedding (1946), Losing Battles (1970), and The
Optimist's Daughter (1972) provide sensitive portraits of families and individuals resisting
change in the South, while the Catholic O'Connor's Wise Blood (1952) deals with disbelief
and saving grace as God erupts into the lives of some Southerners. The most gifted novelist
among the white women writers was Carson McCullers (1917-67). The tragic world and
the neurotic characters of Faulkner also emerge in several of her works. The Heart Is a
Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The Member of the Wedding
(1946), and Clock Without Hands (1961) feature lonely and desperate adolescents, and
eccentric and grotesque adults, all suffering as much from the dark corners of their minds as
from their often frustrated attempts to establish human contacts. Harper Lee's (born 1926)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) also belongs to this genre. It is concerned with the sensational
trial of a black charged with raping a white woman, and is told from the point of view of the
young daughter of the white defense lawyer. Gordon and O'Connor were both Roman
Catholics, and their religious sensibility as well as their sense of tradition seem to be shared
to some extent by other Catholic authors, e.g., the Alabama-born Walker Percy (1916-90;
see The Moviegoer, 1961; The Last Gentleman, 1966; The Second Coming, 1980).
Many other writers continue to study the Southern consciousness as influenced by history
and environment. Prominent among these are Andrew Lytle (1902-95; see his historical
novel about de Soto, At the Moon's Inn, 1941; and A Name for Evil, 1947, a Southern ghost
story), Reynolds Price (born 1933), and the (belated) new star of Southern fiction, Cormac
McCarthy (born 1933). Price has produced sagas of rural Virginia and North Carolina
families in the early part of the twentieth century (see, for instance, The Surface of the
Earth, 1975; The Source of Light, 1981; and Blue Calhoun, 1992). A most reclusive writer
who, like Samuel Beckett, refuses to discuss his work in public, McCarthy grew up on the
East Coast before discovering the landscape of the border area between Texas and Mexico
that was to serve him as the background for his impressive trilogy. Since 1976 he has been
living in the El Paso region. Writing under the influence of European existentialists and
Faulkner's southern gothic as well as Joyce and Beckett, McCarthy initially covered social
outsiders on the brink of civilization in partly gothic novels such as The Orchard Keeper
(1965), Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God (1974). Among his early fiction, Suttree
(1979) ranks as one of the best works. An educated dropout loner who rejects most of the
so-called advantages of civilization, the main character in this novel, Suttree, reflects some
of McCarthy's personal concerns and experiences as he explores the area and the river
around Knoxville, Tennessee. While these books were not very well known, McCarthy shot to
international stardom (a fact he dislikes intensely) with All the Pretty Horses (1992), which
received the National Book Award and was a best-seller soon turned into a (dreadfully bad)
movie. In fact, this was the first part of McCarthy's formidable Border Trilogy, which contains
the sequels The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998). McCarthy hit upon his
favourite subject the archetypal exploration in a sort of postmodern Bildungsroman of the
violence on the Western American frontier as experienced by boys growing into men with
his first magnificent novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (1985).
A journey narrative set mostly in the violent Wild West in the mid-nineteenth century, the novel
follows the fortunes of an unnamed hero, a runaway boy (the kid), who joins a pirate army to
fight in Mexico, and later becomes a member of a gang of bounty killers of Indians. As the boy
grows into a man while witnessing wide-ranging pillaging, murder, and torture, McCarthy's novel
draws a picture of the USA in its fascinating, turbulent and murderous infancy. The boy's journey
with the mysterious Judge Holden and Glanton, the leader of the scalphunters committed to
random violence, becomes a quest for the meaning of life and of human suffering. Into this novel
of initiation and questing philosophically linked to existentialism (as propounded by Nietzsche
and Heidegger) McCarthy has subtly woven intertextual references to the Bible and the great
works of Western literature, from the medieval chivalric tales to Conrad's Heart of Darkness and
the sombre style of Faulkner's southern gothic fiction. Significantly, Blood Meridian draws on the
Western and (Southern) gothic literature while deconstructing both genres: it contains shockingly
realistic depictions of murderous and murdered Indians and cowboy scalphunters and highly
poetic descriptions of Western landscape (cf. the second part of the title). But it is not anthro-
pocentric, for the kid is annihilated by this violent surrounding and disappears like many other
victims in the book. The brutal, wild, fascinating, Western landscape proves the strongest and
most impressive force in the book. Aestheticising the potential beauty contained in terror and
horror (e.g., even the killing of a child or an animal), Blood Meridian is a remarkable literary
achievement celebrating language and verbal beauty over any kind of moral.
Like Blood Meridian, McCarthy's Border Trilogy will probably survive among the most
impressive fiction written in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Again advantaging the Western landscape over human beings, who appear insignificant when
compared to the expanse they traverse or inhabit, the trilogy provides post-westerns exploring
the mysteries of life as experienced by youths in direct, violent, confrontations with nature and
people who are sometimes not better than animals. Set initially in 1949, the first of the three
novels, All the Pretty Horses, follows the tracks of two boy-cowboys, John Grady Cole and
Lacey Rawlins, as their dangerous adventures in Mexico and the American southwest turn
them into disillusioned men. At the age of sixteen, Cole finds himself at the losing end of long
generations of ranchers. Too young to take care of the ranch but unwilling to give up his life-
style, he joins his friend Rawlins and crosses into Mexico, a land both beautiful and barren,
rugged and cruelly civilized. What looks like a comic adventure turns into a costly nightmare
as the adolescents witness murders and mayhem and, within months, age beyond any normal
reckoning. John Grady Cole must realize in the end that he is seeking a life that in midcentury
America, bisected by highways and marked by industrialization, no longer exists. Steeped in
wisdom, after suffering pain and loss, he represents a dying way of life.
The Crossing features another kid, Billy Parham, who travels on horseback from New Mexico
to the Sierra de la Madera in Mexico while dragging with him a trapped she-wolf he intends to
release in the mountains. As Billy has many memorable encounters with men and beasts, this is
another story of initiation and of recognition that provides several occasions for Joycean
epiphanies. The hero of this book is not really the tragic Billy but nature, the animals (including
the horses) and the landscape he faces at every step. Thus the novel provides a marvellous
passage allowing us a look into the consciousness of the she-wolf as she fights for her life. It
seems as if McCarthy had an almost clinical interest in showing how an innocent human being
is gradually crushed by the forces of circumstance and nature. All this is described in a
powerful and moving language that celebrates the awe, the horror, and the wonder a boy is
faced with on his painful road to adulthood on the beautiful, cruel Western frontier.
In the final part of the trilogy, Cities of the Plain (a title alluding to an episode involving the
sinful biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrha), McCarthy resumes the story of the two men
marked by the boyhood adventures of the previous novels and facing an uncertain future in a
rapidly changing country. The story starts out in 1952 with John Grady Cole and Billy Parham
nine years apart in age working as cowboys on a New Mexico ranch threatened by the
military from the north. To the south lie the Mexican cities of the plain (mentioned in the title),
and what they harbour (an epileptic girl with whom Cole falls in love and whom he wants to
save) brings suffering and, in the end, death to one of the cowboys. Only Parham survives, re-
duced to the existence of a homeless person sleeping under bridges. The novel conveys a magic
sense of place and presents the usual ingredients one expects from McCarthy a narrative
replete with character and event, and (as in the previous novels) long passages of conversations
in Spanish that are never translated. Ranchlife domesticity alternates with wildlife scenes and
cruel fights among men, and the terrible beauty of the book is occasionally relieved by wry
humour. One could easily mistake the trilogy as Western (cowboy) fiction, but beneath the
surface of Western locale and action McCarthy has constructed a subtle and well-hidden net-
work of literary allusions and philosophical implications which, upon closer analysis, refer to
Joyce, Kafka and Faulkner as well as to Beckett and Nietzsche. With this trilogy, McCarthy,
who has lived the life of his heroes (and paid for it with a broken marriage and a nomadic life
around the El Paso area), has produced fiction that deserves all the prizes awarded to it (the
National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award) and perhaps to come.
Other Southern novelists began as regionalists but have turned to more general subjects and
other settings in their more recent works. To these belong the Mississippi-born Elizabeth
Spencer (born 1921; see The Voice at the Back Door, 1956; The Snare, 1972; and The Salt
Line, 1984), Calder Willingham (1922-95), who was born in Georgia (see Natural Child,
1952; The Big Nickel, 1975), and Shirley Ann Grau (born 1929), a New Orleans novelist
(see The House in Coliseum Street, 1961; Keepers of the House, 1964; and Evidence of
Love, 1974), who are less read outside the United States; William Styron (1925-2006) and
Truman Capote (1924-84). The South still occupies an eminent place in Styron's Faulk-
nerian family tragedy Lie Down in Darkness (1951) and The Confessions of Nat Turner
(1967), a fictional account of a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, in which Styron treats
the race issue in what he terms a complex "meditation in history". Sophie's Choice (1979)
has a narrator from Virginia but is concerned with a Polish Catholic woman who survives
Auschwitz and later falls in love with an American Jew obsessed with the Holocaust.
Truman Capote was born in New Orleans and grew up on a farm in the South. He lived in
New York and in Europe and travelled widely. Like Tennessee Williams, he held many jobs
in his life and flaunted his Southern origin as well as his homosexuality. Capote was an un-
usually gifted writer of short stories and began his career with tales about the South. The
novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) is about a homosexually inclined boy trying to
reach maturity, while The Grass Harp (1951) presents some eccentric outsiders escaping
social restraint by living in a tree house. With his novella, Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), of
which a successful film was made, Capote left the South behind. This work is about Holly
Golightly (a telling name), a charming and amoral playgirl of New York. In Cold Blood
(1966) is Capote's experiment in the "nonfiction novel". It is an elaborately researched ac-
count of a murder in Kansas in 1959. Although this combination of documentary material
and fiction can hardly be called a novelty (Dos Passos tried it before Capote), it is a com-
pelling book and ushered in a brief wave of "nonfiction novels".
The past as legend, and the sense of a lost tradition, continue to fascinate such novelists as
Jesse Hill Ford (born 1928), who was born in Alabama and has lived in Tennessee where
some of his fiction is set (see The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones, 1965; and The Raider,
1975), and William Humphrey (1924-97), who comes from the east Texas area of the Red
River (see The Ordways, 1965; Hostages to Fortune, 1984; and No Resting Place, 1989).
Meanwhile, a younger generation of white and black (discussed below) women novelists
have produced fiction that is still firmly rooted in their native South (and hence regional)
but concerned with female and feminist issues. Ann Tyler's (born 1941) early novels, for
instance, are mostly set in small Southern towns (see A Slipping-Down Life, 1970) while her
Baltimore books take the family problems to urban settings as strong women face life's
difficulties (Dinner at the Homesick's Restaurant, 1982; Breathing Lessons, 1988), in-
cluding religious problems (Saint Maybe, 1991). Bobbie Ann Mason (born 1940), who
comes from Kentucky and is also a versatile short-story writer, has depicted the changing of
American life among ordinary Kentucky characters in such novels as In Country (1985),
about a young woman whose father was killed in Vietnam; Spence and Lila (1988), in
which the heroine faces breast cancer; and Feather Crowns (1992), set in nineteenth-century
Kentucky and exploring the trials of a woman who gives birth to quintuplets. Jayne Anne
Phillips (born 1952), also a gifted writer of shorter fiction, situates her works in her native
West Virginia. Thus Machine Dreams (1984) provides a panorama of the Hampson family
in West Virginia from the 1930s to the Vietnam war as told from each member's point of
view; Shelter (1994), her second novel, is set in a girls' summer camp in West Virginia and
yields insights via interior monologues into the minds of two sisters, a boy, and an
enigmatic preacher. Phillips's third novel, MotherKind (2000), features a thirty-year old
pregnant woman trying to come to terms with her roles as mother and stepmother and her
mother's slow death by cancer.
The post-war American novel is rich in genres, movements, and names. It seems appropriate
to divide the huge number of novelists into four recognizable movements: the traditional
writers in the realistic line, including novelists of
manners, ethnic writers, such as Afro-Americans,
Jews, and native Americans; the Beats and experi-
mentalists or metafictionists, the increasingly im-
portant women authors with a distinct feminist view-
point connected with what has been termed new real-
ism or minimalism, and the diversification of fiction
beginning in the late 1980s (yuppie fiction, punk and
cyberpunk, the appropriation of science fiction mod-
els, and many others). The strain of realism in Amer-
ican fiction is most obvious in the war novels that
appeared in the 1940s and 1950s. Whereas World
War I generated works of great technical experiment,
World War II produced mainly realistic or starkly
naturalistic fiction reflecting the experience of young
Americans on the European and Pacific battlefields.
Remarkable examples are John Hersey's (1914-93)
A Bell for Adano (1944) and The War Lover (1959),
Gore Vidal's (born 1925) Williwaw (1946), Irwin
Shaw's (1913-84) The Young Lions (1948), which
Mark Rothko, Baptismal Scene.
portrays the fortunes of two American soldiers and a
1945 Nazi, James Gould Cozzens's (1903-78) Guard of
Honor (1948), contrasting human and military values
on an air force base, and Norman Mailer's (1923-2007) The Naked and the Dead (1948),
which employs modernist techniques and draws the picture of an American microcosmic
male society on a South Pacific island held by the Japanese. There are also some explicitly
realistic novels brimming with violence: James Jones's (1921-77) From Here to Eternity
(1951) and Herman Wouk's (born 1915) The Caine Mutiny (1951). Exceptional novelists,
such as John Hawkes (1925-98; see The Cannibal, 1949) and Joseph Heller (1923-99; see
Catch-22, 1961), have covered grotesque and satirical aspects of the war experience. Among
the younger realists, Robert Stone (born 1937) has dealt with the Vietnam war in Dog
Soldiers (1974), a bitter tale of a morally corrupt American journalist who meets with de-
structiveness and egoism everywhere (see also Stone's A Hall of Mirrors, 1967, and A Flag
for Sunrise, 1981, both concerned with individual and national corruption, and with the
violence connected with contemporary Jerusalem in Damascus Gate, 1998). Realism also
marks the works of James Dickey (1923-97), who was also a poet, Hubert Selby (1928-
2004), and Paul Theroux (born 1941). Dickey's Deliverance (1970) tells of four men be-
sieged by hillbillies in the backwoods of Georgia and became internationally known in its
film version. Selby produced a vivid picture of corruption and violence in urban life with
Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and explored sadistic and sexual fantasies in The Room (1971)
and The Demon (1976). Theroux was born in Massachusetts but has spent most of his life
in Africa, Eastern countries, and in Europe. Theroux is also one of the best contemporary
travel writers who has covered Asia and the Americas in his non-fiction works. His best
fiction is concerned with Westerners caught in alien cultures, as in Jungle Lovers (1971)
and Saint Jack (1973) or faced with alien nature, as in The Mosquito Coast (1982), which is
about a neurotic and self-sufficient Yankee engineer trying to build up a technical American
nightmare in the Honduran jungle, and O-Zone (1986), about New Yorkers in the Ozarks.
Other remarkable novels by Theroux include My Secret History (1989), a confessional first-
person narrative about the sexual exploits of a professional traveller; Chicago Loop (1991),
which traces the life of a psychopathic married businessman who kills the woman he finds
through a lonely hearts ad; and Millroy the Magician (1993), about an evangelical magician
of baffling talents. Theroux returned to his familiar turf of exotic locations in Kowloon Tong
(1997), which prefigures the end of colonial rule in Hong Kong (returned to China in 1998)
in a mystery plot set in the British enclave; and Hotel Honolulu (2001), the story of a former
writer observing his bizarre guests as a hotel manager in Hawaii.
Another group of writers have distinguished themselves in the post-war novel of manners,
which deals with the behaviour of the upper middle class and the urban upper class. The
outstanding practitioners in this genre are, among older writers, John P. Marquand (1893-
1960; see his Point of No Return, 1949; Melville Goodwin, USA, 1952; and Women and
Thomas Harrow, 1958), Louis Auchincloss (1917-2010; see The Great World and Timothy
Colt, 1956; A World of Profit, 1968; The Dark Lady, 1977; Watchfires, 1982; The Lady of
Situations, 1990; and Manhattan Monologues, 2002), the better known John Cheever
(1912-82) and J(erome) D(avid) Salinger (1919-2010), and, among the younger novelists,
John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, John Kennedy Toole, and J. P. Donleavy. Cheever, who
also wrote many short stories, dealt with an affluent Massachusetts family in The Wapshot
Chronicle (1957) and The Wapshot Scandal (1964), and satirized another suburban family
in Bullet Park (1969). Cheever's last two works are among his best fiction: Falconer (1977)
is largely told in monologues and is concerned with the imprisonment of an ex-professor for
the murder of his brother, while Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982) treats of the character
of an aging man rejuvenated by a romance and his ecological work to save the landscape of
his youth. J. D. Salinger shares with Cheever a preference for the short story. His The
Catcher in the Rye (1951) remains his most important work and proved an influential novel
for the generation maturing in the 1950s.
Like the best of American fiction (Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick), Salinger's novel has a first-
person narrator, the sixteen-year old Holden Caulfield, a lonely, slightly neurotic and sensitive
boy from a rich family. Apparently recovering from
a serious breakdown after being expelled from prep
school, Holden addresses the reader as if he/she
were a listening friend and tells his brief but com-
pelling story about the expulsion and his picaresque
adventures during two days in New York.
A novel of initiation, The Catcher in the Rye ap-
pealed to the readers of the 1950s because of the
questions Holden asked and because of his rejection
of what he considers the false world of the adults.
Today, one is more impressed by Salinger's excel-
lent ear for the jargon and speech of adolescents in
the 1950s. Holden's imprecise and highly emotional
slang proves a good means for Salinger's attempt to
portray the painful transition of a youth from inno-
cence to adult experience.
Like Cheever, Richard Yates (1926-92) gave
us fictional analyses of American middle-class
life, but in a style that is reminiscent of the na-
turalism of Gustave Flaubert in the novel and of
the hyperrealism of Edward Hopper in art.
Yates's work has a bitter, naturalistic dimension
Duane Hanson, Couple With in its unadorned depiction of the hopelessness
Shopping Bags. 1976 of life told in a prose that is both moving and
sober. One of his important novels, Revolution-
ary Road (1961), for example, opens with a masterful description of the failure of a play
staged with laymen by one of the major characters this becomes a motif foreshadowing
the tragic developments of the plot. The desperation ruling the world of Yates's fiction (he
was also a gifted short-story writer) and mocking every sort of American dream may have
been one of the reasons why he was recognized rather late as an important writer; in his
lifetime, none of his stories was accepted by The New Yorker.
John Updike (1932-2009) made his debut with short stories and has tried a variety of fic-
tional techniques in his novels. He is most convincing as a novelist when he describes
ordinary middle-class life, as in his Rabbit novels. His more unusual works include The
Poorhouse Fair (1959), a parable about the individual and the welfare state; The Centaur
(1963), which links the lives of an American teenager and his father to Greek mythology;
The Coup (1979), a burlesque view of an African dictator and former student in America
now ousted by his supporters. Updike is an extremely versatile writer capable of slipping
into a variety of masks in order to unmask the hang-ups and oddities of contemporary middle-
class Americans. Thus he created a neurotic comic alter ego with the moderately successful
Jewish novelist Henry Bech. Bech appears in a series of interrelated stories covering his
career from the 1970s to the end of the twentieth century in Bech: A Book (1970); Bech is
Back (1982); and Bech at Bay (1998). Sub-titled "a quasi-novel", the latter gains a surrealistic
dimension as we find the elderly writer in various roles as visitor to Chechoslovakia, as the
accused in a criminal trial in California, and the septuagenarian father of a baby and winner
of the Nobel Prize in Sweden.
Most of Updike's novels also show a sophisticated engagement with novelistic genres and
classical American and European literary texts. Thus he emulated and subverted magic
realism and postmodern fantasy in The Witches of Eastwick (1984; made into a movie
starring Jack Nicholson as Satan), about the erotic adventures with Satan of three mischiev-
ous New England divorcees. Hawthorne's classical novel The Scarlet Letter served Updike
as an intertext in three of his novels A Month of Sundays (1975) and Roger's Version
(1986), both novels about adulterous clergymen; and S. (1988). The latter is, on one level, a
letter novel featuring a runaway New England dentist's wife who joins and tricks a pseudo-
Hindu religious community in Arizona. An ironic novelistic comment on the religious re-
vival sweeping America in the 1980s, S. is, on a second level, also an intertextual play with
Hawthorne's famous novel. Similarly, Updike's Brazil (1994) transposes the legend of
Tristan and Iseult to contemporary Brazil, while Gertrude and Claudius (2000), his nine-
teenth novel, presents Hamlet's tragic story from the angle of his much maligned mother. He
has also tried his hand at the dystopian novel with Toward the End of Time (1997), set in
Massachusetts in 2020 after a nuclear war between the USA and China that has thinned the
population and brought social chaos. The story is related by a retired investment counselor
negotiating his way between his domineering wife and gangs of racketeers and criminals
ruling the country. Updike will probably go down in literary history as the most talented
chronicler of the American middle class. In a dazzling style, he records his characters'
waning religious beliefs, their experience of a hedonistic America, and their preoccupation
with sex and the fear of approaching death. His novels also catch the spirit of the decades in
which they were written. Thus Couples (1968), a bestseller that shocked many with its ex-
plicit sex scenes, covers the years of President Kennedy's administration. Sex as a means to
achieve happiness, to escape the boredom of life, and to evade the idea of death, is also
central to Marry Me (1976), thematically related to Couples and imitating the literary
fashion of the time with its three different endings. Updike has also tackled historical sub-
jects in Memories of the Ford Administration (1992), in which a history professor reports
about his biography of President Buchanan and the details of his own (the narrator's) love
life, and In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), a quasi-historical novel about God's relation to
four generations of an American family between 1910 and 1990, a work that is again
marked by its intertextual play with Old Testament stories. Updike's best achievement as a
novelist is his tetralogy concerned with the life and thoughts of the former high-school
basketball champion Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom.
Magnificently rendering the political, economic, and moral anxieties of four decades as seen by
an ordinary and frustrated American, Updike has written a detailed and vastly entertaining
fictional history of modern middle-class America. Rabbit Run (1960) covers the early marital
difficulties and frustrations of the young Harry, who still thrives on his fame as a highschool
basketball star. Rabbit Redux (1971) picks up the story ten years later, as Harry temporarily
loses his wife to a Greek car salesman, befriends two radicals, and gets a job in his father-in-
law's car business. Rabbit Is Rich (1981) shows the Angstroms another ten years later. Now
comfortably rich, "Rabbit" runs his father-in-law's business and enjoys the social and superficial
atmosphere of the local country club. He meets his former lover, Ruth, has paternal problems
with his son Nelson, and is increasingly plagued with visions of death. Even wild sex orgies
cannot provide relief from this fear. Rabbit's problems with his son are paralleled with President
Carter's Iranian hostage crisis in a marvellous novel that catches many facets of American life as
Updike integrates radio and TV programmes, pop culture, newspaper headlines, and political
speeches. Rabbit at Rest (1990) reflects events of the 1980s (e.g., the Lockerbie catastrophe and
the Challenger accident) as filtered through Rabbit's American consciousness that allows
Updike comments on the politics and the social fabric of what often appears like an apocalyptic
America. In this final novel of the tetralogy, Rabbit drives down to his retirement seat in Florida
while musing on his past sexual adventures and the meaning of his life; he dies in a basketball
game with some bewildered youngsters, leaving behind his wife Janice, his son Nelson, now a
social aid worker and separated from his wife, and a daughter, Annabelle, by his former lover
Ruth. Annabelle and Nelson find a true understanding of siblings in Rabbit Remembered (2000), a
novella-length sequel to the Rabbit series (published in a short-story collection, Licks of Love)
in which Janice, now married to Ronnie Harrison, and other survivors entertain Rabbit's
memory while pursuing their own lives in the fictional Brewer, Pennsylvania, over the edge of
the millennium. Following an average American from youth to death during his search for the
American dream, a quest also motivated by sexual desire and metaphysical longing, Updike has
produced a prodigious literary work that supercedes its predecessor, Sinclair Lewis's Babbit
(1922) just one of many intertexts to which the Rabbit novels refer in many respects. It will
remain one of the great literary achievements of postmodern American fiction.
In comparison with Updike's oeuvre, the novels and short stories of the very productive
Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938) suffer from an excess of violence, horror, and melodrama.
Her works include A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Wonderland (1971), The Assassins
(1975), Bellefleur (1980), and A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982). Oates has peopled her novels
with demonic and obsessed characters. They are prevented from communicating by a violent
Amercian society that, in turn, generates bloodshed. In the 1980s, Oates began to focus on
the lives of women in contemporary America; the new feminine gothic novels that emerged
from this literary preoccupation feature female (adolescent) protagonists also frustrated by
the grotesque culture of the United States and caught up in their personal passions, a
mixture that may lead into convulsive violence. Remarkable among these works are Solstice
(1985), Marya: A Life (1986), Black Water (1992), inspired by one of the sexual scandals of
the Kennedy family; and Foxfire (1993), which features an outlaw band of girl warriors in
upstate New York.
Both John Kennedy Toole (1937-69) and J(ames) P(atrick) Donleavy (born 1926) are
representatives of the picaresque mode of the novel of manners. Toole killed himself before
his first and only novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) was published and recognized as a
masterpiece. Its hero is Ignatius J. Reilly, a self-educated and self-defined young genius
who intends to reform the twentieth century but refuses to accept work and responsibility.
Set in the raffish French quarter of New Orleans, the novel justly won a Pulitzer Prize for its
thoughtful critique of the shallowness of modern American life. Ignatius J. Reilly resembles
Donleavy's heroes in their refusal to fit into the social fabric. Sebastian Dangerfield, an
expatriate ex-soldier in Dublin and the dishonest American hero of The Ginger Man (1955),
became the prototype for a series of similar selfish and roguish characters in Donleavy's A
Singular Man (1963), The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B. (1968), A Fairy Tale of New
York (1973), which is a satire on contemporary America, and The Destinies of Darcy
Dancer, Gentleman (1977). Unlike the surrealistic The Onion Eaters (1971), these novels
and his latest works (see Leila, 1983, further adventures of Darcy Dancer; and Wrong
Information is Being Given Out at Princeton, 1998, another "fairy tale of New York") are
too closely modelled on his Ginger Man and draw on his personal experience in America as
well as England and Ireland, where he has lived since he renounced his American citizen-
ship in 1967.
The novel of manners has also enjoyed a huge and lasting success in the more popular
novels of Sloan Wilson (1920-2003; see The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, 1955) and
Alison Lurie (born 1926; see Love and Friendship, 1962; and The War Between the Tates,
1974).
In the decades between 1960 and 1990, American fiction has seen not only the rise of the
Beat movement and (partly indebted to it) the emergence of experimental, self-reflective
novels (metafiction) in avant-garde writing, but also a great diversification. This includes
the new realism (or minimalism), feminist and ethnic fiction, and the increasing importance of
popular genres e.g., science fiction, punk and cyberpunk (discussed in a separate chapter
below) as younger writers attempted to find new models of representation while appro-
priating recent developments in other media. Inspired by Whitman, Thoreau, and Eastern
philosophy, but also by the early work of Henry Miller, the Beats expressed in poetry and
fiction an individualist view of life that celebrated, intensely and ecstatically, music, sex,
alcohol, and "fun". The members (mostly poets and novelists from New York City and San
Francisco) rebelled against established social values, the term "beat" expressing both ex-
haustion or disgust (in the sense of being beaten) and beatification to be found in an alter-
native world of blissful illumination partly induced by drugs and free of commercial exploi-
tation. William Burroughs (1914-97) is the patron of the Beats. With his Junkie (1953) and
The Naked Lunch (Paris, 1959; New York, 1962), partly autobiographical accounts of an
addict's life and nightmares containing scenes of sadism and perversion, he opened the way
for the Beat writers. Burroughs found his own territory in fiction, using the surrealist tech-
nique of cinematic cuts in further studies of apocalyptic hallucinations laced with social
criticism of bourgeois America (see The Soft Machine, 1961; Nova Express, 1964; The Wild
Boys, 1971; Exterminator!, 1973; the quasi-autobiographical Port of Saints, 1980; and the
utopian Cities of the Red Night, 1981). The leader of the Beats in fiction was the Canadian
Jack Kerouac (1922-69). Trying to catch the "flow of the mind", he wrote what he termed
"spontaneous prose" that gave expression to anarchic, mystical, and ecstatic urges. On the
Road (1957) remains his best novel. It is a description of picaresque scenes involving Beat
people travelling around America in search of their own American dream. Less known Beat
novelists are Chandler Brossard (1922-93; see Who Walks in Darkness, 1952) and John
Clellon Holmes (1926-88; see The Horn, 1958).
Like Kerouac, Ken Kesey (1935-2001) toured the USA in the 1960s on a trip with a bus-
load of "merry pranksters". Kesey's fine novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962),
was made into an excellent movie starring Jack Nicholson.
It catches some of the hippie culture of the 1960s in the story of the lazy and funny Randle
McMurphy, who finds himself locked up in a mental ward. He challenges the sadistic control
of the head nurse in a symbolic rebellion against the "system". The narrator is an Indian chief
who, like McMurphy, pretends to be insane. When McMurphy is almost reduced to idiocy by
electric shock treatment and a lobotomy, Chief Bromden smothers him out of pity and makes
his escape. With the image of the asylum, the novel provides a powerful metaphor for a totally
commercialized, inhuman, America in which there is no freedom. The prison mentality of post-
capitalist America leaves no room for individuals. Those who want to live an independent life
(hippies and Indians) are silenced, killed or at best driven away.
The Beat tone of his first novel also echoes in Kesey's Sometime a Great Notion (1964), a
more complicated Faulkner-inspired tale about the feud of two brothers in an Oregon
lumber town. Serving as a mediator between the Beat culture of the 1950s and the hippie
movement that started in the 60s, Kesey then abandoned the novel for a long stretch of time.
He returned to it in 1992 with Sailor Song, which is set in an Alaskan village peopled by
Aleuts and the descendants of former prospectors who must cope with the arrival of a
Hollywood movie company filming a classic children's book.
Various terms have been applied to the experimental novels that began to appear in the
1960s. They make use of absurd and surrealist as well as of self-reflective techniques while
questioning the values of modern America and the meaning of history and literary forms.
Like the British experimentalist authors in the same period, some American writers have
reacted to an international influence reaching back to the age of Enlightenment: the works
of Laurence Sterne, the Marquis de Sade, William Blake, the Comte de Lautramont, Alfred
Jarry, Gertrude Stein, the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake, Samuel Beckett, the French
nouveau roman, Latin American authors such as Borges and Mrquez29, and a unique Rus-
sian emigrant, Vladimir Nabokov. Other writers have given literary expression to an Amer-
ican counter-culture fed by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, and an awareness of
the social and political violence done to humanity. Such expressions as postmodernism,
metafiction and others attempt to describe the novels of a number of authors who have been
as concerned with the impact of war and nihilism on modern man as with the meaning and
form of their own writing. Names connected with this kind of fiction are Nabokov, Hawkes,
Barthelme, Brautigan, Gass, Heller, Vonnegut, Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, Vidal, Irving, and
Purdy, and such younger authors as Sukenick, Abish, Federman, and Katz. John Barth
(born 1930), surely one of the most influential postmodernists, provided two analyses of the
situation in which novelists found themselves in the 1960s. Surveying the entire ex-
perimental field in 1967 in an essay entitled "The Literature of Exhaustion", Barth argued
that the inventive composition of literary forms had come to an end, not least because
writers such as Jorge Luis Borges had apparently done everything imaginable in fiction. All
that was left to the younger novelists, thus Barth's thesis, was parodic imitation and satirical
playing with previous texts and forms. Barth demonstrated his thesis to some extent in The
Sot-Weed Factor (1960), discussed below. If this seemed like a rather limited and negative
attitude, Barth pointed out the new possibilities for the experimental novel in a second es-
say, "The Literature of Replenishment" (1980). He now saw the very postmodernist attempt
to play with established fictional forms and story-telling as the first step in a creative
process of its own; i.e., the ironic treatment by the experimentalists of narrative, character,
and other established elements of fiction was in itself a replenishment of the older forms.
Writers who, according to Barth, had achieved this new aim were Gabriel Garcia Mrquez
and Italo Calvino. Whether or not Barth was right with his thesis and the analysis of his own
work, one can say in retrospect that the postmodernist, experimental, writers rejected the
meaningful realism in American fiction and considered the novel as experimental ground
for the articulation of formal and epistemological questions. Using the collage and montage
techniques already familiar to the modernists, the American metafictionalists were espe-
29 Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian writer and best known for his short stories (col-
lected in Historia universal de la infamia, 1935; Ficciones, 1945; and El Aleph, 1949)
portraying the fantastic in a realistic manner (magic realism). See the translations of some of his
stories in Labyrinths (1962) and Dr Brodie's Report (1971).
Gabriel Garcia Mrquez (born 1928), Colombian novelist. Like Borges, he writes fiction in the
tradition that has been termed "magic realism", treating supernatural and extraordinary events
in a sober and realistic style (A Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967; The Autumn of the Patriarch,
1975). He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982.
cially fond of pastiche, which the theorist Fredric Jameson considers a typical hallmark of
postmodernism as such. In this technique, which was also used by artists (see, for instance,
Andy Warhol's literal "reproductions" of cultural icons such as Elvis Presley or Marilyn
Monroe), texts and pictures from different cultural areas and strata and historical periods are
juxtaposed, with the result that "the line between high art and commercial forms seems in-
creasingly difficult to draw".30 This has produced a rich harvest in that sense Barth's use of
"replenishment" (which he put to use in Letters, 1979, discussed below) is fully justified.
Generally, then, avant-garde metafiction is marked by its erosion of the distinction between
high and low culture, by its preference for pastiche and parody (but without the assumption
of previous fiction that there is something real out there), and the rejection that meaning
resides in the subject and in language. A rather important feature of the postmodernist novel
is the attempt to dissolve the boundaries among the various arts and media as the new fiction
integrates painting, music, and other arts.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), a pioneer and forefather of the postmodernist novel, was
among the most significant experimentalists of the 1950s. He was the son of a distinguished
Russian family and wrote his early novels in Russian and German in several European cities
before moving to the United States in 1940. Nabokov's sources were Gogol31 and European
modernism. As a professor at Cornell, he influenced a number of younger writers, including
Thomas Pynchon. Nabokov's Lolita (Paris, 1955; USA, 1958) caused a scandal and has
since been turned into a film with the late James Mason starring as Humbert Humbert.
Already embodying many traits of postmodern fiction, Lolita is a farcical and satirical novel on
the erotic obsession of a middle-aged European man of letters, Humbert Humbert, with the
twelve-year-old "nymphet" Lolita. In what became almost a hallmark of experimental fiction,
the novel reflects on the process of narration and logical sequence as such as the protagonist,
awaiting trial for murder in the psychiatric ward of a prison, tells his life story mainly con-
cerned with his passion for young girls (nymphets). This breaking of what was then still a
taboo (and proved still problematical when a new Lolita movie was made in the 1990s) is also a
feature of the new novels that were to tackle terra incognita. Humbert considers murdering
Lolita's mother, whom he married to be near his girl-love, but when she is killed by accident he
takes Lolita on a cross-country trip while planning to seduce her. One of the lessons Humbert
has to learn is that his lover is more experienced in sexual matters than he thinks. Humbert
loses Lolita and finds her again at 17, when she confesses to him that during her days with him
she had loved a famous playwright. The infuriated Humbert murders his rival and is jailed, but
dies of a heart attack before the trial. Apart from his satirical treatment of a taboo, the male
obsession with adolescent girls, and numerous ironical attacks on the American way of life,
both inside and outside academe, Nabokov demonstrated with Lolita the possibilities of ex-
perimental fiction it takes neither the story nor the narrator seriously; and it is precisely this
experimenting with the techniques of fiction (narrative voice, plotting, characterization) which
undercuts the potential pornographic dimension of the book.
Some of Nabokov's later works are translations of novels that were first written in Russian.
They include Pnin (1957), about the comic experiences of an exiled Russian professor at an
American college, Pale Fire (1962), Ada or Ardor (1969), which deals satirically with a
30 Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society", in Hal Foster, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic.
Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983): 114.
31 Nikolai V. Gogol (1809-52), Russian writer and dramatist. A satirist, he is especially known for
the short stories he wrote in St. Petersburg and which are set in a mad city where everything is
strange, and for the comic epic Dead Souls (1842), of which he burned the second part.
man's love for his sister, Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins (1974).
Nabokovs amoralism, his comic games with literary forms, his preference for the double
meaning, and his subversion of reality, are related to the grotesque humour and the absurd
that emerged in American fiction in the 1960s.
Aspects of surrealism and the grotesque are essential elements in the novels of John
Hawkes (1925-98), Donald Barthelme (1931-89), and Richard Brautigan (1935-84). A
professor of English at Brown University, Hawkes confessed his debt to the American
gothic fiction of Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, and O'Connor and to European surrealism. After
his war novel The Cannibal (1949), a hallucinatory story of genocide and murder in Ger-
many in 1914 and 1945, Hawkes developed his peculiar style of imaginative discovery in a
series of novels that are less important for their plot and stress aesthetic impression and
experience and artistic effect (see The Lime Twig, 1961; Second Skin, 1964; The Blood
Oranges, 1971; Death, Sleep and the Traveler, 1974; Travesty, 1976; and The Passion
Artist, 1980). This is most obvious in his novel Virginie (1982), which probes the effect of
describing bizarre sexual scenes within the larger plot concerning a girl who has lived two
previous lives in France, one in the eighteenth century and the other around 1945. Hawkes's
Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade (1985) traces the picaresque travels in Alaska of the
reckless John Deauville as seen through the eyes of his daughter Sunny. Hawkes's concern
with aesthetic experience under the impact of psychic forces (the sexual drive, violence, the
death drive) is well rendered in Whistlejacket (1988), which interweaves the obsession of the
eighteenth-century horse painter George Stubbs (who spent entire nights dissecting horses
to learn about their muscles) with that of a gifted but disturbed photographer witnessing adul-
tery and murder. Hawkes continued his surrealist exploration and undermining of novelistic
genres in studies of obsessed consciousnesses. Thus Sweet William (1993) presents the auto-
biography of a horse; The Frog (1996) mingles fable, children's story and erotic adventures;
and his final work, An Irish Eye (1997), again blends genres and traditions (fairy tales,
farces, the letter novel) in a story narrated by Dervla O'Shannon, an Irish orphan planning
her escape with a war-hero who could be her grandfather.
Donald Barthelme has written short stories and two grotesque anti-novels, Snow White
(1967) and The Dead Father (1975). They suggest that both reading and our imagination are
fiction and thus irrational. Barthelme destroys his own plot, characters, and language, creat-
ing a new reality of absurd disorder. A new, if nave, reality was also the aim of Richard
Brautigan. He came out of the Beat movement and wrote a substantial number of short
novels parodying older textual patterns while trying to establish a modern text. Thus Trout
Fishing in America (1967) makes fun of the fishing tale, The Hawkline Monster (1974) is a
gothic "Western", and Dreaming of Babylon (1977) a "detective story". Brautigan made fun
of ideologies and political systems in A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) and
implicitly criticized America in In Watermelon Sugar (1968). William H. Gass (born 1924), a
former professor of philosophy, has been preoccupied with the relation between language
and reality, essentially asserting in his work that reality must be established with words (see
Omensetter's Luck, 1966). Gass's Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife (1970) is an "essay-novel-
la" that has now reached the status of a postmodernist classic. The book equates the text of
the novella to the body of Babs Masters, a striptease dancer who is disappointed with her
inattentive husband/reader and entices an illicit new lover with an exuberant display of the
physical charms of language. Like the predecessors he admires (Laurence Sterne and Lewis
Carroll), Gass uses various visual devices (photographs, comic strip balloons, different type
settings) to drive home his message about the beauty of Babs Masters's body i.e., language
itself. Gass's magnum opus is The Tunnel (1995).
A truly postmodernist novel that is as demanding as the best fiction of Thomas Pynchon, it is
multi-faceted on several levels. The plot, for example, foregrounds the act of fiction writing
(and writing as such) in the story of William Frederick Kohler, a history professor at a mid-
western university who has just completed his life's work, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's
Germany. The only thing that is missing is an introduction. When Kohler sits down to do this
job, the result is an entirely other book his own story. Full of lies and disguises, gaps, and
repetitions, and often chaotic, his introduction is so personal that he hides it from his wife.
Simultaneously, he starts digging a tunnel out from the cellar of his house, a metaphorical
action that mirrors Kohler's probing of his life, his feelings, and his view of history. After
reading a short stretch, the reader realizes that many of the characters in the book might be
fictions of Kohler's mind; one finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality
(related in fiction) and fiction described or seen as reality by the professor of history. The book
is additionally fascinating through Gass's use of intermediality: Music enters the novel as it
were in that it has twelve sections relating to Schnberg's chromatic scale; art takes its share in
black and white or coloured images (comics, pennants et al.); and various kinds of typography
draw one's attention to the fact that reality is also rendered through the old Gutenbergian art of
printing. A gigantic novel that cost Gass twenty-six years of his life, The Tunnel presents the
construction of a complex consciousness (Kohler's) which is supposed to be unique, yet whose
inner character also stands for the author, for the intellectual, on the one hand, and every-
woman, on the other. As an anti-novel it defies all the ordinary methods of narration, plotting,
and character; it is Kohler's own, chaotic, history challenging the objective work he has pre-
sumably written.
Gass has continued his experimental probing of the possibilities of postmodernist fiction in
four interconnected novellas entitled Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (1998). Also
containing elements from neighbouring arts, these are non-narrative works on mind, matter,
God, and the conflict between good and evil.
Joseph Heller (1923-99) and Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) have made the absurdity and the
surrealistic humour of their fiction subservient to social criticism. Although Heller is an
American Jew, his fiction is better understood when evaluated in the American mainstream
rather than in a Jewish-American ethnic tradition. Thus the grotesque absurdity of Heller's
war novel, Catch-22 (1961), goes back to Melville's The Confidence-Man and the surrealism
of Nathanael West. Heller's Something Happened (1974) is a more pessimistic work about a
business executive disgusted with his job and his life; but Good as Gold (1979) returns to
the farcical vein in a comical treatment of Jewish family life and American politics (espe-
cially the shenanigans of Henry Kissinger). It is also a parody of the Jewish-American novel
Heller had been expected to write by critics who stressed his "Jewishness". In God Knows
(1984), a delightful and comic "autobiography" of King David, Heller presents the warrior
king of Israel, husband of Bathsheba, and father of Solomon in a human perspective. After a
brief novelistic excursion into the world of art and painting in the usual surrealist manner
(see Picture This, 1988, about Rembrandt's painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of
Homer), Heller returned to the heroes of Catch-22 in the sequel Closing Time (1994). This
is again a truly postmodernist novel in that Heller is not only self-referential survivors like
Yossarian from the first novel now live in Manhattan while awaiting death and those one
believed dead are resurrected but also mocks fellow writers like Kurt Vonnegut. The
characters even comment on the film version of Catch-22, expressing their (and presumably
Heller's) dislike of the ending.
Heller's view of man as a victim of history, and his assault on the historical and the real,
relate his fiction to that of Vonnegut, Berger, and Coover. Kurt Vonnegut is one of Amer-
ica's most popular authors. In his case, this is quite an achievement, for he has managed to
combine the entertaining with the artistic and the critical without striking his readers as
highbrow. Vonnegut began in a moralistic strain with a dystopian novel, Player Piano
(1952), written in the vein of Orwell and Huxley. But he soon developed a literary cover for
his experimental methods and social criticism by drawing on science fiction and the pulp
novel. In such books as The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle
(1963), and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), Vonnegut used science fiction concepts
(apocalyptic situations, time relativity, sentimentalism) which he then undermined in satirical
and compassionate studies of mankind and American society. Vonnegut's tragicomic view of
America is that of a country suffering from waste, decay and mindlessness. One of his most
studied books is Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Inspired by his own experience of the bombing
of Dresden, this novel plays with the displacement of the real horror of history by fantasy as
the hero, who has survived the "slaughterhouse" of the war, is taken to the planet Tralfa-
madore. It is fiction and imagination, not real history, that render life humane, and Vonne-
gut's novels (see Breakfast of Champions, 1973; Slapstick, 1976; Jailbird, 1979; and Dead-
eye Dick, 1982) continue to confront representative, albeit eccentric, characters (several of
them, such as Kilgore Trout, turn up in different novels and time periods) with a junked and
mad America. His novel Galpagos (1985) seems to suggest that man is too mad to be saved
from his own destruction and that animals know better how to lead a happy life. Vonnegut's
seemingly nave literary forms appeal to many readers; but these forms have sophisticated
functions and are employed to make his bitter message more palatable. This is the case in
Bluebeard (1987), in which a minor character from a previous novel is employed to treat the
usual Vonnegut themes, and in Timequake (1997),
which explores what happens to the author when,
in 2001, a "timequake" hits the earth and forces
everybody to relive the last 10 years of their lives
exactly as they had before but without free will.
Thomas Berger (born 1924) has covered the
period from 1945 to the late 1970s in his four nov-
els about the former GI Carlo Reinhart: Crazy in
Berlin (1958), Reinhart in Love (1961), Vital Parts
(1970), and Reinhart's Women (1981). They play
with historical myths, a method Berger also suc-
cessfully applied to the Western in Little Big Man
(1964), which became very well known in its film
version with Dustin Hoffman. This novel parodies
the myths and sagas of the Old West. Other
popular forms Berger has exploited to show that
myths no longer work in modern America include
the detective novel Who Is Teddy Villanova?
(1977), the Depression novel Sneaky People
(1975), and the science fiction novel Regiment of
Women (1973). After a witty spy novel set in
The real Little Big Man. eastern Europe (Nowhere, 1985) and further, partly
Photo from the U.S. Signal Corps surrealistic, satires of American middle-class life
(Being Invisible, 1987; The Houseguest, 1988; and Changing the Past, 1990), Berger returned
to his favourite procedure of subverting established genres and literary works. In Orrie's
Story (1990), he retells the Greek Oresteia now set in America after World War II; and in
Robert Crews (1994), he provides a postmodernist version of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
This gets beyond the mocking stage as the hero, a hopeless alcoholic, survives a plane crash
in the northern woods and finds his Friday in a woman shot by her husband during a
camping trip. In the struggle for survival, Friday and Robert come to love each other. With
the publication in 1999 of The Return of Little Big Man he mocked both the custom (in
fiction and films) of producing sequels to a successful work and the hero of his best-selling
novel of 1964. In this new version Jack Crabb was ill when he dictated his memoirs. His
supposed death cut short his tale about Custer's Last Stand. Through a newly discovered
manuscript it is now revealed that he faked his own death to escape his publishing contract.
Like Vonnegut and Berger, Robert Coover (born 1932) has been concerned with the
working of fantasy in the creation of myths in history, religion and politics. Coover uses
familiar or historical forms, questions their content, adds a shot of surrealism and leads the
reader to the recognition of the artificial and of myth (see The Origin of the Brunists, 1965).
In Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) a
lonely accountant invents a baseball league and plays its games in his head. The Public
Burning (1977) was Coover's first public success as a novelist. A satirical novel about the
post-war era, it also features surrealist elements, such as Vice-President Nixon and Uncle
Sam golfing together while Ethel and Julius Rosenberg die in the electric chair. Coover
pursued this pattern of juxtaposing the outrageous, the horrible, and the banal in A Political
Fable (1980) and in Spanking the Maid (1982), the latter a satire on sadism in fiction. Like
other American postmodernists Coover is also interested in simultaneously exhausting and
replenishing literary genres. In a series of novels published since the 1980s, he has decon-
structed such genres: in Gerald's Party (1986), for instance, the target is the crime tale in a
murder case that is never solved and merely provides a pretext for the appearance of ever
more stories and characters; in Pinocchio in Venice (1991), he retells Carlo Collodi's fairy
tale from a postmodern viewpoint as the hero, now a hundred years old and equipped with
an American name (Pinenut) returns to Venice to engage in adventures with various char-
acters from literary works; and in John's Wife (1997) and Ghost Town (1998) Coover makes
parasitical use of realist small-town-fiction and classic American western novels (e.g., by
Zane Grey) respectively. Like Gass, Gaddis, and Pynchon, Coover is interested less in
traditional plotting but rather in exploring the limits of narration and the paradoxical
insufficiencies of language, which cannot represent reality but is needed for communication.
Similar literary aims the play with the interrelation of fantasy, fiction, text, and history
characterize the early work of the French-American Raymond Federman (1928-2009; see
his Take It or Leave It, 1976), Walter Abish (born 1931; see his Alphabetical Africa, 1974;
and How German Is It, 1980), and Steve Katz (born 1935), and the better-known ex-
perimental novels of Gore Vidal (born 1925). Some of the experimentalists later turned to
more traditional forms of narration (see, for instance, Federman's Smiles on Washington
Square, 1985; and To Whom it May Concern, 1990). Vidal is not easy to be categorized as
his fiction ranges from realistic war novels (see Williwaw, 1946) and historical novels (see
Julian, 1964; and Creation, 1981), a fictional satirical biography of the United States in a
series of books (Washington DC, 1967; Burr, 1973; 1876, 1976; Lincoln, 1983; Empire,
1987; Hollywood, 1989; and the final volume covering the 1940s and early 1950s, The
Golden Age, 2000), to experimental works: Two Sisters (1970) merges fact and memoirs as
well as past and present, and his "Hollywood novels", Myra Breckenridge (1968) and its se-
quel Myron (1974), trace the lurid adventures and the career of the transsexual Myra/Myron,
who tries to save the film industry. Though Vidal has attacked the experimental fiction of
his colleagues as "plastic fiction", some of his own works are hardly purely realistic novels:
Live From Golgotha (1992), for instance, is another Vidal work with two time levels in
which a TV executive negotiates with the apostle Paul to film the Crucifixion; and The
Smithsonian Institution (1998) is like his previous Duluth (1983) one of Vidal's so-
called "inventions" novels that mingle historical fact (in this case, the development of the
atomic bomb in 1939) with science fiction, vaudeville and surrealism, as Albert Einstein and
Adolf Hitler come alive and a child prodigy is shown the sexual ropes by a re-animated First
Lady from a museum room.
Self-conscious fiction, and the exploration of fiction and forgery in complicated ency-
clopedic structures, characterize the novels of William Gaddis (1922-98) and of the best-
known contemporary experimentalists, John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. Gaddis wrote
only four novels in his lifetime; they are all great achievements. His view of the novelist as
"artificer" found expression in The Recognitions (1955), which became a cult novel of meta-
fiction. It shows a Yankee artist overwhelmed by his career as a forger of old Flemish
painters. JR (1975) was Gaddis's first masterpiece; it received a National Book Award.
A parodic novel on hypocrisy and corruption in the world of high finance, it is also a stylish
satire on American public education and standard business practices. The plot involves a sixth-
grader, the eponymous JR, who amasses a huge corporate empire by simply applying the rules
he learns while operating from public telephones. As a child playing a game, JR has no moral
consciousness and the novel suggests that this is also the case with the people running the
American economy and the country as such. What makes this and the following two novels
remarkable is the form Gaddis invented disconnected dialogue in a visually almost uninter-
rupted long string of text (there are no chapters and no optical divisions). At times, this makes
it extremely difficult for the reader to follow what is going on, as monologues and dialogues
(mostly concerned with money) by various voices follow and intersect each other; these are in
turn interrupted by voices from radio, TV, and telephones. But there is a sophisticated order
behind everything and the patient reader will soon recognize how Gaddis manages to create
and identify his characters with the help of their verbal antics. In addition to the social satire on
an America obsessed by money and success, the novel thus also offers a wide range of literary
and linguistic styles that contribute to its humour and aesthetic quality.
Gaddis wrote only two more novels before his death in 1998; both are again outstanding
works. While Carpenter's Gothic (1985), a satire on the moral collapse of America after the
Vietnam War, is less experimental and more accessible than JR (though still presented in a
disconnected dialogue form), his final work was again a superb if demanding work of
fiction.
Written in Gaddis's trademark unpunctuated dialogue, A Frolic of His Own (1994) holds up to
ridicule the excesses of the American legal system in a tragicomic and polyphonic novel. The
hero of the book is Oscar Crease, a community-college teacher who considers himself the last
civilized man in an America without any interest in cultural values. When Oscar accidentally
runs his car over himself while trying to hotwire it, he starts legal proceedings to find out whom
he could sue. The case develops ludicrous dimensions and becomes interwoven with another
lawsuit, when Oscar discovers that a recent movie may have used the script of a play he wrote
some time ago. This provides the second major thematic subject plagiary in all its forms. At
one point in the plot almost a multi-millionaire (after a first court decision), the neurotic Oscar
Crease eventually ends up where he started. Gaddis's work is a mighty enterprise, as demanding
and as wide in range as Melville's Moby-Dick, as the reader is exposed to American legalese,
Oscar's idiosyncratic father (a judge), his sister, a lover, and various acquaintances. Below the
tragicomic level of the plot, the novel also weaves an intricate intertextual network of references
to all kinds of fiction and non-fiction. This is upheld by allusions to (or quotations of) legal
documents, Oscar's amateur play (derived from one of Eugene O'Neill's works and hence to
some extent also plagiarized), and newspaper and TV reports. Together with the huge chorus of
voices (e.g., lawyers "in combat" in courts of law or talking to Oscar) that make up the charac-
ters, this polyphonic dimension abandons the conventions of realistic narration even while de-
monstrating that there are other, more fascinating, ways of writing a novel in the postmodern
period.
Agap Agape was Gaddis's last work of fiction. Published posthumously in 2002, it contains
his reflection on those aspects of the corporate technological culture that are uniquely de-
structive of the arts. Employing the same form as in his previous works (borrowed to some
extent from the fiction of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, 1931-1989; see Die Ver-
strung, 1967; and Das Kalkwerk, 1970), it features an old man dying in his bed while
grumbling about the decay of the world and the mechanization of the arts.
The experimental novels of Barth and Pynchon make equally large demands on their
readers. John Barth (born 1930) is from Maryland and worked as a university professor of
English. He began his literary career with satirical novels on the comic aspects of existen-
tialism (see The Floating Opera, 1956; and The End of the Road, 1958). With The Sot-Weed
Factor (1960) Barth abandoned conventional forms and produced a comic-epic parody of
eighteenth-century picaresque fiction and a very humorous satire of American colonial hist-
ory. Alluding to a verse satire of the early eighteenth century, the novel provides a fictional
biography of Ebenezer Cook, a "poet laureate" of colonial Maryland. The novel deals with
Cook's thwarted incestuous relations with his sister Anne and his attempts to defend both his
poetry and virginity. Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (1966), also a parody, is a complex and comical
novel. It tells of the efforts of George Giles, the unnatural child of a woman and a computer,
to convince an American college of his new philosophy, and of his fight with an evil and
tyrannical computer. This work describes the modern world as a university campus in alle-
gorical terms. Barth has also written a number of short stories that exemplify his playful ap-
proach to fiction, and two more excellent novels. Letters (1979) parodies the epistolary nov-
el as well as Barth's own fiction of the preceding years. The plot involves seven more or less
parallel narratives, told in the form of correspondence between characters from his earlier
novels and the "Author" as just another fictional character. Ironic self-parody is also an
essential element in Sabbatical (1982), a "romance" about the adventures and ideas of a
college professor and her husband, a former intelligence officer and an aspiring novelist,
during a long cruise aboard a sailboat. Barth has continued his postmodern experimentation
with narrative in fiction in such novels as The Tidewater Tales (1987), concerned with a
novelist's writer's block, and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991), which shows
the gradual exhaustion of Barth's postmodernist means as he apes previous novelistic styles
and resurrects the heroes from his previous novels who interfere in the plot. After a long
stretch of silence, Barth produced another example of postmodernist fiction with Coming
Soon!!! (2001). This is both a self-referential novel (integrating Barth's own The Floating
Opera) and a highly intertextual narrative, referring as it does inter alia to Edna Ferber's
Show Boat (1926) and the musicals and films it spawned. It also parodies the latest media
electronic fiction and e-mail in a contest between a retiring novelist and a writer of hyper-
text who race each other to write a novel about a floating opera as a replica called The
Original Floating Opera II is sinking in the Chesapeake Bay. Barth has thus not abandoned
his now almost traditional (postmodernist) concern with reality and fiction, representation
and imitation, and the influence of the media.
Thomas Pynchon (born 1937), considered by many critics to be
the most impressive American novelist of the late twentieth
century, has tried to wipe out all official records of himself and
refuses to appear in public and to comment on his work. He stud-
ied engineering at Cornell, where he also attended literature
courses offered by Vladimir Nabokov, served in the US Navy and
worked as a technician for Boeing Aircraft in Seattle before he
became a full-time writer and tried to delete public records about
himself. Convinced that he is shadowed by the CIA or the FBI or
both, Pynchon, for all we know, probably lives in New York City
and has portrayed what he sees as America's paranoia in a handful
of novels that are as sophisticated and demanding as the best
fiction of Gass and Gaddis. Together with the works of Barth,
A rare photograph of Vonnegut, and DeLillo, his novels expose and implicitly attack
Thomas Pynchon as not only the fetishization of society and the individual (as seen by
a sailor Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud) but also the work of art as fetish,
i.e., the idea that the novel is something like an aesthetic fetish.
While Pynchon shares Barth's encyclopedic treatment, he has different aims. The most radi-
cal explorer of the limits of modern fantasy, Pynchon has explained his view of history and
fiction in Entropy (1960). His novels exemplify the thermodynamic law that all systems are
bound to run down and that the world's energies will eventually disintegrate. Pynchon's
novel V. (1963) demonstrates the eventual collapse of communication and reveals the
human search for truth and reality to be useless and without meaning.
The complicated plot mirrors Pynchon's idea of the disorganization of life and the world (en-
tropy) in a story in which traditional plotting is replaced with conspiracies and thus a second
meaning of plotting. The book follows the steps of two characters embodying the postmodern
positions. One is the modern American "Schlemihl" (a reference to Adalbert von Chamisso's
Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, 1814), Benny Profane, a belated Beat (his friends are
The Whole Sick Crew) who hunts alligators in the sewers of New York and drifts through life
like a yo-yo; the other is Herbert Stencil, a historian who is determined to decode the diary of
his father, a former secret agent of the British government, and thus to find V., a mysterious
female spy representing Venus, Virgin or even Void (nothingness). Unsolved mysteries and
secrets lurk in the background as the passionate Stencil searches the world above ground from
Paris to Malta and even in Africa, while the phlegmatic Profane is at work below the ground or
in the big city. Historically, the novel covers the period from World War I to the Suez crisis
(1956), but nothing is solved. Following the principle of entropy, numerous characters appear
and disappear, while Stencil is unable to determine the meaning of the V-sign (A woman's
name? The capital of Malta, La Valetta?). Pynchon's novel was obviously written under the
influence not only of the fathers of postmodernism (Nabokov and Borges) and existentialism
(Sartre and Camus) but also of Henry Adams's autobiography (1907) and the philosophical
work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who had written on the relations between empiri-
cism and the meaningful use of language. It shows the alternatives postmodern people are faced
with in an increasingly technological and mysterious world: while Profane reads but does not
much care about the meaning of signs, Stencil tries to construct meaning at every stage. This
paradox in the use of language has occupied Pynchon ever since.
Similarly, the plot of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a short anti-detective novel,
gradually dissolves in a series of grotesque and ambiguous episodes. Again, there is the
general and symbolical theme of a search, which lies at the root of all his fiction. In this case
Oedipa Maas tries to find the inheritor of a set of stamps (Lot 49) in a world of conspiracy,
secret organizations, and paranoia.
These are also the major themes of Gravity's Rainbow (1973), in which dream-like fantasy,
sexual allusions, and labyrinthine connections, together with detailed information on quantum
physics, probability theory and ballistics, confuse the reader about the real and the imaginary in
a story of plots and counterplots. The novel is set in post-war Germany, and its bizarre char-
acters include the American lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop who is looking for a secret German V-2
rocket capable of breaking through the Earth's gravitational barrier. Gravity's Rainbow has been
compared to Joyce's Ulysses and is considered by many critics as the exemplary postmodernist
novel: its complicated narrative structure, its numerous linguistic and literary codes, its ironic
play with cybernetic and fictional forms, its massive accumulation of data and characters (about
400), all amount to the ultimate message that life and philosophy are basically impenetrable.
It took Pynchon almost two decades to produce his next work of fiction, Vineland (1990).
Set in the Vinyard Country of northern California in the 1980s, this is formally more tradi-
tional as it looks back on the counterculture of the 1960s and the powerful, negative influ-
ence of TV on a generation of free spirits. The book is peopled by bizarre characters, some
of them (e.g., Zoyd Wheeler and his estranged wife Frenesi) former hippies who have to
pretend to be mad or collaborate with the FBI to be able to lead their lives. The plot apes the
patterns of mystery and spy fiction but there is a fairy-tale happy ending that seems quite
unusual for a Pynchon novel. Another seven years passed until the publication of Pynchon's
Mason & Dixon (1997).
Again a huge and daunting work that traces both the birth of the American republic and modern
science, this book leaves the twentieth century to follow the travels and adventures of two
historical figures. It is an encyclopedic book written in the style and typographical manner of an
eighteenth-century novel; it is replete not only with technical information (e.g., about the
development of grandfather clocks) whose gathering must have cost Pynchon years of his life,
but also with marvellous stories; and in some surrealistic passages it even gives human voices
to dogs and clocks. The reader accompanies the astronomer Mason and the cartographer Dixon
to South Africa and to America as they create the famous Mason-Dixon line between Maryland
and Pennsylvania between 1763-1768. The two members of the Royal Society notice much too
late that their allegedly reasonable enterprise is being exploited by political forces and will give
rise to land speculation. There is much talking about paradise in the novel, but one of its bitter
truths is that it is the very drive of Western reason that destroys earthly paradises. Pynchon's
message seems to be that one can only write about the magic and the wonderful that, perhaps,
used to exist at the beginning of the United States.
Thomas McGuane (born 1939; see The Bushwacked Piano, 1971), Gilbert Sorrentino
(1929-2006; see Aberration of Starlight, 1980), and Ronald Sukenick (1932-2004; see Out,
1973) are also experimentalists who have "exhausted" traditional literary forms while
creating new satirical fiction. Outside the United States, however, Jerzy Kosinski, James
Purdy, and John Irving are better known, perhaps because they are less boldly innovative.
Jerzy Kosinski (1933-1991) had had a brilliant career in Poland before he came to the USA
in 1957. Most of his novels present lonely, sometimes desperate, psychopathic heroes or
narrators trying to come to terms with evil in themselves or in society. Thus his partly auto-
biographical The Painted Bird (1965) is about a Polish boy's suffering and fight for survival
during the German occupation. Steps (1968), Cockpit (1975) and Blind Date (1977) avoid
sequential plot and present private views of diverse cruelties and the search for emotional
and sexual intimacy of traumatized egos. Apart from The Painted Bird, Kosinski's best
novels are Being There (1971), a satire of American society and politics that draws on
Voltaire's Candide and was filmed with Peter Sellers starring as the hero Chance; and Pin-
ball (1982), a treatment of sexual passion, seduction, and crime. Like Kosinski, James
Purdy (1923-2009) has been fascinated by deviant behaviour in his fictional characters,
who suffer violent and traumatic experiences and are deprived of love (see, for instance,
Malcolm, 1959; Cabot Wright Begins, 1964; Eustace Chisholm and the Works, 1967; I Am
Elijah Thrush, 1972; the trilogy Sleepers in Moon-Crowned Valleys, 1970-81, and Narrow
Rooms, 1978). John Irving's (born 1942) fiction, although highly successful with the
reading public, is less convincing as literary art. Irving combines the conventional novel of
character with melodramatic plots and metafictional elements that do not always produce
the intended parody (see, for instance, Setting Free the Bears, 1968; and The World Ac-
cording to Garp, 1978, his best novel to date). Most of Irving's works follow a similar pat-
tern in which a hero on the fringe of society needs to cope with the chaos of the world; he or
she finds some help in friendship which eventually needs to be overcome too (see The Hotel
New Hampshire, 1981; A Prayer for Owen Meaney, 1989); in A Widow for One Year (1998)
the protagonists even discuss this pattern. Irving's fiction is indebted in form and structure to
the Victorian novel (Dickens, Hardy, Conrad), while his characterisation and mixing of
styles draw on the example of Gnter Grass and Kurt Vonnegut. Thus his tenth novel, The
Fourth Hand (2001) offers the usual ingredients of tragicomedy, sexual farce, and melo-
dramatic plot (a TV journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion) that is one of the reasons
why four of his works of fiction have been filmed.
Among the more experimental postmodernist novelists now at work, Don DeLillo (born
1936) and Paul Auster (born 1947) have achieved the difficult task of pleasing the aca-
demic critics as well as an ever increasing international audience of readers. Both had their
breakthroughs in the 1980s, and especially Auster is meanwhile one of the most cherished
contemporary American authors in Europe. DeLillo has written existential comedies, novels
in which lonely and marginal if down-home characters face a corporate American world of
conspiracies and an everyday reality dominated by banality and constructed by the media.
He first came to critical acclaim with End Zone (1972), which uses football as a metaphor
for an analysis of the American psyche. Among the novels that followed, some focus on
American and international conspiracies as well as paranoia, themes he shares with Pynchon
(see Running Dog, 1978; and The Names, 1982). He also shares with Pynchon the view that
the media (especially TV and the movie industry) actually construct American reality and
that they have replaced religion as "opium for the people". DeLillo's best work of the 1980s
is White Noise (1984), which also introduces his growing concern with ecology and the
trashing of the American environment and language.
The novel seems to have a traditional plot and all-American characters. Jack Gladney teaches
Hitler studies at a liberal arts college and is happily married to his fourth wife, Babette. They
have four ultramodern children reflecting the cultural disaster produced by American consu-
merism. Excursions to the local shopping mall prove high points in the lives of the family mem-
bers; and they are virtually inundated by a garbage of pictures and the white noise of the book's
title, i.e., the noise made by a TV screen, one of the dominating metaphors. This life of con-
sumer banality is suddenly threatened when a lethal chemical cloud threatens the family and
they have to flee. This cloud becomes a more urgent and visible version of the white noise that
has already engulfed them through radio, sirens, microwaves, and TV murmurings. DeLillo
creates a few moments of epiphany when this noise is silenced all of a sudden or when gaps are
described in the order of things arranged in the kitchen. The novel displays his typical com-
bination of seemingly ordinary plot and surreal events that unmask the horrible emptiness at the
heart of an American culture suffering from the trash produced by the media and powerful
corporate companies.
After some novels more closely related to political events and national hysteria (e.g., Libra,
1988, on the killing of President Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald; and Mao II, 1991, on
CIA activities in Greece), the reclusive DeLillo resumed his subtle analysis of what he sees
as a typically American combination of sports fanaticism, mass hysteria, and monumental
events as manipulated by the media. His magnum opus from this period is Underworld
(1997), a huge novel whose collage structure and panoramic technique betray the influence
upon DeLillo of the cinema, jazz, and abstract expressionist painting.
The novel starts with a detailed description of the legendary baseball game in 1951 between the
New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, when Bobby Thomson's home run secures the
Dodgers' victory in the last seconds of the meeting. This shot heard round the Western world is
then juxtaposed with another shot, the Soviet Union's testing of an atomic bomb. As J. Edgar
Hoover, also a legend as an FBI boss, ponders an American response, a small boy in the New
York stadium watches the ball flying toward him. Gradually, it becomes clear that the entire
first chapter, "The Triumph of Death", links the banality (a baseball game) with the seriousness
(wars) of American life. The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, becomes a metaphor (the
nucleus of the atomic bomb is the size of a baseball too) that generates the narrative that fol-
lows. Changing owner every decade, it takes the reader into the American unconscious (created
to some extent by such sports events), into American culture high and low (Lenny Bruce, Mick
Jagger and J. Edgar Hoover, in a leather mask, make appearances among many others) during
the Cold War up to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam. DeLillo has often been praised not only
for his deceptive technique that undermines the banal by demonstrating how it is generated but
also for his minimalist prose reminiscent of Hemingway. The underworld of the title refers to
the place where the atomic bomb is exploded and waste/trash/garbage are stored the atomic
waste as well as the garbage of civilization. DeLillo foregrounds how trash has started to dom-
inate American life and culture on the visual and verbal planes, and finally also on a behaviour-
al level that affects the arts as well as everyday life. Produced by TV and consumerism, trash
assumes almost metaphysical dimensions as DeLillo demonstrates, not without humour, the
purposes it serves and how it affects the consciousness.
Compared to the Moby-Dick-like Underworld, DeLillo's The Body Artist (2001) is almost a
novella musing on the meaning of life and human relationships in the story of an elderly
couple, Rey Robles (who commits suicide) and his third wife Lauren Hartke.
Paul Auster (born 1947) worked for some time as a translator and editor of French lit-
erature. It is French existentialism and the nouveau roman that have left a deep impression
on him. Like Gass, Pynchon, and DeLillo, he uses established forms of popular literature and
culture especially the detective novel to deconstruct them while exploring his major
themes, loss, alienation, and the unpredictable relations between reality (constructed by
words) and consciousness. Initially working in relative obscurity, Auster's first major
success was the "New York trilogy" City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked
Room (1987), all postmodernist detective novels that liken the decay of the city to the decay
of the fictional model as the plot becomes increasingly confused, not least through the
insufficiencies of language. This is metafictional prose at its best as Auster creates expecta-
tions in the reader (based on traditional views of plot and character in crime fiction) only to
disappoint them. The eye of the reader becomes the I of the narrator, and the private eyes of
crime fiction (Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe) are recalled among many other allusions to
literary figures from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Raymond Chandler,
Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Pynchon. A linear plot is never allowed to develop. The city
as a confusing and mysterious locale also provides the setting in Auster's further works of
fiction that are constructed with the same metafictional means in a highly intertextual and
difficult prose. In the Country of Last Things (1987) is a dystopian epistolary novel about a
post-apocalyptic Manhattan and concerned with the search for identity and love; Moon
Palace (1989) is a parody of the bildungsroman cast into a combination of road movie script
and picaresque tale as we follow Marco Stanley Fogg (yet another telling name alluding to
literary characters) on his trip from New York to the Far West in search of an inheritance.
Most of Auster's novels also employ cinematic means (cuts, flashbacks) and it is hardly
surprising that he has written film scripts (e.g., Smoke and Blue in the Face, both filmed by
Wayne Young) and directed a film version of his script for Lulu on the Bridge (1998).
Auster's novels of the 1990s are distinguished by this additional aspect of fiction that is
already strongly dependent on its allusions to literary genres and specific works. Thus The
Music of Chance (1990), about two insignficant characters meeting by chance, is Auster's
literary road movie while Leviathan (1992) explores the postmodern problem of identity
against a (deliberately created) Kafkaesque background. More recently, Auster's metafiction
also integrates stronger elements of surrealism and the fantastic. Mr Vertigo (1992) is in
many respects a typical Auster novel.
Playing with Huckleberry Finn in structure and language, it apes literary tales of initiation as
Walter Clairborne Rawley tells his boyhood story, which begins in 1924, as he remembers it in
old age. Like Huck Finn, he comes from Missouri and speaks a modern version of the Missouri
dialect. Auster's novel is thus a constant, tongue-in-cheek, rewriting of Twain's classic novel
with some postmodern, surrealist twists. Thus Rawley learns to fly in an arduous 33-step series
of trials that include live burial. He also becomes famous as Walt the Wonder Boy who can
levitate, but has to give up this gift because of severe headaches. There are further bizarre ad-
ventures and incidents, including suicides and killings before Walter washes up in Wichita.
Like most postmodernist fiction, Mr Vertigo thus weaves its plot on many levels in a picaresque
and surrealist biography (which may be largely invented by the old Walter), in an allusive inter-
textual game with Mark Twain's novel and other texts, and in references to the Jewish-
American literary tradition (in such types as the "luftmensch" and the survivor of catastrophes).
The surrealistic dimension is given even more room in Auster's Timbuktu (1999).
This features a dog, Mr Bones, as a canine hero and the friend of Willy G. Christmas, a troubled if
original poet-saint from Brooklyn. Constructed with the familiar props of metafiction e.g.,
names, such as Mr Bones and Christmas, alluding to more or less known literary characters;
and a plot pattern borrowed both from the picaresque novel (Don Quixote) and contemporary
popular forms (the road movie, the comic book) Timbuktu is a fine example of postmodernist
fiction: it seems to be an easy read, but it addresses a culturally educated reader capable of
deciphering the welter of intertextual and intermedial allusions. It is in this sophisticated net-
work to be established by the reader that meaning resides as one begins to realize that the
metafictional play of the text is the first step towards an exploration of identity, representation,
dream and death, search and loss.
In The Book of Illusions (2002), Auster's tenth novel, one recognizes again his signature
fascination with the capriciousness of fate and adept use of the story-within-the-story motif.
In this case, a professor, David Zimmer, is trying to rebuild his life after losing his family in
an accident; he researches the career of a mysterious figure from the era of the silent
movies. Several film plots interfere with the plot of the novel, and when Zimmer publishes
his book about Hector Mann, the man comes alive again through the stories of a woman
who knew him and with whom Zimmer falls in love.
It would be wrong to assume, however, that this self-reflective metafiction has ruled the
field of the American novel in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, some writers shared with the
public at large the feeling that a moving away was needed from the excesses of postmod-
ernist writing. Although established metafictionists such as Don DeLillo (see The Names,
1982) and Joseph McElroy (born
1930; see Women and Men, 1987)
have continued to publish experimental
works, realistic forms came back into
favour with what has been termed
minimalism or new realism. The high-
ly stylized and controlled manner of
exposition one finds in this fiction has
much in common with the works of
Hemingway and Chekhov, but it also
presents a new, sobre, view of Ameri-
can daily reality as experienced by un-
spectacular characters. The writers as-
sociated with this development (apart Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson with Bubbles. c. 1990
from those discussed here, see also
Raymond Carver, discussed below, who produced exemplary minimalist short stories, and
Mary Robison, born 1949) mostly deal with inarticulate people who feel bewildered by the
events they have to face. The minimalists use slight plots, a careful selection of surface
details that help create the cool, sobre, impression given by their prose, and a controlled
manner of exposition in frequently ambiguous short scenes. Examples can be found in Ann
Beattie's (born 1947) Love Always (1985; see also her Picturing Will, 1989; and Another
You, 1995), concerned with a love story; Frederick Barthelme's (born 1943) Moon Deluxe
(1983), set in the tacky underbelly of America's lower middle class; Tobias Wolff's (born
1945) This Boy's Life (1989), a memoir of a childhood (see also In Pharao's Army, 1994, an
account of a young manhood), and the novels of Richard Ford (born 1944), one of the
most versatile minimalists. In 1995, Ford received two of the most distinguished literary
awards in America, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Pen/Faulkner award, for his novel
Independence Day. This was Ford's second book featuring the narrator Frank Bascombe who
had made a first appearance in The Sportswriter (1986). Both novels are set in the fictive
small town of Haddam, New Jersey. They deal with the rather mundane daily events in the
life of the divorced narrator who, in the first novel, spends much time reflecting on his
broken marriage and the death of one his sons, while in Independence Day Bascombe, now
a real estate manager, goes on a trip with his teenage son Paul and gives us a panorama of
1980s, middle-class, America and his own state of mind. In between these longer novels
Ford wrote a novella, Wildlife (1990), which also embodies the principles of the new real-
ism in the chronicling of the ruination of a Montana family as seen by a teenage son.
E(dna) Annie Proulx (born 1935) is a neo-realist writer close in spirit to Richard Ford's
melancholic view of humanity and Cormac McCarthy's obsession with landscape and nihil-
ism. Bursting on the literary scene rather late in her career, she received the Pulitzer Prize
and the National Book Award for her novel The Shipping News (1993). It exhibits a superb
sense of place and character in a desolate seaside community in Newfoundland and tells of a
widowed father's attempt to create a home. Before this success, Proulx had earned consider-
able critical praise for Postcards (1992), which won the Pen/Faulkner award. In reproduced
postcards exchanged by the members of the Blood family and their escaped son Loyal it
reveals the inchoate longings of a difficult existence. Proulx's Accordion Crimes (1996) is
also remarkable for its detailed American settings, idiosynchratic characters, and bleak
humour. It is an occasionally violent and epic social history of America as traced through the
immigrant owners of a green accordion. In 1995, Proulx moved to Wyoming, and her recent
fiction (short stories collected in Close Range, 1999) has been concerned with the lives of
natives in the West, including hog farmers and ruthless corporate businessmen in the Texas
panhandle (see That Old Ace in the Hole, 2002)
The latest development in neo-realism has been termed yuppie fiction because the major
representatives (the New York "brat pack" Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Donna
Tartt) have written about the amoral lifestyle of urban executives and the emptiness of life
at the top of a capitalist society. The literary value of this fiction reaches from the merely
entertaining, as in Tartt's psychological thriller The Secret History (1992), about a group of
students at an lite American college and their bacchanal with murderous consequences, to
the highly sophisticated works of McInerney and Ellis, who has been attacked for his alleged
obscenity and misogyny. In a series of novels Jay McInerney (born 1955) has covered the
existential angst and the excesses of city people in fiction that is both satirical and moving,
starting with the highly praised Bright Lights, Big City (1984), about a young New Yorker,
and continuing with The Story of My Life (1988), in which a young man and a woman re-
count their tales of family dysfunction and nightclub decadence, a subject also covered in
Brightness Falls (1992), about the urban yuppie culture of the 1980s. Bret Easton Ellis
(born 1964) began with similar fiction about the trivial lives of rich youngsters in Los Ange-
les (see Less Than Zero, 1985) and, after the spectacular success and the scandal caused by
American Psycho (1991), returned to this subject, describing the moral impoverishment of
well-to-do Los Angelinos in The Informers (1994), and the superficial world of fashion and
models in Glamorama (1999). Controversial, highly intertextual and intermedial, and de-
spite what has been said also equipped with a moral message, American Psycho remains
his best novel.
The sensation caused by this work is due to the fact that the narrator, Patrick Bateman, a hand-
some if narcissist and well educated broker on Wall Street, turns into a brutal and necrophilic
psychopath at night, killing homeless people, and torturing prostitutes and female friends in
sadistic orgies described in minute detail and with apparent great relish. Ellis's novel paints a
sad panorama of the world on Wall Street and in Manhattan's moneyed circles; it reveals the
superficial preoccupations of people who earn and lose millions of dollars in a few hours, who
talk about their bodies and their clothes and seem to have no metaphysical aims whatsoever. It
is Ellis's crass realism, the way he delineates a sick mind in need of drugs, sex, extreme vio-
lence, and the ultimate kick killing (the breaking of the last taboo) which provoked attacks
by feminists and critics demanding a moral behind the atrocities detailed in the book. But it is
precisely the fact that the novel refuses to provide such a moral which points to its overall
target the consumerism and the amoral attitudes engendered by a capitalist system that needs
people like Bateman in order to function. When Bateman, at several instances, openly tells his
colleagues about the atrocities he committed during the night (the novel leaves it open whether
these scenes are fantasies or real events), they don't listen or don't seem to care. In this sense the
book lives up to the lines of one of its epigraphs taken from a song by Talking Heads, "And as
things fell apart, nobody paid much attention". American Psycho is an outright attack on the
American dream gone wrong in the greedy 1980s. It shows Patrick Bateman as a latter-day
Jekyll, Robert Louis Stevenson's doctor who takes a drug turning him into the evil Mr Hyde.
Bateman's drug is money-making, which leaves no room for anything else during the day the
horrors of the night have to compensate for the spiritual emptiness of a cultural and working en-
vironment that literally makes one sick. In addition to this parallel with Stevenson's novel,
American Psycho is studded with all kinds of references (Bateman's name, for instance, also
alludes to Batman) to contemporary music, films, operas and musicals (e.g. Les Misrables and
The Three Penny Opera). In addition, literary texts also provide a sophisticated pattern of
intertexts enriching the meaning of the novel and the sad if terribly true message it tells about
the epitome of America in New York. But just as most American political commentators did
not inquire into the reasons behind the attack on the WTC on September 11, 2001, many
literary critics failed to see the satirical aims of Ellis's novel precisely because what it attacks is
what upholds America. American Psycho carries to Swiftian satiric extremes such ideas as con-
sumption, commodification, and objectification in the monstrous spectacle of the consumer
consumed. Sophisticated in its literary ambition, extremely well written, and a milestone in the
development of new realist fiction incorporating popular genres, American Psycho is a daring
and outstanding novel.
Other writers have focused on urban life further down the social ladder. Thus Tama Jano-
witz's (born 1957) Slaves of New York (1986), about young artists and their friends trying to
survive in Manhattan, became a yuppie cult book (see also her A Cannibal in Manhattan,
1987; and The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group, 1992). Dennis Cooper (born 1943) has
taken Ellis's brutal if honest view of American urban psychosis to suburbia, describing sex-
ual violence in Californian locations and in a style reminiscent of Joan Didion. According to
Ellis, Cooper is the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction (see Closer, 1989;
Frisk, 1991; Try, 1994; and Guide, 1998).
Less savage if highly satirical and innovative fiction was written by David Foster Wallace
(1962-2008), to some extent Pynchon's younger successor. When he committed suicide in
2008 after many years of suffering from depression, Wallace had been recognized as an out-
standing representative of contemporary metafiction. Infinite Jest (1996) remains his master-
work.
In its style, satirical targets, and intertextual games, the novel is indebted to the fiction of
Gaddis and Pynchon as well as to Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy thus it features
extremely lengthy serio-comic appendices and footnotes; but Wallace pursues targets of his
own. The plot is set in a future, dystopian, unified North American state comprising the United
States, Canada and Mexico (known as O.N.A.N. = the Organization of North American
Nations), a country ruled by big corporations that have eliminated the calendar and turned New
England into a dump. The horror and stupidity of this new America dominated by economic
consumption, entertainment and intellectual poverty are indicated by new words for the
calendar years (e.g., "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment") while the freedom fighters of
Quebec constitute the only remaining threat for those in power. Set in a tennis academy
("ETA") and a Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (endnoted "Redundancy sic" in the text) and
featuring a dysfunctional family, the novel explores essential socio-philosophical questions
about the role of entertainment and its effects, the whole presented in occasionally lengthy
scenes that make hard reading. The plot partially revolves around the missing master copy of a
film cartridge, entitled Infinite Jest and referred to in the novel as "the Entertainment". The
Quebec separatists, who champion another language and an alternative non-capitalist culture,
are interested in acquiring a redistributable copy of the movie which is so entertaining to its
viewers that they become lifeless, losing all interest in anything other than the film.
Wallace is a postmodern entertainer as well as a moralist holding up the mirror to an America
he considered extremely fascinating precisely because it combines so many contradictory and
terrifying elements while embodying all the aspects of late capitalism. The image of America
presented in Infinite Jest is that of a subtly totalitarian country in which most of the inhabitants
children and adults alike are dependent in many senses: on drugs, on entertainment (in-
tended to prevent critical thinking), and on an ideology that seems to champion the individual
(the American dream) while leading everybody into personal catastrophe. Depression is a com-
mon disease the novel conveys this in central metaphors of emptiness and sadness. These
apply to the country and to its people such as Gately, an inmate in the halfway house, who
prays to the ceiling instead of God, and the young tennis-star Harold James Incandenza and his
infantile, handicapped, younger brother Mario (the only innocent character in the book). Like
Pynchon, Wallace enjoys playing with (pseudo)telling names illustrating the glittering splen-
dour and the essential hollowness he saw in his country. Thus Harold is called Hal (like the
super-brain computer in Kubrick's SF movie 2001), but he is far from "enlightened" (as his
family name suggests) and cannot answer the seemingly simple questions of his mentally re-
tarded brother. Essentially, what Wallace is after in this huge book, a postmodern attempt to
outdo Melville's Moby-Dick, is an exploration of the American desire for entertainment, how
and why this is produced and how it affects the human need to connect with other people.
Parading a series of fascinating if damaged and deranged characters, all of them victims of the
camouflaged totalitarian system, and conversations often bordering on the philosophically ab-
surd, the novel deconstructs American entertainment in the very act of presenting it. It is an out-
standing effort to sketch in scenes that are both funny and terrifying the disappearance of the
individual in a postmodern American culture dominated by simulation.
Satirical novels on the greedy corporate world have been written by Po Bronson (born
1964; see Bombadiers, 1995; and The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest: A Silicon
Valley Novel, 1997) while the Canadian author Douglas Coupland (born 1961) has covered
the frightening personal alienation produced in this world (see Microserfs, 1995).
The return to realistic traditional narrative is most obvious in Jonathan Franzen's (born
1959) highly praised The Corrections (2001), a fictional microhistory of middle America
and the phenomena of the past decade (dotcom fortunes, the foodie movement, campus
political correctness, and pharmaceutical scandals) focused in the house and family of two
average Americans, the Midwesterners Enid and Alfred Lambert. Franzen's view and scope
is Dickensian (including the number of odd characters), with a touch of postmodern realism
that does not shy away from the description of nasty behaviour in ultimately repellent char-
acters.
Some of the minimalists also combine old-fashioned realism with Latin American magic
realism and fabulism, thus producing a rather special version of realism that points to its
construction and cannot deny its vicinity to metafiction. Novels written in this genre include
T. Coraghessan Boyle's (born 1948) comic-realistic World's End (1987), East is East
(1990) as well as his satire on the wellness movement in The Road to Wellville (1993) and
Tortilla Curtain (1995), which puzzled critics with its mixture of Steinbeckian naturalism
and slapstick humour; William Kennedy's (born 1928) Albany novels (e.g., Billy Phelan's
Greatest Game, 1978; Ironweed, 1983; Quinn's Book, 1988; and Roscoe, 2002, the seventh
book in the Albany cycle), Tim O'Brien's (1946) Northern Lights (1975), the quasi-SF nov-
els of Ted Mooney (born 1951; e.g., Easy to Travel to Other Planets, 1981), and the extra-
vagant works of the expatriate American Russell Hoban (born 1925). Also a writer of chil-
dren's books, Hoban has worked in England since 1969, and his in-between national status
is one of the reasons (apart from the fact that critics have difficulties rubricating his genre-
bending fiction) why he has been neglected in literary histories. His novels always combine
precise observation and ordinary characters (often living in London) this is their realistic
dimension described from odd angles and with occasional intrusions of bizarre events and
the surreal. His most ambitious work to date is Riddley Walker (1980), set in the remote
future after a nuclear catastrophe and told in the extraordinary voice (a mixture of Burgess's
Alex, Twain's Huck Finn, and Salinger's Holden Caulfield) of a boy who must survive in a
brutal world returned to stone-age customs and superstition. For the invention of its lan-
guage and world of magic and terror, this is an unparalleled work of fiction. Hoban's other
novels are less spectacular in their depiction of the inroads the surreal can make into the
boredom of daily life. Thus Kleinzeit (1974) is a satire on the English National Health sys-
tem in which Hospital, Action, Memory, a rather forgetful God, and Word are some of the
characters the patient Kleinzeit must cope with; The Medusa Frequency (1987) follows the
frustrated author Herman Orff's deciphering of computer messages as he encounters
Orpheus' head and the young girl of Vermeer's famous portrait; and in Angelica's Grotto
(1999), the title refers to a pornographic website into which 72-year-old art historian Harold
Klein wanders one evening; his odyssee takes him through erogenous zones on the screen
and in his head and into various corners of the London art world.
Like Hoban, two other expatriates or writers between two countries have produced extra-
ordinary books. One is Tristan Egolf (1972-2005); his picaresque and grotesque novel
about a Job-like sufferer in the heart of America, Lord of the Barnyard (1998), first ap-
peared in France (see also Egolf's Shirt and the Fiddler, 2002). The other is Jonathan
Littell (born in New York in 1967 but educated in France) his ambitious and controversial
novel, The Kindly Ones (2009), narrated by a Nazi criminal who is both monster and aesthete
and escapes to France after the war, was first published in French and received the presti-
gious Prix Goncourt in France in 2006.
By the 1970s, as American literature (especially drama and prose) proved a field of experi-
mentation and diversification, it had also become a battleground for ideological and political
debates. Various ethnic and social groups, including gays and feminists, caused and claimed
public and literary attention. Gay and lesbian authors have had to overcome the standard ex-
pectations that they would produce predictable novels about gay life; and some have man-
aged to develop gay themes in experimental forms, among them Kate Millet (born 1934),
Joanna Russ (born 1937; see The Female Man, 1975; and The Two of Them, 1978), Bertha
Harris (1937-2005), Coleman Dowell (1925-85), and Terry Andrews. One of the most
famous fictional treatments of lesbianism is Rita Mae Brown's (born 1944) Rubfruit Jungle
(1973), an autobiographical picaresque tale and bildungsroman about the adoption of the
heroine by a German-American family. Male homosexual lives have been covered in fiction
by Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City, 1978, set in San Francisco and adapted for TV);
Larry Kramer (Faggots, 1978) and Andrew Holleran (Dancer from the Dance, 1978),
who chronicled the promiscuity in the urban gay fast lane; and by writers covering the di-
sastrous AIDS issues, such as Edmund White (born 1940; see The Farewell Symphony,
1997), and the members of the gay literary circle called the Violet Quilt (apart from White
and Holleran, these included Felice Picano, Michael Grumley, Robert Ferro, Christopher
Cox, and George Whitemore). Supported by feminist publications, women writers have
claimed that there is a specific female view and way of experience which a literature dom-
inated by males has ignored. These writers see in women's literature a coherent body of
fiction, with a (feminine) history that reaches from Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and Edith
Wharton to contemporary novelists such as Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Walker, and Erica
Jong. The field, if field it is (there is still a lot of critical discussion about this point), is wide
and encompasses highbrow and middlebrow literature. On the highbrow side, one finds
Mary McCarthy's (1912-89) ironic and psychologically as well as socially interesting nov-
els that go beyond the feminist viewpoint (see her The Group, 1963; Birds of America,
1971, and Cannibals and Missionaries, 1979), and the fiction of the Californian Joan
Didion (born 1934), originally one of the new journalists (cf. Tom Wolfe and Hunter S.
Thompson discussed in the section on nonfiction below), who is also an essayist, a film
critic and a screen writer. Didion's works are inspired by her interest in the new journalism,
in autobiography, and the impact of politics on women's lives. Didion employs Californian
settings as synecdoches for a disintegrating world in which her female characters find no
bearings or perish. Play It as It Lays (1970), often compared to the early novels of Philip
Roth and John Updike, shows the tragic consequences of the American dream as produced
in Hollywood in the life of an actress, Maria Wyeth, who founders in a world without
genuine human relationships. Presented in short scenes of montage, the novel indicates both
the feminist and the political concerns that have occupied Didion in a few excellent and
formally experimental works. Moving between the fictional Latin American state of Boca
Grande and California, Didion's A Book of Common Prayer (1977) traces the growing self-
awareness of another Californian woman, while The Last Thing He Wanted (1996) is set in
the 1980s and American arms deals with Nicara-
gua provide the background to a moral thriller
featuring a bewildered Elena McMahon as prota-
gonist. At the other extreme of feminist writing
one finds the trendy "feminist" and shrill fiction of
Marilyn French (1929-2009; see her novel The
Women's Room, 1977, which brought her fame and
notoriety; and those on similar subjects, Her
Mother's Daughter, 1987; and Our Father, 1994).
Women and the way they cope with the modern
world have been treated in the satirical mode by
Lisa Alther (born 1944) in Kinflicks (1976). The
frankest expression of female sexuality can be
found in the fiction and the journals of the French-
born Anas Nin (1903-77; see her Delta of Venus,
1968) and in the partly autobiographical novels of
the feminist liberationist Erica Jong (born 1942),
such as Fear of Flying (1973) and its sequels, How
to Save Your Own Life (1977) and Parachutes and
Kisses (1984). Jong has also tried other genres of
fiction, e.g., the (humorous and erotic) historical
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #116. 1982 novel in a re-writing of John Cleland's Fanny Hill
(see Fanny, 1980), and fantasy (Serenissima: A Novel of Venice, 1987), but she returned to
her favourite autobiographical mode with Inventing Memory (1997), a novel about mothers
and daughters in a story stretching over four generations of a Jewish-American family.
While appropriating metafictional methods and popular genres (science fiction and horror
tales), some feminist writers have tried to break new ground and to deconstruct familiar
patterns and gender roles. This is the case in Marilynne Robinson's (born 1944) The
Talking Room (1975), Lyn Hejinian's (born 1941) My Life (1980), and Rachel Ingalls's
(born 1940) Be My Guest (1992), two novellas drawing on horror fiction and films.
Apart from the experimentalists, the new realists, and women writers, ethnic prose fiction
has attracted much attention in contemporary American literature. In what follows, the
searchlight will be on a few outstanding Jewish, black, Native, Hispanic, and Asian-Amer-
ican writers. Some Jewish novelists, like Heller, Salinger, and Irwin Shaw, write in the
mainstream of American fiction, but Bellow, Malamud, Roth and, to a lesser extent, Docto-
row are best understood when seen in the Jewish-American tradition. America has seen two
great waves of Jewish immigration: that from Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1924, and
that from Western Europe between 1930 and 1945. The first generation produced a rich
literature in Yiddish, Isaac Bashevis Singer's (1902-91) works being outstanding examples;
his books have meanwhile been translated into English. The Yiddish language and literature
remain important sources for many Jewish writers, and also for those who stand at the
beginning of a Jewish-American literature in English: the poet Delmore Schwartz (1913-
66) and the novelists Bellow and Mailer. Those writers who consider themselves Jewish-
American novelists mainly Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth (Norman
Mailer and E. L. Doctorow hovering between the Jewish and the WASP traditions) have
been concerned with the alienation of Jews from, and their painful adaptation to, modern
gentile America. The best of Jewish-American fiction goes beyond descriptions of, and lam-
entations on, various kinds of alienation and penetrates to a diagnosis of American society.
Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction has been concerned exclusively with Jewish settings and
characters, first in Eastern Europe (see, for instance, Satan in Goray, 1935; The Family
Moskat, 1950; The Slave, 1962; and Shosha, 1978), and, more recently, in New York (see
Enemies, 1970). Singer is also an excellent writer of short stories and received the Nobel
Prize in 1978. He was a masterful chronicler of the heritage, the religion, and the daily life
of Jews in Eastern Europe.
Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was awarded the Nobel Prize for his fiction in 1976. Bellow has
repeatedly dealt with the dilemma of the Jew in modern America. Chicago provides the
background for several of his novels. His early work reflects his reading of existential phil-
osophers and of Kafka and Dostoevsky32 as he explores questions relating to freedom and
identity (see Dangling Man, 1944; The Victim, 1947; and Seize the Day, 1956). The Ad-
ventures of Augie March (1953) is Bellow's first successful attempt with realistic picaresque
fiction and is concerned with the adventures of a young Chicago Jew. In Henderson the Rain
King (1959) Bellow portrays a Connecticut millionaire in search of his identity on a journey
32 Fyodor M. Dostoevsky (1821-81), Russian writer and best known for his novels The Insulted
and the Injured (1861), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), and The Brothers
Karamazov (1880). They discuss profound religious and political ideas and provide narrative
tension and excellent characterization. Dostoevsky admired Dickens, and both authors share an
interest in the city, in children, crime, and the suffering of the innocent. In the twentieth century,
he has become the most widely read Russian writer.
in Africa. Problems of the middle-aged Jew are central in Herzog (1964), an autobiograph-
ical novel on the marital and emotional difficulties of a Jewish intellectual. This has re-
mained Bellow's favourite subject. Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) presents a cosmopolitan
survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, now resident in the modern nightmare called New
York but living in the imaginary world of religion and literature. Humboldt's Gift (1975) is a
fictional portrait of the poet Delmore Schwartz and describes his assistance to the narrator,
Charlie Citrine, who is plagued by women, success, and the idea of death. The death motif
is central to The Dean's December (1982), in which a Jewish university professor ponders
death while in Chicago and Eastern Europe. Though Bellow later announced that he pre-
ferred the novella form to the novel (see his novellas, mostly concerned with Chicago char-
acters, The Theft, 1988; The Bellarosa Connection, 1989; and The Actual, 1997), he pro-
duced two more outstanding longer works of fiction. With More Die of Heartbreak (1987)
he returned to the world of his 1982 novel in yet another story about a Chicago professor of
botany and his marital difficulties. The book provides a good sense of place and people in a
postmodern America threatened by ignorance and corruption. The midwestern university
milieu also serves as the setting for Bellow's Ravelstein (2000), in which a brilliant elderly
professor, Abe Ravelstein, discusses his life and memoirs with a friend, Chick, who is the
narrator of the novel. The book ends on a sombre note as Ravelstein, returned from a trip to
Paris, succumbs to Aids while Chick nearly dies.
Cynthia Ozick (born 1928), a Bronx-born Jewish novelist and critic, has been concerned
with the Jewish-American identity that cannot be separated from the Holocaust. These
themes emerge in her "Jamesian" novel Trust (1966) and in her novellas collected in Blood-
shed (1976). The Cannibal Galaxy (1983), a short novel, features a Swedish critic fascinated
by Judaism and his discovery of the manuscript of a Polish Holocaust victim. The tragi-
comic aspects of the suffering Jew torn between his religious-cultural tradition and hedon-
istic America have been covered in several excellent and entertaining novels by Bernard
Malamud and Philip Roth. Bernard Malamud's (1914-86) realistic and compassionate novels
show outsiders distressed by the spiritual and moral poverty of their world (see The Assistant,
1957; A New Life, 1961; The Fixer, 1966; and Dubin's Lives, 1979). Malamud's The Tenants
(1971) is a parable of moral failure, and his last novel, God's Grace (1982), mocks the idea
of man as God's supreme creature in the story of the sole survivor of a nuclear war who
starts a new civilization among apes. Philip Roth (born 1933), like Malamud a former uni-
versity professor, has written satirically on the Jewish libido, the constraints of the family,
and guilt complexes (see When She Was Good, 1967). Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a hu-
morous psychoanalytical pseudo-study of the young Alexander Portnoy's sexual complexes
and his struggle with his possessive mother, remains one of Roth's best books. He has also
written witty satires on the Nixon administration, Our Gang (1971), and contemporary
America, The Great American Novel (1973); has explored with ironic humour the emotional
and professional problems of a Jewish writer in the largely autobiographical trilogy entitled
Zuckerman Bound A Trilogy and Epilogue (1985), which brings together in one volume
the previously published novels The Ghostwriter (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and
The Anatomy Lesson (1983; see also the epilogue, The Prague Orgy, 1985). He has treated
in grotesque and farcical modes the sexual hang-ups of educated Jewish men in The Breast
(1972), My Life as a Man (1974), and The Professor of Desire (1977). Roth returned to his
Zuckerman character in further novels of the 1980s that filter American events through the
Jewish psyche of a hero very close to the author: The Counterlife (1986) has the hero and
his brother Henry Zuckerman complain about sexual issues and taking a trip to Israel; and
The Facts (1988) carries the relation between author and invented alter ego to a first
extreme as the author writes a letter to his character in which he purports to say the truth
about his life. Roth's novels of the 1990s provide evidence of his continuing fascination
with the issues of (auto)biography, sexual and racial identity, and the doppelgnger motif.
Thus Deception (1990) presents a thinly disguised writer named Philip meeting his mistress
in a room without a bed; they talk, play games, have sex, and tell lies; Operation Shylock: A
Confession (1993) introduces a protagonist called Philip Roth who, after a breakdown,
travels to Israel and gets involved with a man pretending to be Philip Roth. In Sabbath's
Theatre (1995), which received the National Book Award, Roth created an elderly Portnoy,
Mickey Sabbath, who shocked many readers and critics with his selfish and amoral pursuits,
including minutely reported telephone sex (visually set off at the bottom of the pages), that
aim at nothing else but the satisfaction of basic primitive drives. Roth also brought back a
wiser and more distant Zuckerman observer in another trilogy covering the period from the
1950s until the late 1990s: American Pastoral (1997) compares the idyllic world of post-
war, middle-class America to the radical period of the 1960s as a daugther turns against her
father; similarly I Married a Communist (1998) reflects the McCarthy era of the Cold War
in the mind of characters (e.g., Ira Ringold) now much older; and The Human Stain (2000).
Based on the case of a New York Times editor, it tackles the issue of racial identity in the story
of Coleman Silk, a black who manages to pass for a Jew. Told by Silk's neighbour, Roth's familiar
alter ego, Zuckerman, the novel relates how Silk's entire life and career are based on this lie, as
the would-be Jew fathers children with a Jewish wife, takes a mistress, and finally stumbles over
an allegedly racial remark in class. Persecuted and maligned because of behaviour that is not
p.c., Silk confesses to his friend Zuckerman and finally kills himself and his mistress by driving
off the road. Highly critical of American ideas on what is p.c. in academe and in life (the famous
academic and dean Coleman Silk has a love affair with a charwoman), Roth's novel is a biting
satire on the racial issue in American culture. Commenting as it does on the moral corruption of
America (the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal serves as one of the backdrops) and American uni-
versities, where p.c. behaviour is shown to produce ludicrous and tragic consquences, this is one
of Philip Roth's best books. Like Sabbath's Theatre it is written against tendencies Roth per-
ceives to be extremely dangerous for American society.
Roth started the new millennium with the resurrection of another alter ego, the womanizing
academic David Kepish (who had already appeared in The Breast and The Professor of
Desire, 1977). The hero of the (pseudo)autobiographical The Dying Animal (2001), Kepish
has lived what he terms "emancipated manhood". The routine of the white-haired, sixtyish
faun is put into violent erotic disorder when he falls in love with Consuela, a beautiful
Cuban exile of 24 who produces maddening sexual possessiveness in the man who thought
he was a dying animal. The short novel ends on a sad tone with a grim loss.
E. L. Doctorow (born 1931) has been concerned more with American than with Jewish life.
The Book of Daniel (1971) is a political novel about the arrest and trial for espionage of the
Rosenbergs, a Jewish couple, and Ragtime (1975) provides a fictionalized slice of life from
the early decades of the century. It was sensitively filmed by Milos Forman. Loon Lake
(1980) tries to reconstruct the world of capitalism and crime of the 1930s. The early part of
the century seems to have fascinated Doctorow; he returned to its treatment in further
novels. Thus World's Fair (1985) traces the life of a boy maturing in the Bronx; the latter
provides the setting for Billy Bathgate (1989), on the life of gangsters during the 1930s. The
Waterworks (1994) combines the detective tale with the historical novel and goes even
further back into the nineteenth century in a story about the scandalous deeds of the New
York union leader Boss Tweed and his brutal accomplices. It evokes the social history of
America after the Civil War and is thus yet another chapter in Doctorow's attempt to cover
American history from the viewpoint of an outspoken socialist novelist. The work of Jewish
humorists and satirists Bruce Jay Friedman (born 1930; see A Mother's Kisses, 1964),
Wallace Markfield (1926-2002; see To an Early Grave, 1964), and Stanley Elkin (1930-
95; see The Rabbi of Lud, 1987; and The MacGuffin, 1991) and of such versatile novelists
as Chaim Potok (1929-2002), whose subject was the world of the Chassidic Jews and their
immediate neighbours (see The Chosen, 1967), attests to the continuing vigour of Jewish-
American fiction.
Before he died in 1996 Harold Brodkey (1930-96), also a superb writer of short stories,
gave us two examples of the Jewish postmodernist novel. The first, The Runaway Soul
(1991), was many years in the writing. A work of self-exploration and with a good shot of
autobiographical material, it has a fourteen-year-old boy, Wiley Silenowicz, as a centre of
consciousness. Filtered through his mind, the story of the book tells of his adoption in the
1930s by the Silenowicz family in St. Louis and of his tormenting by his sister Nonie, the
natural child of the family. With Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner in mind, Brodkey tried to take
further the stream-of-consciousness technique while tracing the vagaries of a mind maturing
from adolescence into manhood. Brodkey's Profane Friendship (1994), set in Venice, is
formally less experimental but as candid in its treatment of private erotic thoughts and
homosexual acts between the hero, Niles O'Hara, and his Italian lover, Giangiacomo
Gallieni.
Like Doctorow, Norman Mailer (1923-2007), as a writer, is more American than Jewish.
Mailer has written a very successful war novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), and has
since tried a variety of fictional genres, never forgetting to dramatize himself. After his more
conventional Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955) he abandoned traditional
forms of the novel. An American Dream (1965) is Mailer's attempt at a psychoanalytical
novel; Armies of the Night (1968) is his first nonfiction book with fictional passages. It was
followed by Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), Of a Fire on the Moon (1970), which
analyses the lunar landing, and The Executioner's Song (1979), which is indebted in its
structure to Capote's In Cold Blood (1966) and discusses the events around the execution of
the murderer Gary Gilmore. Among the numerous public statements Mailer has made about
his life and fiction there are some that stress his need of money, and this would explain his
more sensational works, written to become bestsellers in the market of popular fiction, such
as Ancient Evenings (1983) and Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984), the speculative biography
of Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn (1973), and a book on Cassius Clay, now Muhammad Ali,
called The Fight (1975). Since the mid-1980s Mailer has tried to produce the Great Amer-
ican Novel that would surpass even his early work, but the result has been generally dis-
appointing (see Harlot's Ghost, 1991, a spy novel about CIA operatives; and Oswald's Tale:
An American Mystery, 1995, a belated attempt to produce a non-fiction novel about Ken-
nedy's alleged assassinator).
If Afro-American fiction is now a powerful voice in American literature, it is because its
way was prepared by the members of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the work of
Langston Hughes (1902-67) and James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), an educator and
civil rights leader, and by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Seminal novels written
before 1960 include those of Richard Wright (1908-60), especially Native Son (1940), a
naturalistic study of the tragic life of a black man in the Chicago slums, and The Outsider
(1953), written in Paris and set in Chicago, and Ralph Ellison's (1914-94) superb Invisible
Man (1952). Ellison's theme is the black hero's search for his identity and his gradual
disillusionment with American capitalism, with socialism, and even with the black cause.
Containing both realistic and expressionistic elements, this novel has exerted influence on
several younger black writers. Today's black women and feminist writers found two fore-
mothers in Zora Neale Hurston and Ann Petry, discussed below. Ellison was followed by
James Baldwin (1924-87). Baldwin's more recent fiction has not fulfilled the promise of
his Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which is concerned with the frustrations of a young
black and his relations to ecstatic religious fundamentalism. An expatriate in Paris for many
years (Wright and Ellison went abroad, too), Baldwin has made his homosexuality as
important a motif as the race issue, and both are prominent in Giovanni's Room (1956) and
Another Country (1962). They were followed by Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone
(1968), about an aging black actor, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), about a pregnant
young woman's courageous fight for her imprisoned fianc, and Just Above My Head
(1979), which returns to the setting of his early fiction, Harlem, and dramatizes the life of a
Harlem gospel singer.
On 28 April 1963, 250,000 blacks, led by Martin Luther King, marched to Washington and
demonstrated peacefully for their rights. In the wake of similar events and of the work of
Baldwin and other writers, black literature has developed several impressive genres that
include fiction and confessional or autobio-
graphical writings, such as The Autobiogra-
phy of Malcolm X (1965), written with the
assistance of Alex Haley, Eldridge Cleaver's
(1935-98) Soul on Ice (1968), Bobby Seale's
(born 1936) Seize the Time (1970), George
Jackson's Soledad Brother (1970), and the
autobiography of Angela Davis (born 1944),
published in 1974. Alex Haley's (1921-92)
Roots (1976), a semi-fictional family chronicle,
became internationally known when it was
made into a TV series.
The Afro-American novel in the postmodern
period33 has continued to flourish, developing
a great variety of genres from crime fiction
(see the novels of Chester Himes, discussed in
the section on crime literature below) to expe- Zora Neale Hurston
rimental novels and feminist literature. Black as seen by David Levine. 1978
women's fiction, today represented mainly by
the internationally known Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones, had its pioneers in
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-60) and Ann Petry (1908-97). Rediscovered in the early 1970s
and canonized by Alice Walker in the 1979 as an outstanding black woman writer, Hurston
studied anthropology and became interested in the heritage of blacks in America. Her
33 See Walter Gbel, Der afroamerikanische Roman im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Einfhrung (Berlin:
E. Schmidt Verlag, 2001).
masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), is a milestone in the Afro-American
feminist novel, celebrating as it does the self-liberation of the heroine Janie.
Janie has to go through two marriages with domineering men to find her freedom. Courageously
leaving her first, brutal, husband after publicly humiliating him, she also suffers from male vio-
lence in her second marriage until she meets her true love, Teacake, a gambler and itinerant cot-
ton-picker. When Teacake is infected by rabies, she kills him in self-defense. Accused of
murder, Janie is acquitted during her trial due to the testimony of a white sheriff and a doctor.
Hurston's novel became a key feminist text exploring as it does the need of female authority and
independence in the face of male oppression.
Ann Petry covered the black ghetto experience in Harlem in The Street (1946), a novel
indebted partly to Richard Wright's racial issues but with an additional feminist agenda.
Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, to name just two authors, drew on the thematic and topical
examples provided by the novels of Hurston and Petry (see also Petry's Country Place, 1947;
and The Narrows, 1953). Toni Morrison (born 1931) is an Ohio-born novelist who has
written about the problems of black women in the North. The Bluest Eye (1970) was her
first major novel that engages with racial issues in the story of a young black woman
leaving the old South with the belief that blue eyes would get her accepted in society.
Morrison's next novel, Sula (1973), has an even stronger feminist agenda. In a fragmentary
plot, it is concerned with the friendship of two black women, Nel and Sula, who together
with their mothers embody the principle of continuity and reliability in the black community
unlike the men who resemble white oppressive males in their tendency to exploit and
suppress women. Issues beyond feminism emerge in Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977),
in which a black man explores his family history and discovers how myth is created, and
Tar Baby (1981), whose subjects are race and motherhood. In 1993, Morrison was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first African-American to be so honoured. The prize was
awarded for her feminist engagement, also obvious in the novel Beloved (1987), which won
a Pulitzer Prize, and her fictional exploration of the black experience in such works as Jazz
(1992), which is set in the 1920s and deals with the suffering of a black couple moving from
the South to Harlem in New York City. Morrison's strong feminist concern emerges again in
Paradise (1998), about the founding of a city in Oklahoma by black migrants and a sanct-
uary for persecuted women outside that city. Contrasting male ideas of order, hierarchy, and
power with feminine utopian notions of tolerance and liberty (including sexual behaviour),
Paradise tells a bitter message about men as those living in the city raid the women's
monastery and destroy their community.
Alice Walker (born 1944), who was born in Georgia, is one of several Southern black
women writers. She started with aggressive novels of social criticism and has meanwhile
turned to discussions and analyses of the specific problems of women and their relations
with men. Walker's Meridian (1976) deals with a woman torn between the revolutionary
Civil Rights movement and her love for the black people of the South. The Color Purple
(1982) became a national and international best-seller and, not least through Steven Spiel-
berg's tear-jerking movie version of the novel in 1985, made Alice Walker an international
star and spokeswoman of feminism in literature.
A letter novel largely written in the form of a diary, The Color Purple depicts the lives of two
devoted sisters, one of whom temporarily goes to Africa as a missionary, and their suffering in
the South (Georgia). Although there is much to be said for Walker's detailed picture of black
life, this novel suffers from an overdose of sentiment and flat characterization. It opens with the
letters of the heroine, the initially nave Celie, addressed to God. Celie reports about her father
raping her as a child and fathering two children with her whom he then sends away. She pro-
tects her younger sister Nettie from her incestuous father who marries her to a brutal black man.
True love, thus the message of this and other black feminist novels, only seems to be possible
between women. After losing her confidence in (the white) God, Celie writes to her sister in
Africa and turns for comfort to her husband's mistress. It is this self-confident woman, Shug
Avery, who teaches Celie self-respect and makes her discover her body. Joining Shug Avery in
Memphis, Celie falls in love with her and finds emotional and sexual fulfilment. The novel thus
moves from the depiction of female suffering to emancipation, as Celie becomes successful and
later admits her former husband, not back into the conjugal bed but into a business they share as
he acquires a name, Albert (the first part of the novel refers to him simply as "Mr"), and
almost feminine features. Another part of the novel deals with Nettie's experience in Africa,
where she has joined a family of missionaries. It is the second generation, Celie's and Nettie's
children, who seem to be able to find happiness in heterosexual relations with partners who
have learned to respect women. The occasionally extreme sentimentalism, the simplifications of
gender roles (the novel never inquires into the socio-economic forces and models brutalizing
black male behaviour), and the placative depiction of Africa are balanced by a moving vision of
the world through the eyes and the language of a disadvantaged, courageous, woman. Walker
manages to make Celie's language, which grows with her maturity, a sign both of her oppres-
sion and her emancipation.
Walker's later novels, all concerned with black (female) suffering and emancipation, include
The Temple of my Familiar (1989), a fictional study of three marriages that ranges from pre-
colonial Africa and post-slavery North Carolina to modern San Francisco, and Possessing
the Secret of Joy (1992), which resumes the Nettie-Olinka plot from The Color Purple. If
the simplistic condemnation of black men in The Color Purple detracts from the value of
the book, so does Walker's missionary zeal in the sequel which takes a polemical stance
against the circumcision of African girls. North America provides the setting for Walker's
By the Light of My Father's Smile (1998), dealing with a community of Indios and blacks in
the mountains of Mexico.
Other notable black women writers are Gayl Jones (born 1949), who has also written on the
slave experience and sexual abuse from a decidedly feminist viewpoint in Corregidora
(1975) and Eva's Man (1976), and some older writers mainly known for their fictional treat-
ment of autobiography, such as Lucille Clifton (born 1936; Generations, 1976) and Maya
Angelou (born 1928; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1971; Singin' & Swingin' & Gettin'
Merry Like Christmas, 1976; The Heart of a Woman, 1981). While still firmly anchored in
the Afro-American cultural experience, a number of younger black women writers have
been less concerned with feminist issues. Thus Diane McKinney Whetstone (born 1954) is
known for her historical fiction, which has been described as postmodern romance (see, for
instance, Tumbling, 1997; and Tempest Rising, 1999) and praises black humanity and love in
the face of suffering and diversity. Gloria Naylor (born 1950) has portrayed black culture
in the terms of magic realism and intertextual playing (see Mama Day, 1988; Bailey's Caf,
1992; and The Men of Brewster Place, 1998), a mixture one also finds in the novels of Tina
McElroy Ansa (born 1949; see Baby of the Family, 1989; Ugly Ways, 1993; and The Hand
I Fan With, 1996), who has confessed her debt to Zora Neale Hurston. A good shot of
humour and sentiment combined with precise social observation and the use of demotic
black English marks the best-selling fiction (some of it filmed) of Terry McMillan (born
1951; see Disappearing Acts, 1990; Waiting to Exhale, 1996; and How Stella Got Her
Groove Back, 1996). Xam Wilson Cartir (born 1949) has tried to marry the rhythms and
compositional principles of black music with the novel form in such works as Be-Bop, Re-
Bop (1987) and Muse-Echo Blues (1991).
Finally, Ishmael Reed (born 1938) and William Melvin Kelley (born 1937) are two of
several black experimental novelists34. Reed has written a number of parodies and satires
(see, for instance, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, 1967; Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down,
1969; about the fantastic adventures of a black cowboy; Mumbo Jumbo, 1972; and Flight to
Canada, 1976, the latter a parody of the slave narrative, which was popular in the nine-
teenth century) that are distinguished by a mixture of caricature, fantasy, and surrealism. As
a university professor, Reed witnessed the civil rights movement on campus. He spoke out
forcefully on behalf of American blacks in The Quality of Hurt (1973), an autobiographical
work, and as a consequence of the experiences described in this book he has a keen eye for
the struggles in American academe that involve race and class and, more recently, gender.
Thus his The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974) covers the racial issues in Berkeley during
the 1960s from a humorous angle. Reed's bizarre and occasionally surrealist humour turned
to black and bitter satire in The Terrible Twos (1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989), two
fantasies of political and social corruption in postmodern America. Japanese by Spring
(1993) ranks among his best satires on American academic life, as he describes factional
struggles and issues of political correctness in a fictional college in Oakland, California.
Kelley studied creative writing at Harvard, where John Hawkes and Archibald MacLeish
were among his teachers. His first novel, A Different Drummer (1962), portrays the exodus
of the black population from a fictitious Southern state. Its scope and the use of frequent
shifts of point of view are reminiscent of Faulkner. The experimental and surrealist style of
John Hawkes has left its traces in Kelly's dem (1967), which is a scathing satire of "the ways
of white folks" as a white New York advertising exe-
cutive searches for the father of the black baby to which
his wife has given birth. Kelley's Dunfords Travels
Everywhere (1970) contrasts a black in France who was
educated at Harvard with a swindler from the Harlem
ghetto.
At the end of the millennium, the Afro-American novel
has truly come into its own, covering a spectrum of
genres and approaches that is as wide as the one of
American literature in general. The neo-slave narrative
has been covered by Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed
as well as by Charles Johnson (born 1948; see Ox-
herding Tale, 1982; and Middle Passage, 1990) and J.
California Cooper (see In Search of Satisfaction,
1994). Ernest J. Gaines (born 1933) spent his early life
picking cotton on a Lousiana plantation and his novels
Of Love and Dust (1967) and A Gathering of Old Men
(1983) describe both the racism of the Louisiana Cajuns
as well the economic conditions creating such attitudes.
Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman
Rafael Medina, Koshare. 1968
(1971) was made into a movie; it is a novelistic slave
34 See also the works of Charles S. Wright (born 1932) and Henry Van Dyke (born 1928).
narrative and a saga of black history seen through the eyes of a 110-year-old woman, while
A Lesson Before Dying (1993), which received the Pulitzer Prize, traces the way toward
self-recognition and responsibility of a young black unjustly condemned to death. John
Edgar Wideman (born 1941) has described black history (mostly based on his own ghetto
experience in Pittsburgh) as a nightmare (see, for instance, A Glance Away, 1967; and Sent
For You Yesterday, 1983), most recently in The Cattle Killing (1996); the neo-gothic novel
has found a black representative in Tananarive Due (born 1966, discussed below); and the
epic fiction of Bebe Moore Campbell (born 1950; see Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, 1992;
and Brothers and Sisters, 1995) competes with the more humorous epic novels of Leon
Forrest (1937-97), which also have an experimental, intertextual, dimension (e.g., Divine
Days, 1997). Afro-Americans write science Fiction and crime fiction (see the sections be-
low); and some of them have explored the possibilities of using the African-American
musical heritage (blues, jazz) in fiction, most notably Xam Wilson Cartir (mentioned
above), and her male colleague Clarence Major (born 1936; see his Dirty Bird Blues,
1996). With the existence of a black middle class in America, African-American writers in
the new millennium have also focused on the fictional exploration of this part of black
America, most notably the Yale professor Stephen L. Carter (born 1954). Carter's prota-
gonist in The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), set at an elite university, is Talcott Garland, a
black professor of law and (like the author) a good chess player. As he solves a mysterious
murder case in his family, Carter has ample opportunity to describe the amenities of the life
of the new black bourgeoisie, a white spot in American literature and a far cry from the
slave narrative that was still championed at the end of the last century.
In addition to the literature written by Jews and blacks, major ethnic fiction has been pro-
duced by Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans. Since the late 1960s, Native
American novelists have been concerned both with the correction of prevalent stereotypes
and the construction of minority identities. While correcting the notions that Indians belong
to the past or must be seen apart from American culture, the Native authors rely on the
various tribal traditions of storytelling (especially trickster stories) and myths. The poet and
novelist N. Scott Momaday (born 1934) has recorded the legends of his Kiowa tribe in The
Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) and won a Pulitzer Prize with his novel House Made of
Dawn (1968). With The Ancient Child (1989) Momaday covered the ritual pilgrimage of the
painter Locke Setman. Tracing Setman's way toward a new Native identity, Momaday uses
elements of magic realism and Indian tales. James Welch (1940-2003) has written on the
modern Indians' loss of identity in such novels as Winter in the Blood (1974) and The Death
of Jim Loney (1979), and he has reconstructed the traditional world of a nineteenth-century
Blackfoot in Fools Crow (1986). The contemporary situation of educated Natives caught
between ethnic discrimination, politics, and crime is the subject of Welch's The Indian
Lawyer (1990). Leslie M. Silko's (born 1948) Ceremony (1977) combines modern realism
with traditional Indian forms, such as stories, songs, and myths. Her Almanac of the Dead
(1991), which integrates parts of the Maya chronicle Popul Vuh, is an apocalyptic prophecy
of the perishing of the Europeans' violent and amoral world reconstructed in the American
Southwest. Until the suicide of her husband Michael Dorris in 1997, Louise Erdrich (born
1954) wrote most of her fiction in collaboration with her spouse. She has covered the
twentieth-century experience of a people living on, and moving away from, a Chippewa
reservation in a series of six novels marked by irony and compassion: Love Medicine
(1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), and Tales of
Burning Love (1996) are all set in North Dakota, while The Antelope Wife (1998) has as its
background the urban area in and around Minneapolis. A multi-perspective view without
protagonists marks the fiction of the Chickasaw Linda Hogan (born 1947); in Mean Spirit
(1990) she describes the exploitation of the Osage tribe by white prospectors and oil barons
in the 1920s, while Paula Gunn Allen (1939-2008; see The Woman Who Owned the
Shadows, 1983) and Janet Campbell Hale (born 1947; see The Jailing of Cecilia Capture,
1985) have given Native American fiction a feminist twist in novels dominated by the motif
of pilgrimages toward new female identities. Like some other Native American novelists
(e.g., Louise Erdrich, the daughter of a Chippewa and a German-American father), Louis
Owens (1948-2002) is what he himself calls a "mixedblood" (he has Choctaw, Cherokee,
and Irish ancestors). He has dealt with the problematics of a mixed cultural heritage and
hybrid identities in fiction that is partly postmodernist and highly intertextual, using the
form of the crime novel to probe questions of race, belonging, and a waning culture (see
Wolfsong, 1991; The Sharpest Sight, 1992; Bone Game, 1994; Nightland, 1996; and Dark
River, 1999).
Other important Native American novelists are Thomas King, Gerald Vizenor, and Simon
Ortiz. The works of the Cherokee Thomas King (born 1943) include Medicine River (1990),
set in a community of Indians in a small Canadian town, and Green Grass, Running Water
(1993), a postmodernist variation of the Indian trickster tale. The latter is also an important
part of the witty fiction of the Chippewa Gerald Robert Vizenor (born 1934), who is also a
university professor and cultural critic. Vizenor has deconstructed the traditional images of
Indians upheld by Natives themselves and by whites alike in what he sees as post-Indian
fiction (see Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, 1978; Griever: An American Monkey King
in China, 1987; and Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel, 1997).
The recent fiction of Native Americans offers a varied and large spectrum of genres and
approaches, including historical novels (see Joseph Bruchac's Dawn Land, 1993; and
Betty Louise Bell's Faces in the Moon, 1994), crime fiction (see Erdrich/Dorris's The
Crown of Columbus, 1991), experimental works (e.g., Gordon Henry Jr's The Light People,
1994), and "littrature engage", i.e., politically engaged novels exploring the unpleasant
history of the exploitation and suppression of Native Americans down into the twentieth
century (see Anna Lee Walters's Ghost Singer, 1988; and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's From
the River's Edge, 1991).
The prose fiction of Hispanic-Americans has been dominated by the novels of Chicano
authors. Thus Oscar Zeta Acosta's (born 1935) fictionalized autobiographical books cover
his rise from poverty and drug addiction (see The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, 1972,
and the sequel The Revolt of the Cockroach People, 1973); Toms Rivera (1935-84) wrote
about the migrant Chicano workers in Texas and California in a short novel with elements
of magic realism that has become a classic (y no se lo trag la tierra / and the earth did
not part, 1971); and Rudolfo A. Anaya (born 1937) has covered similar subjects in fiction
set in New Mexico (see Tortuga, 1979, the last part of a trilogy). Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
(born 1929) is an minence grise among Chicano authors. Until the late 1970s he wrote in
Spanish and made Belken County in the Rio Grande Valley the setting of a series of novels
(the Klail City death trip series) marked by fragmentary elements. His recent fiction written
in English and set in the same location includes an experimental letter novel, Dear Rafe
(1981), an attempt in detective fiction, Partners in Crime (1985) and further chronicles of
the Rio Grande Valley, Beckey and Her Friends (1990) and The Useless Servants (1993).
Other contemporary Chicano authors include Nash Candelaria (born 1943), who has
covered the struggles between Anglos and Chicanos in Inheritance of Strangers (1985, the
final part of a trilogy), a theme he shares with Alejandro Morales (born 1944; see The
Brick People, 1988). Magic realism and the general influence of Latin American literature
shaped the fiction of Arturo Islas (1938-91; see Migrant Souls, 1990) and Ron Arias (born
1941; The Road to Tamazunchale, 1975). Experimental fiction has been written by Richard
Rodriguez (born 1944), who deconstructs autobiographical writing (see Hunger of Memory,
1981; and Days of Obligation, 1992), and Cecile Pineda (born 1942), who blends various
fictional genres (e.g., in Frieze, 1986, and The Love Queen of the Amazon, 1992).
Chicanas with a feminist orientation include Ana Castillo (born 1953; see the epistolary
novel The Mixquiahuala Letters, 1986; and So Far From God, 1993, the story of a woman
and her daughters in New Mexico); Helena Mara Viramontes (born 1954; see Under the
Feet of Jesus, 1995, about migrant fruit pickers); and Denise Chavez (born 1948; see Face
of an Angel, 1994, about a New Mexico waitress and her family).
Latin-American competitors of these Chicano authors are the Cuban-born Roberto G.
Fernandez (born 1951), mainly known for his satirical fiction about exiled Cubans (see
Holy Radishes!, 1995); Oscar Hijuelos (born 1951), the son of Cuban immigrants whose
best novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1990), describes the cultural shock and
the suffering involved in emigration; and Abraham Rodriguez Jr (born 1961), who is of
Puertorican origin and whose lively prose covers the urban setting and the language of
impoverished and partly criminal Latinos (see Spidertown, 1993).
Each of the large American cities has its Chinatown and Koreatown, the most remarkable
being in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. Despite the discrimination against Japanese-
Americans in World War II, when they were segregated in camps (an experience reflected
in recent Asian-American fiction: see No-No Boy, 1957, by John Okada, 1923-71), Asian-
American cultures have flourished in the post-war period.35 In the contemporary literary
scene Asian-American writers are present in all genres. As far as the novel is concerned, the
Chinese emigrant's view of America has been described in a realistic manner by Luis Chu
(1915-70) in Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), and by Chuang Hua (born 1937) in Crossings
(1968), while Maxine Hong Kingston (born 1940) has focused on the Asian's situation
between two cultures in such works as The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood
Among Ghosts (1976), which integrates biographical and poetic pieces, China Men (1980),
about Chinese emigration to America, and Tripmaster Monkey. His Fake Book (1989),
concerning a Chinese-American's experience of the Beat movement. Other Chinese-Amer-
ican novelists of note are Amy Tan (born 1952), who has written about conflicts between
generations (The Kitchen God's Wife, 1991), and Gish Yen (born 1956), known for her
tragi-comic treatment of the Chinese version of the American dream in Typical American
(1991). Japanese-American fiction includes works by Hisaye Yamamoto (born 1921; see
the stories collected in Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, 1988) and David Mura (born
1952; see Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, 1991). The Koreans have found a
literary spokesman in Chang-Rae Lee (born 1965), whose Native Speaker (1995) presents
the first-person narrative of Henry Park, a second-generation Korean born in the USA; and
Bharati Mukherjee, who was born in Calcutta in 1940 and teaches at the University of
35 On the history of Asian-American literature before 1945, see Heiner Bus, "Asiatisch-amerika-
nische Literatur", in Hubert Zapf, ed. Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte (Stuttgart: Metzler,
1997): 455-67.
California in Berkeley, has been concerned with assimilated Indians in America in such
highly praised novels as Jasmine (1989), about the creation of a new identity through
migration, and Leave It to Me (1997), which draws on the Hindu cosmos as much as it does
on American everyday life.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, notable novels by established mainstream
authors have come from John Updike, discussed above, and the lesser known Valerie
Martin (born 1949). The late Updike was one of the first to respond in novelistic form to
the attack on the World Trade Center that traumatized America. With Terrorist (2006),
Updike gave us a book that combines elements of the thriller with his more traditional con-
cerns the moral decay of post-capitalist America as opposed to the religious quest of in-
dividuals, and the initiation motif:
Set in the fictional East Coast city of New Prospect (modelled on Paterson, New Jersey) and
drawing its suspense from references to the terrorist incidents of 9/11, the novel creates a multi-
perspective panorama of what might be called the shaping of a terrorist in the United States.
This is Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, an Arab-American high school graduate with an Irish-Ameri-
can mother. Under the guidance of the mysterious Shaikh Rashid he converts from a moderate
Muslim into an Islamic suicide bomber willing to help in the blowing up of the Lincoln Tunnel.
As Ahmad joins the jihad and becomes a religious fundamentalist disgusted with American
manners, Updike also depicts the state's counter-terrorism forces (including Charlie Chehab, a
CIA agent finally beheaded by the terrorists) as well as Ahmad's dysfunctional family and
teachers, thus interweaving the thriller plot with the religious quest narrative. In fact, the novel
is driven more by moral and theological conflicts than by politics or ethnic disruption in so-
ciety. Updike is always at his best when either through a first-person narrator or his use of
free indirect speech he gets the reader close to the mind of his protagonist. It is precisely be-
cause we do not only follow the emergence of Ahmad's misguided fundamentalist views (de-
scribed with wonderful irony) but also the views of other focalizer figures around him (his
mother, his Jewish high school teacher Levy, his friend the CIA agent, and his African Ameri-
can girlfriend) that we finally understand the central issue of the novel the lament over the
hedonism and nihilism ruling contemporary America.
By comparison with Updike, the feminist fiction of Valerie Martin received little attention
until she won the prestigious British Orange Prize in 2003. Known to the specialists as a
sophisticated novelist and short-story writer, Martin produced a first outstanding work of
fiction in 1990 with Mary Reilly, a retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
from the viewpoint of the servant maid in the doctor's house (it was filmed in 1996). Her
prize-winning novel of 2003 was Property, a subtle take on the gruesome lives of two fe-
male characters, one black and one white, on a sugar plantation during the antebellum years
in the American South. Martin's The Confessions of Edward Day (2009) takes place in a
very different setting the habitat of young East Coast actors in the 1970s. The novel is
quite resourceful in its intertextual pastiche of the classics of "confessional" literature (St.
Augustine and Rousseau) and drama (Shakespeare's Hamlet, for instance) in the story of
Edward delivering to us an (unreliable) confession about his youth and later life as an actor.
In the course of the novel Martin skillfully interweaves several recurring motifs above all
quirky sexual obsession, the betrayals of love, the enigmas of identity, and the brutal busi-
ness of the artistic vocation.
Compared to previous decades, African American writers (e.g., Alice Walker and Toni
Morrison) have not produced works that are as impressive as that of the Jewish American
writer Philip Roth, surely a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. His recent fiction,
relatively short novels, is masterful in every respect in the way it integrates previous
literary models, its use of the ironies of biographical writing, and the exploration of the
Jewish psyche over several decades in American history. Thus The Plot Against America
(2004) projects an alternate history of the suffering Roth family in an antisemitic America
after a Nazi takeover (Charles Lindbergh beats Roosevelt in the election of 1940); Every-
man (2006) covers Jewish life (based on Roth's biography) in New Jersey over several post-
war decades, and Exit Ghost (2007) has Roth's alter ego from previous novels, Zuckerman,
reflect on twenty-first century America before he eventually dies.
Experimental fiction36 published after 2000 continues to be rich in themes, forms, and ap-
proaches. Like Updike, Don DeLillo turned to the events of 9/11 and the psychological im-
pact of the personal experience of the attack on one character and his family in Falling Man
(2007); this explores the nature of terrorist violence, the role of the mass media, and the
construction of reality. To some extent, DeLillo's lonely and frustrated characters (e.g., the
Manhattan billionaire Eric Packer in Cosmopolis, 2003) share their occasionally surrealist
world view with those one encounters in Paul Auster's fiction. Auster has remained faithful
to his experimental postmodern project of conjuring up dystopian and frightful alternative
worlds in The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Travels in the Scriptorium (2007), a self-reflexive
novel about a man locked in a room and reading the manuscript of another prisoner, and
Man in the Dark (2008), a dystopian work concerned with a newly (racially) divided America
after 2000. With Invisible (2009) he returned to his favourite themes and narrative methods
three narrators produce a tale stretching over 40 years in four interlocking parts that move
between America, the Caribbean and Europe while exploring questions of identity, memory,
and reality. In fact, most of the so-called writers of metafiction have remained true to their
particular lines of writing carved out in the final decades of the last century. In that sense,
John Barth and Robert Coover have not tried anything new they are still concerned with
the ironies of self-reflexive storytelling and the experiments with story forms. Bret Easton
Ellis has reflected in Lunar Park (2005) on his own fame after his controversial American
Psycho and the media world's creation of a powerfully attractive artificial reality; the novel
features a fictionalized biography of Ellis himself, several characters based on real people,
some from his own fiction, and allusions to websites Ellis fabricated himself. It is perhaps
Cormac McCarthy who has developed most among the postmodernists after his inter-
nationally praised Border Trilogy of the 1990s. This was followed by No Country for Old
Men (2005), which again reads like another Western novel but is essentially a study of evil
(in the character of the sociopath Anton Chigurh) in a narrative frame that changes between
third-person presentation and the reminiscences of Sheriff Bell, one of the protagonists. The
film version of 2007 was excellent but could not catch the literary allusions of the novel that
start with the very title and its reference to Yeats's poem "Sailing to Byzantium." With its
almost utterly pessimistic view of mankind, McCarthy's The Road (2006) approached
Beckettian dimensions of existentialism and nihilism, an aspect of his fiction that has been
too much ignored.
An apocalyptic tale of the journey toward the sea undertaken by an unnamed father and his son
across a landscape and through a civilization probably destroyed by atomic bombs, the novel
presents scenes of violence and horror as the father, a dying man, seeks a shelter for his boy.
36 For a recent study covering the works of Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Bret
Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland, and Thomas Pynchon until the end of the last century, see
Alan Bilton (2002), listed in the bibliography of this book.
Constantly faced with threats of attack and starvation, they encounter roving bands of cannibals
roasting a baby on a spit, and the father must kill to save his child. The latter gradually emerges
as a force of purity, a saint child or Jesus figure willing to share their dwindling food supplies
with fellow refugees. The laconic dialogues between the two reveal, inter alia, the mother's
previous suicide and the hope of the father that they "carry the fire." After extreme hardship,
they reach a milder zone in the south, the father dies and in the only scene providing some
hope in a world apparently abandoned by God the boy finds a foster family. If the novel
received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2006 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in
2007, it was no doubt because the critics noticed that this is neither a dark thriller nor a dys-
topian science fiction novel. While it does integrate some of the traditional elements of these
genres and is also an anti-Walden, its real concern is the existentialist testing of the humanist
message of the New Testament in a double apocalypse that could happen anytime first in the
cataclysm of an atomic war and then in the bleak conditions left to dehumanized survivors.
Yet the experimental writer who stayed most faithful to the principles of metafiction is
Thomas Pynchon. Almost ten years passed between the publication of Mason & Dixon and
his next novel, Against the Day (2006), yet another attempt not only to surpass Melville's
Moby-Dick in length, themes, and style(s) but also his own previous fiction, such as
Gravity's Rainbow and V.
Like some of his earlier works, this gigantic book (at 1,085 pages it is Pynchon's longest to
date) can be considered as historiographical metafiction, an attempt to cover the years between
the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the aftermath of World War I from various angles in sub-
stantially different styles of writing. Featuring more than a hundred characters and settings in
the United States, Europe, Central Asia, and Mexico, the Byzantine plot of the novel would
seem to mock the very idea of plotting in fiction. Two remarkable strands concern a group of
five balloonists and their dog (the "chums of chance") and the story of the anarchist Webb
Traverse and his family part of Pynchon's prevailing fascination with (government) con-
spiracies in the United States and the fight of courageous individuals (prototypes of the hippies)
against fascist systems. The multitude of plots leading into dead ends, and confusing episodes
resumed much later in the narrative exceed the reader's ability to follow but this is part of
Pynchon's game with traditional reader expectations and playfully embodies his notion of
entropy in the postmodern novel. Far more important are his pastiches in aping various styles of
writing and representation; thus he mimicks several types of fiction which, together, also help
to characterise the period: the boys' adventure story, the Western, science fiction concerned
with eccentrics and utopian writing, the spy novel, and even the sadomasochistic pornography
tale not to mention a plethora of popular songs. Perhaps this re-construction of a historical
period through the parody of its popular styles of representation in several media (borrowed to
some extent from James Joyce's Ulysses) constitutes one of the great achievements of the book.
It seems far more important than the various strands of plot and the endless list of characters
that includes mathematicians, drug users, and cameo appearances of Bela Lugosi and Groucho
Marx. What finally emerges in this re-creation is a panorama of unrestrained corporate greed,
religious hypocrisy, and evil intent in government circles Pynchon announced, tongue-in-
cheek, that no reference to the present day was intended. The major themes of the novel are the
implications and consequences of the technological leap around 1900, the war in modern
history between utopianism and totalitarianism, anarchism and hegemony, counterculture and
corporate control, and once again entropy and order. Even resistance to domination can end
in its own regime of domination, and science, the novel shows, can function as a method of
disenchantment and control or be a door to marvellous worlds.
This was followed in 2009 by Inherent Vice, which most readers found much more ac-
cessible, not least because it seems to be a "noir" detective novel with an extremely likeable
protagonist, private eye Larry (Doc) Sportello.
But again, Pynchon is after much more than just spoofing popular American detective fiction. It
is, in fact, also a historical novel whose narrator clearly sides with the hippies beleaguered by
the Los Angeles Police Department and the FBI. The time is 1970, as California and the US are
still shocked by the Manson murders and the Los Angeles police check any cars holding several
people. The setting is a fictional community (Gordita Beach) of surfers near Los Angeles, with
Doc Sportello (the names of the characters are as bizarre as always in Pynchon's fiction) in-
vestigating the disappearance of his ex-girl friend's present lover, Mickey Wolfman, a real
estate mogul. Sportello is a pot-smoking private eye of considerable intelligence and wit. As he
looks for Wolfman and this part of the plot becomes more and more mysterious (with a secret
organization called "The Golden Fang" looming everywhere), other threads are introduced in-
volving several corpses, a police spy who pretends to be dead, and a contract killer whose day
job is creative financing. As important as the plot strands that are eventually woven together
(the immoral Wolfman wanted to reform and was whisked away by his half-criminal cronies) is
the re-creation of the California counterculture of the late 1960s. Pynchon achieves this marvel-
lously through a parade of comic avatars of social types the sex-hungry woman, the rock and
roll scene, the drug takers that include the protagonist, and the hippie surfers. They appear in
various skirmishes with LAPD Detective "Bigfoot" Bjornsen and a number of shady characters
as well as the FBI. Amid this parade, the reader never loses sight of the major plot, but it also
becomes clear that Inherent Vice (a legal term referring to a hidden defect of a property or
object which of itself is the cause of its damage) is more than a pastiche of the fiction of
Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. It is an almost nostalgic celebration of the popular
(counter)culture in California as Pynchon must have experienced it when he lived there in the
late 1960s. Long-forgotten songs and movies (especially those featuring Doc's favourite actor,
John Garfield, one of the victims in McCarthy's witch hunt) are mentioned and discussed in
detail by Doc and his friends; and a slowly developing atmosphere of paranoia is created as the
novel comes to a satisfying end for the private eye. But Doc Sportello must also learn that the
corrupt and immoral people in power (some of them members of "The Golden Fang") "have
been in place forever", as the tycoon Crocker puts it. In a most entertaining manner the novel
describes what America lost with the passing of the free spirits of the Sixties, with their beach
communities, pop culture, music, drugs, and TV. Simultaneously, it foreshadows a darker future
of surveillance not least in the first technical steps on the way towards the internet ironically
taken by the hippies themselves. In this darker future, the epigraph of the novel suggests (a
graffito from Paris in May 1968), it will be time again to announce: "Under the paving-stones,
the beach!"
4.2 The Short Story37

Brief, fast-moving, and offering the reader suspense, surprise and, often, literary art, the
short story has become one of America's most popular forms of fiction. The reason for this
may have something to do with the demand of newspapers, journals, and magazines for
stories that fill only a few pages and attract readers. Such publications as Atlantic Monthly
(founded 1857), Harper's Monthly Magazine (founded in 1850; from 1900-1925 the title
was Harper's New Monthly Magazine; and since then Harper's Magazine), Harper's Bazaar
(founded 1929), a weekly women's magazine first entitled Harper's Bazar (1867-1929), and,
above all, The New Yorker (founded 1925) have contributed to the variety and popularity of
the short story by publishing experimental as well as traditional fiction. Writing, in America,
is a tough, competitive job. It is taught in creative writing courses at colleges and univer-
sities, and many short-story authors were inspired by attending classes held by established
writers. Thus Raymond Carver (1938-88), an outstanding practitioner of the short story
discussed below, took an influental writing class taught by the young metafictionist John
Gardner (1933-82). Authors engage in highly publicized contests involving both critical
esteem and financial success. And since many newspapers (the Sunday editions) and period-
icals pay handsome fees for recognized celebrities, reputable short story writers such as
Mailer, Updike, Vidal, Richard Ford, and DeLillo have published their fiction in Esquire
and even in Playboy.
Short stories have been written in virtually all the genres and movements in which novels
have also appeared, and most major novelists have produced short fiction. This holds true
for naturalistic writers like Jack London (Short Stories, 1960) and Theodore Dreiser (The
Best Short Stories of Theodore Dreiser, 1947), and the social criticism of Steinbeck (The
Long Valley, 1938) and of Southern writers like Erskine Caldwell (Complete Stories,
1953). A few authors have proved masters of shorter fiction. One of them was O. Henry,
the pseudonym of William Sidney Porter (1862-1910), who began his career while serving a
prison sentence for embezzlement. His stories (see the collections Cabbages and Kings,
1904; and The Four Million, 1906) are humorous, sometimes sentimental, and highly in-
genious in their use of coincidence and surprise, but they suffer from simplistic character-
ization that often leads to caricature. The satirical-humorous story was the special field of
Ring Lardner (1885-1933), a sports journalist who published some of his stories in the
Chicago Tribune and in The Saturday Evening Post. Held in colloquial speech and in slang,
they expose the self-deception and vanity of a variety of ordinary characters (The Collected
Short Stories, 1941). James Thurber (1894-1961) surpassed Lardner in public esteem.
Many of his essays, stories, and cartoons (some written in collaboration with E. B. White)
first appeared in The New Yorker, including his much anthologized "The Secret Life of
Walter Mitty" (1932), a hilarious description of the escapist fantasies of a henpecked hus-
band (see also Fables for Our Time, 1940, and The Thurber Carnival, 1945).
Short stories with a stronger literary appeal came from the pens of Sherwood Anderson
(Winesburg, Ohio, 1919; and Short Stories, 1962) and from those who profited from the
psychological approach and the principles of composition of Henry James, such as Edith
37 Biographical information (e.g., birthdates) is provided only for those authors not discussed in
the section on the novel above. A good selection of contemporary short stories by major writers
can be found in John G. Parks, ed. American Short Stories Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2002).
Wharton (The Best Short Stories, 1958). The principal authors who shaped the modern
literary short story are Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. All of them members of the
"lost generation", they questioned the meaning of human existence and values. F. Scott
Fitzgerald's stories about the Jazz Age demonstrate the degeneration of the American
dream in a world of hypocrisy, materialism, and recklessness. These are the major themes in
his story, "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (1922). Fitzgerald also covered the Hollywood
world of make-believe he knew from personal experience as a screen writer (see The
Stories, 1951). Hemingway's stories, written in the laconic and economical style for which
he became famous, introduce characters in basic human situations that reflect both the
nihilism of Hemingway's generation and his own preoccupation with courage in a cruel
world without meaning and in the face of approaching death. Thus Nick Adams, the hero of
several of his stories, must realize in "The Killers" how vicious and arbitrary life can be.
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936) presents another disillusioned hero in an African
setting: Harry, the novelist (a thinly disguised Hemingway), knows he must die, and as death
approaches he recognizes that both love and happiness ceased to exist for him long ago
death will be a relief. It is this experience of recognition (the Joycean "epiphany") and the
cruel surprise ending, borrowed from Ambrose Bierce, which the story has in common with
Hemingway's other "African" tale, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936).
Hemingway's stories are collected in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories
(1938) and The Nick Adams Stories (1972), which contains a number of posthumously pub-
lished "Nick Adams" stories in addition to the ones contained in the previous collection. As
a series, these stories were undoubtedly influenced by such earlier examples as Joyce's Dub-
liners and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Hemingway's short fiction has proved influential
for writers in America and Europe. This holds true for both his style and themes. His
realistic, precise, and economical diction, his sparing and unobtrusive use of symbols, and
his treatment of the issues that fascinated him most violence, fear, courage, and death
impressed numerous imitators and a number of contemporary authors. William Faulkner's
short fiction is inspired by such motifs as the decay of the South and race relations (see
Collected Stories, 1977). Like Hemingway, Faulkner wrote several stories combining a pro-
cess of recognition with a realistic plot and symbolic events. One such story is "The Bear"
(published in Go Down, Moses, 1942), in which Faulkner uses stream-of-consciousness
techniques, thus achieving a fiction that is much more complex than Hemingway's. Told
from the viewpoint of the rich landowner Isaac McCaslin, "The Bear" tells of the killing of
Old Ben, a bear symbolizing the freedom of nature and the wilderness, and of the death of
Sam Fathers, a half-blood. McCaslin's "epiphany" consists in the fact that he admits the
guilt of his ancestors and is prepared to do penance by dispossessing himself of his land.
Like his novels, Faulkner's stories are set in Yoknapatawpha, an imaginary Southern county
he peopled with eccentric characters driven and motivated by myth, past crimes, and ven-
geance. The stories often refer to each other and, together, establish a convincing if partly
grotesque picture of the South as Faulkner saw it (see, for instance, The Unvanquished,
1938, the first six chapters of which were originally published as short stories, and Knight's
Gambit, 1949).
Between 1930-1960, the short story writers stood under the influence of Hemingway, Henry
James, and Faulkner. The psychological realism of James and the Southern Gothic of
Faulkner are especially obvious in the work of such Southern writers as Katherine Anne
Porter (1890-1980; see The Collected Stories, 1967), Caroline Gordon (1895-1981; The
Collected Stories, 1981), Eudora Welty (1909-2001; Collected Stories, 1981), Carson
McCullers (1917-67), Flannery O'Connor (1925-64; The Complete Stories, 1971), and
Truman Capote (1924-84; Tree of Night, 1949; and Music for Chameleons, 1980). Al-
though Porter's "Flowering Judas" (1930) is set in Mexico, the story is exemplary, much
like the best fiction of Anderson, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Porter's story is about Laura,
an American teacher, who has lost her Catholic faith and has become disillusioned with her
revolutionary Mexican friends. Eventually, she realizes that she is a modern "Judas" in the
sense that she is incapable of human love. Truman Capote's "Children on Their Birthdays"
(1963) is an example of the typical Southern mixture of grotesque, humorous, and tragic
elements, a mixture that also distinguishes some of the short fiction of Welty, O'Connor,
Faulkner, and Porter. Capote's story, told by a thinly disguised "Mr. C.", brims with
Southern colloquialisms and local colour. Without sentimentalism, it deals sympathetically
with the essentially humorous behaviour, and the sudden tragic death, of a precocious and
eccentric teenager, "Miss" Lily Jane Bobbit. Behind Capote's brilliant portraits of unfor-
gettable characters and his charming views of the deep South one senses his profound love
of a region where he spent most of his childhood. What has been called "New American
Gothic" is also associated with Peter Taylor (1917-94), whose subject was the urban
middle-class world of the South (see Collected Stories, 1986), James Purdy (1923-2009; see
Color of Darkness: Eleven Stories and a Novella, 1957), who has explored the perverse that
lurks behind the ordinary, and Barry Hannah (born 1942), a successor to Faulkner with his
grim and grotesque treatment of Southern low life in Airships (1978), Captain Maximus
(1985), and Bats Out of Hell (1993).
The short stories written in the 1960s and 1970s reflect the division of American fiction into
traditional and experimental forms. J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, Richard Yates, John Up-
dike, and many Jewish authors have preferred conventional forms in their short fiction.
Salinger has often cast children and adolescents as heroes confronting the world of the
adults. Typical examples are his Nine Stories (1953), the chronicle of the Glass family:
Franny and Zooey (1961), Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An
Introduction (both in 1963) and his latest story, "Hapworth, 16, 1924", published in The
New Yorker in 1965. Cheever was the chronicler of the upper middle class in which most of
his novels and stories are set (The Stories, 1978). Richard Yates chose a more tragic view
in his portraits of upper middle-class life in America the hopelessness one finds in his
hyperrealistic stories (see Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, 1962) is matched by a moving dimen-
sion and a prose that can compete with the best of naturalistic fiction. John Updike has ful-
filled the same role a rung down in the social hierarchy: his stories about middle-class
characters display a scintillating verbal virtuosity (The Same Door, 1959; Pigeon Feathers,
1962; The Music School, 1966; Museums and Women, 1972; and Problems, 1979). Updike's
short fiction, much like his novels, is concerned with the issues he finds most interesting in
American life: the overpowering influence of materialism, the individual's need for love, the
omnipresent fear of death, and the futile attempts to overcome at least the fear by indulging
in sex. He combined these themes with the treatment of marital love in "Wife-Wooing"
(1960), a story that is also remarkable for its rich and evocative style. Written in the present
tense, and from the point of view of a nostalgic husband recalling the time of honey-
mooning with his wife, the story records the almost "Joycean" disappointment of the man's
lust and longing, and his "revenge" (a psychological reaction) as he recognizes his wife's
physical defects brought on by her age. Further realist chronicles of the changing morals
and manners of lower middle-class Americans as seen by Updike can be found in Too Far
to Go: The Maple Stories (1979), Trust Me (1987), Afterlife and Other Stories (1994), and
Licks of Love (2000, which also contains Rabbit Remembered, a novella concluding his
series of novels about Rabbit Angstrom).
The more distinguished short-story writers among the experimentalists are John Barth
(Lost in the Funhouse, 1968; Chimera, 1972; and On With the Story, 1996), who has re-
served the mode of the absurd for his parodic and self-conscious short fiction (Chimera, for
instance, returns to tales already told by Scheherezade and Perseus); Donald Barthelme,
whose subjects are the loneliness of people in the grotesque and fantastic atmosphere of
modern urban life (City Life, 1970; Guilty Pleasures, 1974; Amateurs, 1976); Robert
Coover, who plays with myths and archetypes in equally grotesque settings in fiction (see
Pricksongs and Descants, 1969; and A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Remember This,
1987) that is as much marked by pastiche, collage, and by self-reflexiveness as that of
William Gass (see In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, 1968), and Thomas Pynchon.
Pynchon's early stories have been collected in Slow Learner (1984). One of them is entitled
"Entropy".
First published in The Kenyon Review in 1960, this employs both American and mythological
characters in a story introducing people who live in three different apartments, and on different
floors, in a house. The second floor is occupied by a cybernetics
specialist, Saul, and his wife Miriam, who have an argument over
information and meaning. When Miriam leaves her husband in a
huff, he climbs to the third floor, where a party is going on that can
be heard on the floor above. This in turn is the home of Callisto
and Aubade, who have created an ecological sanctuary shut off
from the outer world. Applying some ideas of the thermodynamic
laws, Callisto is convinced that the world will end in a cultural
entropy, which he sees confirmed in the death of a bird he tried to
save by warming it, and in the action of his wife, who breaks a
window only to realize that the world outside has already reached
the final stage. Some of Callisto's ideas are confirmed by "Meatball
Mulligan's lease-breaking party" on the third floor, where numerous
people come and go and a huge heap of trash has been amassed. The
actions and conversations of the house dwellers essentially under-
line Pynchon's conviction, based on the thermodynamic laws, that One of the rare photos of
all "systems" are bound to run down and to produce chaos where Pynchon as young man
there was order. As in his much studied novels, he applies the laws
of entropy to fiction and thus creates a new and fascinating com-
bination of literature and science. In addition, "Entropy" plays subtle intertextual games with
European literature and the Western mythological universe: Names are employed as signifiers
that used to have meaning but have lost it (again an application of the laws of physics that is
one of the major motifs of the story): Aubade refers to a genre of chivalric songs; Callisto was a
king's daughter seduced by Zeus and transformed into a star; and the first sentence of the story
("Downstairs, Meatball Mulligan's lease-breaking party was moving into its 40th hour") carries
echoes of Joyce's Ulysses (which is in turn a parody of another text).
Other important experimental short story writers of the 1960s and 1970s were Ronald
Sukenick (1932-2004), known for his collage technique (see The Death of the Novel, 1969;
and The Endless Short Story, 1986), John Gardner (1933-82), whose fiction countered the
nihilisms of his age with visions of pastoral transformation (see The Art of Living and Other
Stories, 1981), and John Hawkes, a master of grotesque and nightmarish stories exploring
various drives of the subconscious (see Lunar Landscapes, 1969; and the novella Innocence
in Extremis, 1985).
The 1980s and 1990s saw the continuation of established schools, such as the fiction of
manners and metafiction. Writers like Updike provided further examples of the story of
manners and the experimentalists turned out more metafiction that had a remarkable influ-
ence on younger writers. Thus the stories of Pam Houston (born 1962; see "How to Talk to
a Hunter" in Cowboys Are My Weakness, 1992) reflect the distancing and collage styles of
Gass and Coover as she covers outdoor life in the West from a feminist angle. However, like
the novel, the short story also witnesses a renaissance of realistic conventions. Examples
can be found in the short fiction of the new realists among the novelists discussed above: in
the Southern fiction set in Western Kentucky, by Bobbie Ann Mason (Shiloh and Other
Stories, 1982; Love Life, 1989; Midnight Magic, 1998), and in West Virginia, by Jayne Anne
Phillips (Black Tickets, 1979; and Fast Lanes, 1987); and in works by Ann Beattie (What
Was Mine, 1991; Park City: New and Selected Stories, 1998; and Perfect Recall: New
Stories, 2001), Richard Ford (Rock Springs, 1987; Women With Men: Three Stories, 1997;
and A Multitude of Sins, 2002); and Tobias Wolff (In the Garden of North American
Martyrs, 1981; Back in the World, 1985; and The Night in Question, 1996). Outstanding
among the new realists are Raymond Carver (1938-88) and Mary Robison (born 1949).
Often referred to as one of the fathers of American neo-realism, Carver married at 18, sup-
ported two children by working evenings while studying at Chico State College in Cali-
fornia, where he was inspired by John Gardner's creative writing class. Providing for his
family while working as a janitor, waiter, and gas station attendant, he experienced the life
of the working class at first hand and never had enough time to write. In 1975, Carver de-
clared bankruptcy, and over the next two years he was frequently hospitalized for alcohol
abuse. When his first marriage failed, he began to live with the poet Tess Gallagher and he
died from lung cancer in 1988. Carver is the creator of what has been called "minimalism"
in fiction, a style that was flat and unemotional, spare and unadorned. His stories articulate
the lives of America's poor and working class (rarely those of the upwardly mobile) in which
human possibility was minimal at best. The title story in What We Talk About When We Talk
About Love (1981) is a good example, though it features characters from the middle class.
Like most of Carver's stories, it deals with a trivial everyday event. Two couples meeting for
dinner discuss forms of love and human communication. The plot drives towards an implicit
criticism of the cardiologist Mel McGinness, who shows a cold, indifferent attitude towards his
second wife Terri. As their relationship is gradually revealed to be superficial and Mel makes
advances to Laura, Nick's wife, the second couple provide an example of mutual love and
understanding, even though they talk very little. Reducing description to a minimum of infor-
mation and dealing with just four characters, Carver lays bare the essential drives behind their
behaviour aggression and egoism.
Minimalism's masterpiece so far, Carver's collection contains the hallmarks of the new
school a slight plot, an elliptical development of dramatic conflict, and the meticulous
recreation of class-specific or local speech patterns (see also Carver's Cathedral, 1983; and
Where I'm Calling From, 1988). Like Carver's stories, Mary Robison's short fiction is
distinguished by a spare, lucid, and detached style, and she has a keen eye for the small,
seemingly insignificant events and details of everyday life as she depicts the eccentricities
and foibles of middle-class Americans (see Days, 1983; An Amateur Guide to the Night,
1983; and Believe Them, 1988). Other contemporary new realist short story writers include
Madison Smartt Bell (born 1957; Zero DB, 1987; Barking Man and Other Stories, 1990),
Richard Bausch (born 1945; Aren't You Happy For me and Other Stories, 1995); and
Patricia Henley (born 1950), whose short stories also have a feminist dimension (see
Friday Night at the Silver Star, 1982; The Secret of Cartwheels, 1992). An unusual voice is
that of Andrea Barrett (born 1965), who was trained as a biologist. All of her short fiction
reflects thorough research and often blends historical and fictional characters in explorations
of the confluence of history, science, and memory (see Ship Fever, 1995). Barrett's short
fiction is matched by the clinically honest stories of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008).
Writing in the wake of Gaddis, Carver, and Ellis, Wallace unmasks the sad world of male
American minds distorted by TV, violence, sexism, and consumerism in his occasionally
brutal but always epiphanic Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2000).
The short story also mirrors the diversification in American literature in the last decade of
the past century (cf. the section on the novel above). Younger gay and feminist writers as
well as ethnic authors consolidated the work begun by their predecessors in the 1970s while
moving from the margins to the mainstream of American cultural attention. David Leavitt's
(born 1961) works, for instance, skillfully explore the experiences of gay men and women
in families and society in such collections as Family Dancing (1984) and A Place I've Never
Been (1990). A writer with feminist concerns is Mary Gaitskill (born 1954). She had a
troubled adolescene, worked as a stripper and spent some time in mental hospitals before
completing a B.A. at the University of Michigan in 1981. Gaitskill covered the postmodern
woman's alienation in America in fiction portraying a world of violation, bad behaviour, and
lacking intimacy (Bad Behaviour, 1988; and Because They Wanted To, 1997). Some women
writers chose science Fiction (discussed below) as a genre in which they depicted alternat-
ive worlds allowing new forms of behaviour for both sexes; examples are Ursula Le Guin's
(born 1929) Interfaces (1980) and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1992), and
Lore Segal's (born 1928) "The Reverse Bug" (1989). To some extent, Segal's particular vi-
sion of the world as an unsafe place derives from the fact that as a child she was expelled
from Vienna by the Nazis, and arrived in America via England.
Remarkable ethnic short fiction has come from Jewish, African-American, Native Amer-
ican, Hispanic, and Asian-American authors. Jewish writers who have produced fictional
studies of Jewish life and suffering in America include Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was
concerned with emigrants (Collected Stories, 1982), Cynthia Ozick (The Pagan Rabbi,
1971; Bloodshed, 1976; Levitation, 1982, and The Shawl, 1989, consisting of a story and a
novella), Bernard Malamud (The Magic Barrel, 1958; Idiots First, 1963; Rembrandt's
Hat, 1973), Saul Bellow (Mosby's Memoirs, 1968; Him With His Foot in His Mouth, 1984),
and Harold Brodkey. Malamud belongs to the line of authors who have drawn on mythical
and grotesque traditions reaching back to Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne. Malamud's story
"The Jewbird" (1963), for instance, is a cruel modern fairy tale in which a persecuted Jew,
in the shape of a bird, tries to find refuge in the home of a Jewish frozen-food salesman.
When the "bird" is thrown out by the salesman, it/he is killed by anti-Semites. Ozick's
stories, at times making use of postmodern techniques, bear witness to past evils (the
Holocaust) and to traditional Jewish moral values. By the time he died in 1996, Harold
Brodkey had gained a sizable reputation as a writer of short stories, many first published in
The New Yorker magazine. In such collections as First Love and Other Sorrows (1958) and
Women and Angels (1985) Brodkey covered Jewish family life in the small-town Midwest
while his best book of short fiction Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (1988) includes
prize-winning pieces reaching beyond the Jewish experience.
Thus "Innocence" (first published in American Review in 1973) is a highly erotic and funny
report by the narrator, a Harvard student called Wiley, who tries everything physically possible
to give an orgasm to a girl, his fellow student Orra Perkins, who claims that she is frigid.
Wiley's tale leaves out no sexual details whatsover, but the pornographic dimension of the story
is constantly undercut by the description of the seriousness and the frantic attempts involved in
sexual intercourse.
More recent Jewish short stories attest to the continuing influence of Malamud and Philip
Roth (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959, a novella and five short stories about Jewish life); their
grotesque and surreal fiction echoes in the works of Mark Helprin (born 1947; Ellis Island
and Other Stories, 1981) and Steven Millhauser (born 1943; "Eisenheim the Illusionist",
1989; and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, 1998).
Since the 1930s, African-American authors38 have also produced a rich harvest of short
fiction that includes the stories of Langston Hughes (The Ways of White Folks, 1934;
Something in Common, 1963) and Arna Bontemps (1902-73; The Old South, 1973), the
protest literature of Ralph Ellison (published in the 1940s and 1950s and collected in Flying
Home and Other Stories, 1996) and James Baldwin (Going to Meet the Man, 1965), and
the realistic descriptions of black life by Ernest J. Gaines (Bloodline, 1968). Experimental
fiction has been written by William Melvin Kelley (Dancers on the Shore, 1964), and the
new realism of the 1980s and 1990s can be studied in the short fiction of Don Belton ("Her
Mother's Prayers on Fire", 1989), Wanda Coleman (born 1946; A War of Eyes, 1988;
Heavy Daughter Blues, 1991; and African Sleeping Sickness, 1993), J(oan) California
Cooper (A Piece of Mine, 1984; Homemade Love, 1986; Some Soul to Keep, 1987; The
Matter Is Life, 1991), and John McCluskey (born 1944; "Lush Life", 1990). Feminist and
racial issues mark the recent fiction of Alice Walker (You Can't Keep a Good Woman
Down, 1981; The Way Forward Is
With a Broken Heart, 2000), and
Ann Allen Shockley (born 1927,
The Black and White of It, 1980;
"The World of Rosy Polk", 1987),
who is an outspoken lesbian and
has dealt with this issue in some of
her stories.
Hispanic-American short fiction
has come from the pens of Helena
Mara Viramontes (born 1954)
and Sandra Cisneros (born 1954).
A Chicana who grew up in East
Los Angeles, Viramontes has ad-
dressed economic, racial, and sex-
Native Americans Then and Now. ual oppression affecting Chicana
Mural Painting. n. d. women in her short stories col-
38 See Wolfgang Karrer and Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, eds. The African American Short Story.
1970 to 1990 (Trier: WVT, 1993).
lected in The Moths and Other Stories (1985) and Paris Rats in E.L.A. (1993), and Cisneros,
also a Chicana who has lived in Chicago and Mexico City, has given expression to the
feeling of a girl and woman living in a male-dominated culture and its connections with the
dominant Anglo society (The House on Mango Street, 1984; and Woman Hollering Creek,
1991).
Excellent short fiction by Native Americans dealing with problems of cultural and racial
adjustment includes works by Leslie M. Silko (Storyteller, 1981; and Gardens in the
Dunes, 1999), and Sherman Alexie (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,
1993; The Toughest Indian in the World, 2000). The Acoma Simon Ortiz (born 1941),
better known as a poet, has also published short fiction juxtaposing the materialist world of
white America with the culture of his Pueblo nation (see Fightin': New and Collected
Stories, 1983). The Asians' situation in America (immigration, cultural loss and longing) has
been the subject of short stories written by the novelists discussed above: Hisaye Ya-
mamoto (Seventeen Syllables, and Other Stories, 1988), Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club,
1989, a sequence of interrelated stories), Bharati Mukherjee (Darkness, 1985; and The
Middlewoman and Other Stories, 1988), and by Frank Chin (born 1940), one of the grand
old men of Asian-American literature and a severe critic of his fellow writers who is as
much known for his novels (Donald Duk, 1991; Gunga Din Highway, 1994) as for his
iconoclastic, demythologizing short stories (The Chinamen Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co.,
1988).
5. Children's Literature
The literature offered to children in the United States includes British works (discussed in
the section on twentieth-century British Literature above) as well as books written in North
America. Today, the market of children's literature in America is distinguished by its great
thematic and ethnic varities, drawing as it does not only on the Anglo-American tradition
but also on the literature for children from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Native Amer-
ican folklore. In what follows here, the focus will be on mainstream children's books.
There can be no doubt that the strong moralistic and pedagogic streak that has survived even
in postmodern children's books has its origins in America's Puritan heritage. Children's
literature deserves more attention for the very fact that from a psychological viewpoint it
serves as a reservoir for what psychologists term the collective unconscious of nations. In
this respect it would be interesting to study the differences rather than the common basis
between American and British literature for children. If American culture as such is strongly
intertwined with religion (Marxists would argue that the dominant, rampant, American capi-
talism actually needs religion in order to prosper), the literature for children reflects this to
some extent, for it also draws on the colonial Puritan piety books written for children. These
include Milk for Babes, Drawn Out of the Breast of Both Testaments (1646), a catechism for
children by John Cotton (1584-1652), who emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay colony in
1633 and became one of the most important religious leaders. He also wrote the preface to
the Bay Psalm Book (1640), a collection of psalms translated by Richard Mather (1596-
1669), among others. The book contained the Puritan doctrines in doggerel verse that could
be easily learned (if not understood) by children at an early age. This was also the case with
the first Calvinistic school book in North America, The New England Primer (1683).
Containing crudely rhymed couplets and woodcuts, it was meant to teach the alphabet and
to spread the Puritan faith contained in such prayers as "Now I lay me down to sleep". The
book is estimated to have sold close to 6 million copies. Its enormous influence is certainly
due to the Puritan tactics of trying to reach large sections of the population (including the
originally illiterate) in order to win them over to Calvinism (which, to this day, tolerates
even extreme forms of capitalism). The Puritans considered children as little adults who had
to be exposed to the Calvinistic faith at an early age even at the risk of provoking extreme
fear and psychosis (recorded in quite a few children's diaries) in children allegedly faced
with the prospect of hellfire in the case of bad behaviour. This is one of the reasons why
most of the leading Puritan theologians wrote books for children or books that could also
be read by or out to children. These include publications by Cotton Mather (1663-1728),
one of the most bigoted if still influential preachers (see Memorable Providences, 1689; The
Wonders of the Invisible World, 1693; and The Good Education of Children, 1708), and his
father, Increase Mather (1639-1723; see, for instance, Remarkable Providences, 1684).
Remarkable Providences was originally published under the title An Essay for the Recording of
Illustrious Providences. Containing accounts of extraordinary interventions of God or Provi-
dence in human affairs, based on reports by Puritan preachers in England and Ireland to which
Mather added further reports from New England, it was intended to provide scientific proof of
the presence of supernatural forces in the world. It is a remarkable book which, in New Eng-
land's Puritan-dominated culture, took the place of fairy tales and anything now associated with
fiction (which was frowned upon as a waste of time). Laced with theological observations and
conclusions in support of Calvinism, it was addressed to both adults and children. The book
provided entertainment in allegedly true and sometimes gripping stories lacking any critical
testimony and indoctrination in that it tried to spread the Calvinistic belief in predestination
and the interposition of God on behalf of his "saints" (i.e., confirmed members of the Puritan
congregations). It also fostered the belief, held by many Americans down to this day, that
America (or New England) was the New Jerusalem, a land whose pious inhabitants were
favoured and eventually saved by God.
In fact, it could be argued that this children's literature from the pens of Puritan indoc-
trinators was as influential in maintaining an ideology (through the collective unconscious)
as the one we find at work in the twentieth-century cartoons for children (and adults), which
also support the American way of life.
In the eighteenth century, America still imported and reprinted many books from England,
such as the popular Songs from the Nursery (1719). A new trend started with the adaptation
for children of books originally written for adults, especially humorous fiction and adventure
stories by Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Like Richard Henry Dana
Jr's (1815-82) Two Years Before the Mast (1840), a realistic account of Dana's voyage as a
common sailor on a merchant ship from New England to California and his sojourn on the
California coast, these versions for children introduced American subjects (the frontier, the
Indians, the American coasts). They also supported the gradual moving away from religiously
oriented writing to the generally moral and didactic literature that began with works by
Nathaniel Hawthorne. Some of Hawthorne's early tales (later published in Twice-Told
Tales, 1837) first appeared in Samuel Griswold Goodrich's (1793-1860) The Token (1827-
42). This was an annual gift book containing excellent stories with some literary value as
well as moralistic and sugarcoated fiction of the kind Goodrich wrote himself. Under the
pseudonym Peter Parley, he produced more than 100 moralistic books for youth instruction
(see, for instance, The Tales of Peter Parley About America, 1827). Hawthorne and Epes
Sargent (1813-80), a Boston author and journalist, were among the writers Goodrich em-
ployed to write children's books under his pseudonym. The nineteenth-century drive towards
entertainment combined with instruction is also obvious in the 28 volumes of the Rollo
series (1835ff.), published by the Massachusetts educator and clergyman Jacob Abbott
(1803-79) in collaboration with his brother John S. C. Abbott; these volumes contained
instructive stories for children. Both boys and girls enjoyed Joel Chandler Harris's (1848-
1908) Uncle Remus Stories. First published in periodicals (e.g., in Constitution, 1879) and
then in book form (Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, 1881; Nights with Uncle Remus,
1883; Uncle Remus and His Friends, 1892; Mr. Rabbit at Home, 1895; The Tar-Baby and
Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus, 1904; and Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit, 1906), these
stories are fascinating because they draw on black folklore. Harris was born and reared in a
small town in Georgia and later worked as a journalist in Louisiana and Georgia. He col-
lected his materials at first hand among Southern blacks.
The stories are told with a simple humour and authentic (Southern) dialect. Written in the con-
text of Southern plantation life, they are presented by Uncle Remus, once a slave, and now a
trusted family servant who entertains the young son of his (white) employers with traditional
tales and fables grounded in African-American folklore. Uncle Remus is both typical and
strongly individual in the way he talks, and the Remus collections owe some of their fascination
not only to the black folklore background but also to the Southern "local color" that comes
across in the oral tradition that informs Uncle Remus's language. The collection includes the
"Tar-baby" stories and others in which the protagonists are animals with human characteristics,
such as Br'er Fox, Br'er Rabbit, and Br'er Wolf. Harris's stories became successful enough to
allow him the founding in 1907 of his own Uncle Remus's Magazine.
Other popular works competing with Uncle Remus's Stories were written by Howard Pyle
(1853-1911), who was also an illustrator and painter (see his books about medieval heroes
and pirates; e.g., The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, 1883; Men of Iron, 1892; and
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates, 1921); Ernest Seton Thompson (1860-1946), who was
reared in Canada and won a reputation with his animal books (see, for instance, The Bio-
graphy of a Grizzly, 1900; Lives of the Hunted, 1901; and Biography of an Arctic Fox,
1937); Thornton W. Burgess (1874-1965), a Massachusetts author known for his whim-
sical depiction of animal life (see The Burgess Bird Book for Children, 1919; The Burgess
Sea Shore Book for Children, 1929); Gelett F. Burgess's (1866-1951) stories and drawings
involving "goops" (see Goops and How to Be Them, 1900); Palmer Cox (1840-1924), a
Quebec-born author and illustrator who created "the brownies", a good-natured race of elves
(see The Brownies: Their Book, 1887); Frank Baum's (1856-1919) fantasies about the land
of Oz, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), which was adapted for the stage (see also Ozma
of Oz, 1907; The Road to Oz, 1909; and The Lost Princess of Oz, 1917); and Frank R.
Stockton (1834-1902), a Philadelphia novelist known for his whimsically fantastic short
stories for children (see The Floating Prince and Other Fairy Tales, 1881; The Bee Man of
Orn and Other Fanciful Tales, 1887).
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, children's literature received an enormous im-
petus from the periodicals edited exclusively for the young. These started in 1789 with The
Children's Magazine; they were particularly numerous in the nineteenth century e.g.,
Parley's Magazine (1833-41), Merry's Museum for Boys and Girls (1841-72) and some of
them continued to be published into the twentieth century, e.g., The Youth's Companion
(1827-1929), St. Nicholas (1873-1940), American Boy (1899-1941), Boy's Life (1911ff.),
Highlights for Children (1946ff.), Cricket (1973ff.), and Cobblestone (1980ff.).
An interesting phenomenon of late nineteenth-

century American literature for children is the
emergence of gendering, as authors began to
write works aiming at either boys or girls. Thus
Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, the story of a
little girl, Dorothy, and her dog Toto, who are
whisked away by a cyclone from a drab Kansas
home to a land of adventure, seems to be written
with a female audience in mind; in fact, of the
50 books Baum wrote for children, eighteen
were written for girls, under the pseudonym
Edith Van Dyne. John Bennett (1865-1956)
wrote a book for boys, Master Skylark (1897), a
historical novel about Shakespeare's time. This
gendered catering to the two sexes continued
with the flourishing of magazines for children
Andy Warhol, Mickey Mouse. and the editorship of women. Thus the late nine-
From the portfolio Myths. 1981 teenth-century market was decidedly influenced
by Mary Mapes Doge (1831-1905), the author
of Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates (1865) and the editor of St. Nicholas (founded in
1873), a position that allowed her as important a voice in children's literature of the time as
that of Louisa May Alcott (1832-88), the editor between 1868-69 of the juvenile magazine
Merry's Museum (see also her A Garland for Girls, 1888). Additional fiction for girls was
written by Isabella Alden (1841-1930), who published 75 books under her pseudonym,
Pansy, and edited a magazine for children, Pansy (1873-96); Frances Baylor (1848-1920),
who dealt with Mexican children captured by Comanches in Juan and Juanita (1888);
Harriet Lothrop (1844-1924), who used the pseudonym of Margaret Sidney for her best-
selling Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (1881); Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-
1924), the English-born author of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886, later dramatised and filmed
with enormous success); Alice Hegan Rice (1870-1942), best known for her Mrs. Wiggs of
the Cabbage Patch (1901); Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856-1923), the founder of one of the
first American kindergartens in San Francisco and the author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook
Farm (1903); and Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), who covered her native frontier
Wisconsin in such popular books as Little House in the Big Woods (1932) and Little House
on the Prairie (1935).
The gendering of children's literature continued to increase after 1900 and is most obvious
in the work of Edward Stratemeyer (1863-1930) and his syndicate. Stratemeyer is the
author of several series of fiction for boys and girls. Among the 150 full-length novels
attributed to him, there are 30 volumes on the Rover Boys (1899-1926), written under the
pseudonym Arthur M. Winfield, 40 volumes about the inventive Tom Swift (1910ff.) and a
series about the roving Motor Boys (1906ff.). Under the name Laura Lee Hope, Stratemeyer
published books for girls too, e.g., those concerning the Bobbsey Twins. After Stratemeyer's
death his daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams (1894-1982), continued all his series
e.g., the American Girls series and the Hardy Boys series, the latter written mainly by Mrs.
Adams and expanded on his three novels about Nancy Drew, a girl detective (the works
were attributed to Carolyn Keene).
Children's books aiming at a male readership include Daniel Pierce Thompson's (1795-
1868) The Green Mountain Boys (1839), a historical romance dealing with the Revolution-
ary hero Ethan Allen; John Townsend Trowbridge's (1827-1916) Cudjo's Cave (1864), an
anti-slavery novel for adolescents; a series of romances about the South and the West by the
Irish-born novelist Mayne Reid (1818-83; e.g., The Boy Hunters, 1852); Thomas B.
Aldrich's (1836-1907) Story of a Bad Boy (1870), a semi-autobiographical novel; Noah
Brooks's (1830-1903) Western novel The Boy Emigrants (1877); Booth N. Tarkington's
(1869-1946) best-selling Penrod (1914) and its sequels; and the equally popular books by
C(harles) C(arleton) Coffin (1823-96; e.g., The Boys of '76, 1876; and The Boys of '61,
1881) and Horatio Alger Jr. (1832-99). Alger's books for boys demonstrate both the way
children's literature reflects the American dream (which in most cases means getting rich as
fast as possible) and the manner in which it also perpetuates it on a subdued ideological
level. Significantly, Alger came from an old Puritan family and graduated from Harvard's
Divinity School. After travelling widely and serving in the Civil War and then as Unitarian
Minister, he was ousted in 1866 for immoral relations with his choir boys. He moved to
New York to continue his literary career, writing about 130 popular books for boys.
What has been termed "the Horatio Alger myth" is the message of his fiction, almost all of it
based on the thesis that a struggle against poverty and temptation inevitably leads a boy to
success and wealth. His books thus propagate the American dream on the level of children's
literature. This dream came true in the stories connected with Alger's most famous hero,
Ragged Dick, who features in the series published after 1867; these books competed with two
other series Luck and Pluck (1869ff.) and Tattered Tom (1871) that worked with a similar
message wrapped up in adventure stories. Alger's enormous influence can be gauged from the
fact that more than 20 million copies of his books are estimated to have been printed.
More critical fiction also suited for children was written by Edward Eggleston (1837-
1902), who attacked conditions in rural schools in his boys' story The Hoosier Schoolboy
(1883), and Mark Twain, who held up the mirror to American society in his Tom Sawyer
(1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884), both discussed above in the chapter on nineteenth-
century fiction.
In the twentieth century, children's literature has diversified and offers a broad spectrum.
This reaches from factual information (e.g., in books by Patricia Lauber and Seymour
Simon) to fiction and includes novels, the pulp fiction produced for series in magazines as
well as comic books. Picture books for the very young are The Little Engine That Could
(1930), Dorothy Kunhardt's Pat the Bunny (1942), Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon
(1947) and works by the Alsace-born illustrator and cartoonist Tomi Ungerer (born 1931),
who spent some years in New York City (see Moon Man, 1967; Zeralda's Giant, 1972; The
Three Robbers, repr. 1998; and Tomi Ungerer's Heidi, repr. 1997). Authors writing for
children exclusively include Dr. Seuss (i.e., Theodore Geisel), Maurice Sendak (born
1928), a Brooklyn-born illustrator (see Where the Wild Things Are, 1963), Walter Farley,
and Walter Dean Myers. Numerous writers of fiction for adults have also catered to the
juveniles' market, e.g., the SF writers Isaac Asimov (1920-92), Ray Bradbury (born 1920),
and Ursula Le Guin (born 1929; see her SF for young people, A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968;
The Tombs of Atuan, 1971; The Farthest Shore, 1972; and Tehanua, 1990); Pearl S. Buck
(1892-1973), who still is a favourite author among adolescent girls; William Saroyan
(1908-81; see My Name is Aram, 1940), John Steinbeck (1902-68; see The Red Pony,
1937; and The Pearl, 1948); and James Thurber (1894-1961; see The Wonderful O, 1957).
Comic books cater to both adults and children alike; like the "funnies" part of American
(Sunday) newspapers, they constitute an important section of the market of popular mass
literature. In the course of the twentieth century, the comic-book market as a section of pulp
fiction has produced all-American heroes, such as Tarzan, Superman, and Spiderman, each
with their special series. These protagonists represent the stereotypical American ethical and
socio-political values (e.g., self-reliance, charity, democracy sometimes paradoxically
guaranteed by a hero with fascist features) while living mostly chaste lives. One of the ear-
liest was Edgar Rice Burroughs's (1875-1950) Tarzan series.
Also the author of many science fiction works, Burroughs is known above all for his fantastic
adventure stories about the son of a British nobleman, later named Tarzan, who is abandoned in
the African jungle as a baby and reared by apes. The feckless hero featured in a lengthy series
that started with Tarzan and the Apes (1914); in the many sequels, he grows up, marries and
also has a son and a grandson. Not least through the movies based on the series (one of the
earliest had Johnny Weissmuller, a former swimming champion, in the leading role) Tarzan has
become a crucial figure in the American collective unconscious.
Equally successful in the commercial sense was Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon series,
started in 1934. Interesting developments in the genre include diversification (e.g., there are
also horror and pornographic varieties) as well as gendering. The latter is obvious in
Wonder Woman, begun in 1941 by William Marston and H. G. Peters. The heroine of this
series was introduced as a woman "as lovely as Aphrodite as wise as Athena with the
speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules." Wonder Woman found a belligerent, fem-
inist, successor in the "phallic woman" starring in Diane DiMassa's Hothead Paisan (1993),
a protagonist described as a "Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist" in the sub-title and as such a
radical activist of a man-hating, pro-lesbian politics.
Various awards and prizes have contributed to an expanding market. Since 1921, the Newbery
Medal (the name is derived from an eighteenth-century publisher of chapbooks) is given to
the book judged best in a given year; and since 1938 the children's book considered to
contain the best illustrations is awarded the Caldecott Medal.
6. Popular Fiction
6.1 The Middlebrow novel, punk, horror, fantasy, and the Western
The novels of Norman Mailer, Erica Jong, and Alice Walker are indicative of a phenomenon
in American fiction that is not easily understood by Europeans used to distinguishing
between "high" and "mass" culture and to dividing literature into slices labelled highbrow,
middlebrow, and lowbrow. But in America, more than in Europe, the writer and his literary
product are subject to extreme commercialization by the publishing industry. This industry,
in turn, has close links with the TV and film industry. Huge advances are sometimes paid
for books that are not yet written; and books are often written with an eye to the possibility
of making them into movies (Alice Walker's The Color Purple, 1982, seems to be such a
work). Admittedly, this leads to a popularization of literary culture, a sort of middlebrow
taste, that accepts a variety of genres, including the experimental, but does not discriminate
sufficiently between the excellent, the mediocre, and downright trash. However, what can be
said in favour of contemporary American fiction is that it is always open to the innovative
and very much aware of the present.
The market for popular fiction is enormous in the United States. On occasion, it absorbs
best-sellers from such authors as Mailer, Updike and Vidal. But market forces now make it
more and more difficult for literary works to get into print. The giant chains Barnes &
Noble, Waldenbooks now choose what the American public will read, rather than the
intellectuals and literati. Books must be marketable to succeed on the market, a tautology
that aptly describes the relationship between popular taste and highbrow fiction. Anyone
entering a bookstore in the United States, especially those in airports or malls, will be over-
powered by the presence of popular fiction, with formulaic detective stories, spy thrillers,
science fiction, horror tales, romances, and westerns filling the shelves while serious novels
are sold under the label of literature. Internet book chains like Amazon provide a large
forum for readers where they can write reviews and comment on the books they have read
and these assessments reach from the banal to the highly sophisticated. The point is, how-
ever, that any former distinction between highbrow and middlebrow literature seems now to
have ceased to exist. Until the 1970s, important names in the middlebrow market were
Margaret Mitchell (1900-49), Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) and the very successful James
Michener (1907-97). Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936) is a romantic-sentimental novel
about the Civil War from the point of view of the Southern plantation owners. It sold
1,500,000 copies in its first year and many times that figure after the lavish motion picture
(with Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh) was released in 1939. Pearl S. Buck was the daughter
of a missionary and grew up in China. She popularized the East in such works as The Good
Earth (1931) and many subsequent novels based on her personal experience. Financially,
Michener surpassed Buck in producing numerous blockbusters. His successful recipe was
the clever mixture of historical fact and fiction in works that deal with regions and countries,
such as Hawaii (1959), The Source (1965, on Israel), Centennial (1974), which is a "faction"
history of Colorado, Chesapeake (1978), and The Covenant (1980, on South Africa). One of
Michener's last works deals with America's last frontier (Space, 1982). Another typical
popular novel written for the mass market was Mario Puzo's The Godfather (1969), which
sold over ten million copies. Its mixture of crime and sex helped to make it a bestseller and
an equally successful movie. A sequel exploited the popularity of the first film version.
Erich Segal's romance Love Story (1970), also made into a movie, topped the bestseller-list
for two years while William P. Blatty's The Exorcist did so in 1974.
In December 1987, the New York Times Bestseller List provided an impression of the pop-
ular taste. It contained two horror novels by Stephen King, a romance by Danielle Steel, a
sentimental-wry account by Garrison Keillor of growing up in the Midwest, a spy novel, a
crime story, two historical novels, a science fiction book, a children's Christmas book, hu-
morous tales of an outdoor man, a Michener epic and works by such literary authors as
Toni Morrison, Tom Wolfe, and Kurt Vonnegut. The situation had changed very little in
January 2001: Among the first ten on the Times Bestseller List could be found works by
John Grisham, Sue Grafton, Andre Dubus III, Thomas Harris, and Dean Koontz (to name
just the best known), and the genres represented were crime and horror fiction, romance,
sentimental novels, and literature for children. The pattern is clear: Pop fiction of all genres
dominates, though established "high" authors also seem to be able to reach the mass market.
However, in the list of 2001 no highbrow author turns up among the first fifteen.
Tom Wolfe (born 1931), who became known in the 1960s and 70s as one of the witty new
journalists, attempted to create a new social novel (an equivalent of the French fiction
produced by Balzac and Zola) with The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). The tragicomic story
of the accidental downfall of a rich New York banker, this was a huge popular success and
was duly filmed in 1991 by Brian De Palma. But much to the chagrin of Wolfe, it proved a
failure with the critics. Wolfe answered those who complained about his use of clichs and
stereotypes (in character and plot) in a manifesto published in 1989. But this could not
refute the charges; and the next bestseller he wrote in this genre, A Man in Full (1998), a
similar story about a conglomerate business king from Atlanta, Georgia, confirmed what the
critics had said all along Wolfe's fiction (like most pop literature), despite its occasional
high points, hardly ever rises above traditional expectations in this genre.
This is not the case with the punk fiction also produced in the 1980s, with Kathy Acker
(1948-97) as a major representative. Actually aiming at the destruction of any notion of high
(bourgeois) culture, including literature, punk fiction has a paradoxical dimension in that it
wants to be both popular and avant-garde. A feminist and a social critic as well as an artist
who styled her own body (including performances in peep shows on Times Square), Acker
produced controversial fiction that is postmodernist and anti-bourgeois. Like the experimen-
talists in fiction she mixed various genres (pornography, classical literature, movie scripts et
al.) to create works that are highly inventive if provocative in two ways: they plagiarize
deliberately while trying to create an alternative, non-bourgeois aesthetics. Occasionally
banned in other countries, Acker's Blood and Guts in High School (1978) was a succs de
scandale: a truly postmodernist work playing with texts by Freud, Hawthorne, and Boc-
caccio and mingling fictional and historical characters, it celebrates pastiche and frag-
mentary narration while exploring the self; but it sold because the author repeatedly said
that her book was about sex, language, and violence. In her subsequent works (see Great
Expectations, 1983; a pastiche-parody of Dickens; Don Quixote Which Was a Dream, 1986;
and Empire of the Senseless, 1988), the very titles indicate Acker's strategy of structural and
philosophical subversion as she pursues her aims of gender crossing and genre bending by
adopting and subverting allegedly highly aesthetic texts (e.g., Huckleberry Finn and works
by the Marquis de Sade). Subjected to the postmodernist play inspired by Derrida, Lacan,
and Kristeva, these prior texts merely serve as jumping board for Acker's ideas connected
with feminism, patriarchy, and the sexual repression of women. Compared with Wolfe's
novels, Acker's fiction is daring, innovative, and aesthetically interesting precisely because
it refuses to fulfil readerly expectations.
Punk fiction, unlike cyberpunk discussed below, constituted a rather small segment in the
market of popular literature. Thus, any picture of contemporary fiction would indeed be in-
complete without reference to the major genres horror, thrillers and fantasy, westerns,
science fiction and hyperfiction, and the huge market of crime novels. In what follows, only
the stars among popular fiction writers can be mentioned. Stephen King (born 1947) is the
acknowledged king of contemporary horror a late version of Gothic literature39. Writers of
neo-gothic novels such as King command huge audiences and enormous media attention.
King publishes a book almost every year and has written both Science Fiction and horror
tales. Drawing on Poe and Hawthorne and the vampire novel as well as on recent movies,
he has made millions of dollars by describing the eruption into everyday life of the irrational
and of supernatural and evil forces (see Pet Sematary, 1983). His works include The Dead
39 See Stephen Bruhm, "The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It", in Jerrold E. Hogle, ed.
The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002):
259-77.
Zone (1979), The Shining (1977), The Dark Half (1989), Gerald's Game (1992), and In-
somnia (1994). Together with Peter Straub (born 1943), another writer of horror fiction
who locates evil in this world, King has written what might be called horror thrillers (see
The Talisman, 1999) of which the latest is Black House (2002), about a serial killer who
murders and eats children but is, eventually, revealed to be a tool in the hands of darker
powers. Stephen King's female counterpart is Anne Rice (born 1941); her popular horror
fiction has a slight feminist touch, especially in the vampire trilogy Interview with the
Vampire (1976; filmed by Neil Jordan in 1994), The Vampire Lestat (1985), and The Queen
of the Damned (1988) but this is counterbalanced by a self-reflexive and, at times, tongue-
in-cheek use of the genre. Rice has also covered the world of witches and witchcraft in The
Witching Hour (1990), and its sequels, Lasher (1993) and Taltos (1994). There are also
Afro-American writers of neo-gothic novels who draw on the European and American tra-
ditions of horror tales, from Poe to King, but also on the African traditions of believing in
ghosts and magic that has survived in voodoo. Thus Tananarive Due (born 1966) strikes
the telling balance of realistic details and threatening supernatural events in The Between
(1995), the story of a black boy, Hilton, who finds himself moving towards insanity in a
mysterious world situated between the living and the undead. Borrowing from King's The
Shining and African spiritual ideas (in this case from Ghana), this psycho-thriller margin-
alizes racial conflicts (there is a white blackmailer) while celebrating American family
values. Due's My Soul to Keep (1997) verbalizes the belief in a meta-world of ghosts and
undead people in the story of an American black couple, Jessica and David, of which the
husband (originally an Ethiopian) has been given eternal life. This also has its horrible di-
mensions as he sees beloved people die around himself, including his own children. In order
to preserve his secret he even kills his wife's colleague and, persecuted by the searchers of
the magician who gave him immortality, he divulges his secret to his wife and daughter.
While he can save his wife and make her immortal too, his daughter Kira dies as the voodoo
ceremony is interrupted. Due successfully blends elements from various genres King's
supernatural fiction, superman cartoons, slasher movies, and stories about voodoo culture
in an attempt to pit an allegedly powerful, mysterious, African and African-American spirit-
uality against the soulless world of America.
The various horror and fantasy genres
have been blended in one of the most re-
markable novels to appear in the last dec-
ade, Mark Z. Danielewski's (born 1966)
House of Leaves (2000), which has al-
ready attained a cult status and deserves a
place in the canon of major fiction precise-
ly because it questions the borderlines
between elite and popular literature in
America.
In many respects formally, aestheti-
cally, and ideologically this novel can
compete with the best highbrow fiction of Keith Haring, Untitled. 1987
Pynchon, Ballard, King, and David Foster
Wallace as Danielewski aims at and achieves high literary targets. The plot is constructed
around several narrative voices that complement and contradict each other while weaving the
major story. This concerns a photojournalist, Will Navidson, who creates a film document of
his family moving into a new home. The project runs smoothly until the house proves to con-
tain an eerie maze of passageways and virtual spaces perhaps inhabited by an unseen male-
volent creature. An expedition into these spaces proves deadly, but the filmic record, then
translated into writing, proves a success. This Blair Witch-type of story is fascinating in itself,
establishing the horror element. But Danielewski then transcends the genre by complicating the
narrative process often, like Laurence Sterne, in ironic ways and drawing our attention not
only to the intricacies of showing/telling in text and image but also to the problems discussed in
high-brow literature, e.g., paranoia, loneliness, and despair in postmodern America. For what is
called the Navidson Record first falls into the hands of Zampan, a blind old man who edits it
in a notebook whose leaves (hence the title of the book) are found by his neighbour, Johnny
Truant, the major narrator and editor of the Navidson Record. Truant's latent paranoia increases
as he follows the Navidson story, preparing it for publication by adding his own comments in
footnotes that, at times, run over several pages. What the reader gets, then, are meta-narratives
complemented by a chorus of footnotes (Zampan's, Truant's, the editors' of the book) that are
beautifully orchestrated since the different voices can be followed through individual typefaces
in the text in which the word house is held in blue. Eventually, it turns out that the Navidson
Record is only one plot; equally important are the mysterious story of the old blind man and the
life of the paranoid Johnny Truant, the major narrator: the plot gradually unfolds his family
history in letters sent to him from an asylum by his mentally disturbed mother. Even more ad-
venturous than Sterne's Tristram Shandy, containing as it does photographs, different typefaces,
and the oddest visual quirks imaginable, the book is kaleidoscopically layered and deconstructs
the genres it integrates horror stories of the H. P. Lovecraft style, thrillers, postmodernist
fiction, and even academic criticism. In addition, it is not only intertextual but also intermedial
as the author borrows some conventions from film and music-videos. It also has a wonderfully
sad story to tell and deserves to be admitted to the canon of outstanding fiction.
A combination of thriller and horror tales can be found in the works of Thomas Harris
(born 1940), a former journalist, who achieved international fame with The Silence of the
Lambs (1988), filmed with Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. This features the serial killer
Hannibal Lecter who had first appeared in Red Dragon (1981), and was allowed to continue
eating people in Hannibal (1999). The popular American thriller is today represented by the
sensational novels of Tom Clancy (born 1947), featuring international corporate and milit-
ary conspiracies (see, for instance, Red Rabbit, 2002, a nostalgic look at the apprenticeship
in the CIA of Clancy's protagonist, Jack Ryan, who appeared in previous novels), and John
Grisham's (born 1955) similar fiction, but above all by the so-called father of the techno-
thriller, Michael Crichton (1942-2008), who came to international prominence through
Steven Spielberg's movie based on Jurassic Park (1990). Since then, Crichton has produced
many novels of this kind, which frequently contain appendices listing technical and critical
literature (see Disclosure, 1993; and Lost World, 1995).
The Western has one of the longest histories in popular fiction. The field encompasses the
formulaic novels of Louis L'Amour (1908-88, born Louis LaMoore), the "best-selling
Western author of all time", and the more sophisticated, culturally engaged, Western fiction
of Larry McMurtrey and Edward Abbey. By the mid-1990s, L'Amour had sold more books
(230 million copies) than his predecessors Max Brand and Zane Grey together. 33 movies
and TV films were based on L'Amour's almost 100 novels and 400 short stories. Larry
McMurtrey (born 1936) has described the mythic traditions of the West, including the
world of the cowboys, but also the psychic condition of frustrated Americans in Texan cities
(see The Last Picture Show, 1966; Lonesome Dove, 1985; Texasville, 1987; Buffalo Girls,
1992), while Edward Abbey (1927-89) was the chronicler of the ecological disaster caused
by the industrialization of the Southwest, and of the lonesome heroes fighting for nature
(The Monkey Wrench Gang, 1975). This subject also dominates in John Nichols's (born
1940) Western novels, distinguished by their grotesque humour in the face of psycho-
pathology and oppression (see The Milagro Beanfield War, 1974).
6.2 Science Fiction and Hyperfiction

Science fiction is an even bigger market than crime fiction. Novels and stories in this genre
are published each day by the dozen and most of them are quickly forgotten. At the end of
the millennium it has become increasingly difficult to separate British from American SF,
not least because the writers on both sides of the Atlantic share common subjects and scen-
arios. Twentieth-century American SF has drawn on the European precedent (e.g., Mary
Shelley and H. G. Wells) as well as on the utopian fiction of E. A. Poe (see Poe's proto-SF
stories40, such as "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall", 1835; and "Eureka",
1848) and Mark Twain's hilarious satire on time travel in A Connecticut Yankee at King
Arthur's Court (1889). The genre was further boosted by the founding of Amazing Stories
(1926), a SF journal edited by Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967). He emigrated to the United
States from Luxembourg and since 1953 is commemorated by the annual Hugo awards for
SF. Another SF magazine, Astounding, was founded by John W. Campbell in 1937;
Campbell promoted a number of authors who became internationally known SF writers,
among them Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. American SF published before 1945
appeared mostly in magazines and hovered between utopian-dystopian adventures and
fantasy; among the most prolific authors of this period are Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-
1950), also known as the inventor of Tarzan, and H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937; see his post-
humously collected works, The Outsider and Others, 1939; and Beyond the Wall of Sleep,
1943). The technical and scientific inventions of World War II and the manned travel into
outer space that followed brought about a double change post-war SF focused more on
technical details, on socio-political ideas, and it was marketed in book form. In this context
mention should be made of the Science fiction of Theodore Sturgeon (1918-85). With his
widely read novel More Than Human (1953), a psychodrama exploring loneliness and
shared consciousness, he achieved a cult status (see also his stories, some of them collected
in A Touch of Strange, 1958; Sturgeon in Orbit, 1964; and The Stars are the Styx, 1979).
Though the genre still suffers from the use of clichs and stereotypes, a few authors have
written SF literature, as it is called in the USA, that is worth reading because it consciously
avoids the stereotypes with which this kind of fiction seems particularly plagued.41 Ray
Bradbury (born 1920) has produced a dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and many
stories of the O. Henry type in SF settings. Among the 40 odd works to his credit, Robert
Heinlein's (1907-88) most impressive novel is Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), a bitter
satire on the failure of moral progress. Isaac Asimov (1920-92) is known for his huge
output of novels and stories, not just SF; his outstanding work is the Foundation trilogy
(1951-53), which assesses man's relation to history. One of the most underrated SF authors
40 See The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Harold Beaver (London: Penguin, 1976).
41 Apart from the more interesting authors discussed in the text above, American SF writers of
this century include August Derleth (1909-71), Frank Herbert (1920-86), and A.E. van Vogt.
was Philip K. Dick (1928-82), whose concern with reality and alternative universes had an
immediate influence on the rise of cyberpunk SF in the 1980s. Dick wrote many stories (see
The Best of Philip K. Dick, 1977), of which some were made into movies (e.g., Total Recall,
1990, is based on his "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale") and a few outstanding
novels, such as Time Out of Joint (1959), concerned with the question of what constitutes
reality, and The Man in the High Castle (1962), about parallel worlds, and A Scanner
Darkly (1977), about forms of mental and virtual entrapment.
The most remarkable developments in the genre of SF in the postmodern period are cyber-
punk fiction42 and feminist SF. Both suggest that the former line separating high (literary)
and low (popular) writing is beginning to disappear as authors such as William Gibson and
Ursula Le Guin are accepted in the literary canon. William Gibson (born 1948), an Amer-
ican-born writer living in Canada, is generally credited with the invention of the term cyber-
space in his pioneering novel Neuromancer (1984): Cyberspace is the sum of the world's
data, represented graphically (e.g., in a computer), and accessible by "jacking in" through
computer consoles. This involves the uploading of one's consciousness into cyberspace,
leaving the "meat" of the body behind. Once inside this virtual space, users ("console cow-
boys") can fly through the data, which recreates and represents urban (real) landscapes. The
term cyberpunk was coined by Bruce Bethke in 1983 and demonstrated as it were in Ridley
Scott's movie Blade Runner (1982), based on Philip K. Dick's novella Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep? (1968). Cyberpunk, then, refers to performances in several media, in-
volving both the celebration and the subversion of recent (computer-generated) technolo-
gies. In literature, cyberpunk usually describes a future world dominated by libertarian post-
capitalism, where a few powerful conglomerates exert international influence and nation-
states are weak or gone; where a dual economy flourishes and is enforced through corporate
modes of surveillance while society is urbanized in fragmented, divided, simulacra cities.
Human beings still exist in cyberpunk fiction, but so do cyborgs, i.e., posthumans (machine-
enhanced or genetically manipulated beings), avatars (virtual recreations of users in cyber-
space), and AIs (artificial intelligences not bound to any bodies). Against this backdrop,
cyberpunk heroes (space cowboys) are ambiguously located as working within the system
(often involuntarily like slaves) and against it as they eke out a precarious existence between
real and virtual worlds, criminal and legal behaviour. Today, cyberpunk refers to a genre of
science fiction as much as to the characters depicted in it and the subcultural formations in
which they move. William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) first demonstrated the possibilities
of the genre as well as its indebtedness to the gothic and the noir thriller:
Case, the protagonist of the novel, is a former cyberspace computer specialist (a mixture of
samurai, cowboy, and noir detective) punished for stealing data. His brain cells have been
manipulated, making it impossible for him to jack into the matrix. Isolated and self-destructive,
he is hired by an unknown authority (later revealed as an artificial intelligence) promising help
for him if he consents to go on a virtual reality quest. His target, Villa Straylight, itself a virtual
reality reminiscent of the threatening castles of Gothic fiction, belongs to a family (Tessier-
Ashpool) that controls the world's two most powerful artificial intelligences. As Case negotiates
his way between the real world (he lives in Tokyo and travels to Europe and America) and
42 On this genre, see David Bell, An Introduction to Cybercultures (London: Routledge, 2001);
Dani Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson
(London: Athlone, 2000); and Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies
in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
virtual reality, for some stretch of the way accompanied by the beautiful, posthuman, Molly, the
two AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer unite and the new artificial intelligence finally an-
nounces to Case that it is the matrix, that it has united with others in the universe. The novel
ends like many noir thrillers, with a beaten detective-hero, Case finding solace in discovering
his dead lover, Linda, "alive" as an avatar and waiting for him in cyberspace.
Gibson kept up this pattern in a collection of short stories, Burning Chrome (1988), and two
novels that can be considered as sequels to Neuromancer Count Zero (1986) and Mona
Lisa Overdrive (1988). What unites these works is the location (e.g., "the Sprawl", a con-
glomeration of cities between Los Angeles and San Francisco), and a few characters and the
subject of the lonesome space cowboy facing a real world of crime and conspiracies, and a
virtual world that becomes more and more enticing (often compared to a drug) for the
protagonist, though each novel has a separate plot. In Gibson's Virtual Light (1993), a bridge
in San Francisco occupied by dropouts and belated hippies becomes the meeting ground for
some of the major characters (Rydell and Chevette) faced with the same problems of a
disintegrating world controlled by mega-conglomerates, but with a shifting stress on
humanistic closures. Rydell returns in Idoru (1996), in which a rock star falls in love with a
computer-generated posthuman being (idoru), and again in All Tomorrow's Parties (1999),
in which the bridge in San Francisco is further developed into a carnivalized city in which
the noir-SF ex-cop Rydell is looking for the woman carrying magic glasses (containing the
plans for a new city). Published in 2003, Gibson's Pattern Recognition plays, tongue-in-
cheek, with his previous fiction in intratextual allusions as it were (the heroine's name,
Cayce Pollard, for instance, echoes the male hero Case from Neuromancer). In a story
mingling elements of the thriller and SF, the design consultant Pollard slips into the role of a
sleuth while investigating the mysterious creation and broadcasting of underground video
clips creating a worldwide buzz. Together with Bruce Sterling (born 1954), Gibson wrote
The Difference Engine (1990), which juggles with the idea of an alternative history and
takes us back into the nineteenth century, as Charles Babbage develops a computer that
really functions but helps turn the world into a dystopian nightmare. Sterling has written
cyberpunk fiction in his own right. His Schismatrix (1985, republished with short stories in
Schismatrix Plus, 1996) is about mankind living in artificial habitats and divided into two
species, Mechs (enhanced by computer interfaces) and Shapers (bio-engineered beings).
Sterling's Holy Fire (1996) probes moral and political questions concerning life-extension in
the story of an elderly Californian woman who is rejuvenated and escapes to Europe (see
also Distraction, 1998, the story of an artifically created spin doctor manipulating American
politics in a nightmarish future). Gibson and Sterling have found followers. Rudy Rucker
(born 1946) has described the struggle between giant AIs and hackers in Software (1982)
and Wetware (1988), both republished in Live Robots: Software (1994), with the surfers
triumphant in cyberspace; and in Snow Crash (1992) Neal Stephenson (born 1959), the
Gibson of the 1990s, invented the word "metaverse" (a cyberspace in which avatars can be
created and manipulated) and a postmodernist hero, Hiro Protagonist, half-black and half-
Asian, who must save the world from a drug/computer virus. Like Gibson, Stephenson
blends the archaic (Sumerian texts and beliefs are unearthed) with the hi-tech, mixing past
and future in a dystopian America kept human by lonesome characters such as Hiro or the
female pizza deliverer Y. T. Stephenson is as inventive a writer as Gibson, depicting an apo-
calyptic California controlled by Chinese and Italian mafias that are occupied with gang
warfare and viral/spiritual indoctrination. With Zodiac (1995), Stephenson wrote an eco-
thriller SF novel that is much more entertaining than Callenbach's didactic Ecotopia, while
The Diamond Age (1996) presents Stephenson's particular vision of the possibilities of
nanotechnology in the near future.
In addition to such cyberpunk fiction, mainstream SF continues to be published too. A re-
markable work in what is generally an ephemerous and formulaic genre is Greg Bear's
(born 1951) Darwin's Radio (1999), about the hunt for an infectious virus killing women
and babies that has been reactivated in an archeological site. More interesting, however, is
the SF written by authors with socio-political aims who use the genre of SF to bring about a
change of mentality in their reading audience. While
this didactic dimension harbours the danger of pro-
ducing manifestos thinly disguised as fiction (as in
Ernest Callenbach's ecological utopian novel, Eco-
topia, 1975), there are some excellent examples by
women writers and African-American authors.
While the former stress feminist issues, the latter in-
troduce such aspects as race and identity. Prototypes
of feminist SF have come from the brilliant Cana-
dian author Margaret Atwood (born 1939) and the
Americans Ursula Le Guin (born 1929) and Marge
Piercy (born 1936). They have appropriated the
genre not only to extend its limits by including the
issue of gender (usually neglected by male writers)
but also to propagate feminist ideas. Turned into a
movie by Volker Schlndorff, Atwood's The Hand-
maid's Tale (1985) projects some ultra-conservative
David Levine's view of tendencies of the Reagan era (religious fundamen-
Ursula Le Guin. 2002 talism, patriarchism) into a dystopian future, as the
female narrator reports from the imaginary Republic
of Gilead (a future fundamentalist America) about her sad life as a breeder of children.
Unlike Atwood, Le Guin has described female utopias in such novels as The Dispossessed:
An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), in which a revolution by women abolishes hierarchies to
introduce anarchy, and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which deals with a planet in-
habited by people who can choose and change their sex when they want to have sexual
relations. Alternative worlds for women also dominate in Marge Piercy's Woman on the
Edge of Time (1976), in which hierarchy does not exist but utopia is difficult to maintain;
and in the militant feminist fiction by Joanna Russ (born 1937; The Female Man, 1975)
and Sally Miller Gearhart (born 1931; The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women,
1979) describing worlds inhabited only by women. Finally, Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006)
and Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) are black SF authors of considerable verbal and formal
originality whose works explore racial issues as part of a larger social critique. Butler has
presented striking projections of feminist theory, sexual and racial oppression, and dehu-
manizing tendencies in a culture rushing towards progress (see Survivor, 1978; and Wild
Seed, 1980); in her Xenogenesis trilogy, aliens mate with the few human survivors of a
nuclear holocaust in order to create a better gene pool (see Dawn, 1987; Adulthood Rites,
1988; and Imago, 1989). In her more recent fiction, Butler depicts lonely heroines searching
for sanctuaries in an apocalyptic and dystopian future California plagued by marauding
hordes of drug-addicts (see The Parable of the Sower, 1993; and Parable of Talents, 1999).
Delany is one of the boldest contemporary innovators. After the metafictional excursions
into new cultures, languages, myths, and social milieus in his early novels (The Einstein
Intersection, 1967; Babel-17, 1966; and Nova, 1968) he wrote with Dhalgren (1975) a mas-
sive, unclassifiable, phantasmagoric work that employs SF conventions and metaphors ex-
ploring ethnicity, sexuality, and the effects of language on perception and identity.
In the new century after 2000, science fiction and cyberpunk fiction of literary value is hard
to find. William Gibson, for example, seems to have run out of steam in the genre. His
Spook Country (2007) is basically a thriller with elements of the spy novel. The book takes
a multilayered approach similar to Gibson's fiction prior to 2003 and treats themes relating
to the nature of media (locative art) and esoteric, as well as familiar Gibson ideas such as
the impact of technology on society and individual lives. The arrival of post-cyberpunk fic-
tion has also been announced, but the anthology of SF of this allegedly new type published
in 2007 by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel contained works that are not essentially
different from what Gibson, Sterling, and Stephenson had already written: this fiction con-
tinues to focus on a ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information and cybernetic aug-
mentation of the human body, but without the assumption of dystopia. Thus the fiction of
Cory Doctorow (born 1971), a Canadian writer, is neither anti-cyberpunk (e.g., Little
Brother, 2008), as some would have it, nor a new start, even though some of his novels are
set in the "real" world (Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, 2008).
Science fiction of some quality has been written by the established practitioner Neal
Stephenson and the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. Stephenson briefly tried the
historical genre with his Baroque Cycle (eight separate novels published between 2002-
2004) and then returned to speculative SF with Anathem (2008). This combines scientific as
well as philosophical speculation in a tale set on another planet and in another time as the
characters debate theories from quantum physics (alternative world models) and neuro-
science while living in a world in which some of today's theories have already become
reality (e.g., nuclear pulse propulsion). Atwood has given expression to her growing con-
cern with what she sees as irresponsible scientific experimentation and ecological behaviour
in two thematically related novels. The first is Oryx and Crake (2003), a critique of the
commodification of human life and concerned with the collapse of civilization brought on
by genetic engineering and xenotransplantation; and the second a more ecologically oriented
companion piece entitled The Year of the Flood (2009). Featuring some of the characters
from Oryx and Crake, it follows the destiny of a small group of survivors, God's Gardeners,
wondering whether they experienced the same environmental apocalypse as depicted in
Oryx and Crake. This, Atwood believes, might be upon us in the near future if we do not
change our behaviour concerning the environment and scientific experimentation.
As explained above, hyperfiction (or hypertext) seems to be the child of the marriage be-
tween electronic technology and poststructuralist ideas, especially ideas concerning the
openness of the art work, the ambiguity of the sign, and the importance of the reader in the
creation of meaning. Thus some recent novels are constructed along the patterns of e-mail
exchanges. An example is Astro Teller's (born 1970) Exegesis (1997). Held in the form of
e-mails between Alice Lu, a computer programmer at Stanford University, and her creation,
the programme Edgar, it traces a love story and the development of a consciousness that
eventually tries to escape to lead a life of its own.
Novelists, with SF writers at the forefront, have also exploited the possibilities of the inter-
net to promote their books, comment on them and whet readers'/internet users' appetite. Thus
the "blog", a sort of digital journal, is being used by quite a few authors and, in some cases,
takes the form of an extension of the book. Neil Stephenson, for instance, one of the stars of
cyberpunk fiction, created a "metaweb" around his novel Quicksilver: characters from the
novel turned up on this site, questions could be raised and were answered and footnotes
were provided. Stephenson's "metaweb" not longer active (partial archives may be found
via http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Stephenson:Neal:
Quicksilver) , in other words, extended his fiction into another medium as he created a
forum not only for Quicksilver the latter is also a sequel to his Cryptonomicon and as such
part of his trilogy, the "baroque cycle."
American authors have especially excelled in the new genre of hyperfiction43, as their works
integrate other media (e.g., pictures, film, and music) and thus become more attractive to a
younger audience. Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden (1991) is a typical example of
hyperfiction.
The opening of this work (available on CD) is telling, for the reader has a great choice of ac-
cesses, entering through either one of 13 "paths to explore" and "paths to deplore" or one of 39
"places" on a map or again by completing one of 56 sentences. At the beginning, the user is
made familiar with the grammar of Victory Garden as one learns how to move around in the
"text" while creating one's own story. There is then a polylinear sequence. Advancing in this
way, the user gets the impression of watching TV, with many locations and plots including bits
of the Gulf War between Iraq and the NATO countries. The setting is, mostly, a Southern
college town in the United States (Tara) that is peopled by disillusioned students and a crazy
prophet-professor. Fact (speeches by Saddam Hussein) and fiction become interchangeable as
each text sequence is cut down to about twenty lines, and the reader often feels "lost in the fun-
house." Each reading produces a new meaning that depends on the way one advances.
Unlike SF, HT fiction does not seem to have formed any national varieties; the major
authors are Americans. Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden works with the same principles
as Michael Joyce's Afternoon. A Story (1987), a classic of electronic fiction in which Peter,
a technical writer, begins his afternoon (in one reading) with a terrible suspicion. Together
with other hypertext specialists (e.g., Joy Kaplan; see her The New York Boyfriends, 2002,
an elaborate Freudian story told entirely through e-mails), Moulthrop and Joyce have
worked together on projects and publications, producing critical as well as fictional works
(see Moulthrop's Hegirascope, 1995, revised in 1997; and Joyce's Twilight, a Symphony,
1996). Hegirascope, or What If the World Still Won't Be Still contains 175 pages traversed
by 700 links that may turn the reading process into an adventure but can also prove
extremely tiring. As HT, CD-ROM, and the World Wide Web developed further technol-
ogies in the 1990s, the relationship between author and reader became even more fasci-
nating with more comprehensive reader/user participation in the creative process. Thus the
original WWW version of 253 (1996), by the Canadian SF writer Geoff Ryman (born
1951), allowed an extreme form of interconnectivity as the readers could browse randomly
through a series of 253 linked documents (character sketches, each 253 words long)
resembling an encyclopedia rather than a traditional narrative. While early examples of
hypertext literature, such as Shelley Jackson's (born 1963) Patchwork Girl, or A Modern
Monster (1995) a sequel or addition to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in which a female
43 For a recent study of HT, see Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2002).
monster is quilted as it were contained very few illustrations and no sound or cinematic
effects, more recent productions tend to be shorter, with more ambitious mixing of sound,
image, and text. Recent examples are Zahra Safavian's Berceuse (2001; see www.
drunkenboat.com/db3/safavian/intro.html) a lyrical hypertext offering painterly images,
New Age music, and snatches of poetry with links indicated in coloured words; Stephanie
Strickland's (born 1971) similar True North (1998), of which a print version is also
available; and Talan Memmott's (born 1964) Lolli's Apartment (1999), which constructs
and deconstructs texts and their media embedding. With the development of the MOO
(Multiple User Dungeons, Object-Oriented), a computer-based technology, a new era for
users began they could now assume an author role by creating imaginary spaces, roles,
and characters. Virtual writing communities have been created aspiring to the production of
authorless texts and the deliberate blurring of the boundaries between editor, writer, reader,
and critic.44 In Zahra Safavian's Berceuse, for instance, one does not even have to click
anymore as the cursor floats over the differently coloured links, landscapes appear within
landscapes and reading becomes a multimedia experience that includes viewing and
hearing. Such productions are, in fact, not essentially different from the works of such
artists as Peter Gabriel, who would be badly classified as a musician, for his CDs are also
multi-media productions that have advanced from combinations of sound/image/text to true
HT works that now allow and in fact urge the consumer to search links in the internet while
playing the CD. Hyperfiction aims not only to tear down the opposition between reader and
writer, it also attempts to obliterate the essential difference between world and word as an
illusion of presence and control is being produced. For the impression of absolute freedom
is of course an illusion since all details, even the possibilities of advancement (or return),
have of course been programmed. First reactions to the saturation produced by the enor-
mous amount of links in hypertexts are noticeable in more recent HT productions. Thus the
HT author and poet Felix Jung (featured as writer and designer) reveals the choice of the
recipient to be a fiction by resuming absolute control over the cursor: his poems (see
http://webdelsol.com/Synesthesia/; for example the poem "Cruelty": http://webdelsol.com/
Synesthesia/2/cruelty.html) build up in a frame that resembles an internet screen (e.g.,
Netscape), but the process is sequential and the cursor moves from text to image and cannot
be manipulated by the reader. The simulation of immediacy and never ending choice entails
some interesting psychological dimensions for the reader/user that have hardly been
explored (e.g., dimensions concerning emotion, addiction, eroticism, and the experience of
non-verbal, visual or musical stimuli). Perhaps we are in the romantic period of the com-
puter age, and like the first age of romanticism it probably also contains both the sublime
and the horrible.
A fascinating recent example is the aptly named Intimacies (2004) by the former professor
Eric Brown. It engages parodically with Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela as the plot is
transported to the late twentieth century and e-mails instead of letters are intercepted and
websites galore are provided for the reader's delight.
44 One example can be found at Lingua MOO (1995), created by Cynthia Haynes and Jan R.
Holmevik at the University of Texas, Dallas [http://english.ttu.edu/KAIROS/1.2/coverweb/
HandH/start.html].
6.3 Crime Fiction

After World War I, American crime fiction45 gained both a literary and sociopolitical dimen-
sion with the novels of Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) and Raymond Chandler (1888-
1959). They created realistic and disillusioned American detectives and provided some
criticism of the greed and the false values of post-war society during the Depression. Ham-
mett worked for eight years as a Pinkerton detective in San Francisco. He created the tough,
"hard-boiled" private investigator Sam Spade. In his thrillers (see The Dain Curse, 1929;
The Maltese Falcon, 1930; The Thin Man, 1932) there is a remarkable realism of subject and
language. Chandler followed Hammett's lead with such bestsellers as The Big Sleep (1939),
Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and The Long Good-bye (1953), distinguished by realistic
scenes of the seamy side of Los Angeles and a laconic and melancholic detective, Philip
Marlowe, who became a cult figure and was played by Humphrey Bogart in the film ver-
sions. Frequently characterized as the successor to Chandler and Hammett, Ross Macdonald
(1915-83) created the private detective Lew Archer, writing his first private-eye novels
under the name Kenneth Millar in the late 1940s. A low-key figure observing the action
from the sidelines, Archer was the protagonist of eighteen novels and a handful of short
stories (see The Moving Target, 1949; The Chill, 1964; and The Blue Hammer, 1976). Earle
Stanley Gardner's (1889-1970) Perry Mason (see also the TV series of that title) is a more
sophisticated and intellectual figure as he conducts his courtroom scenes as a lawyer-detec-
tive with an immense fertility of imagination (see, for instance, The Case of the Sulky Girl,
1933; and Some Slips Don't Show, 1957). Writers who have produced detective novels with
special and genre-making characters include John Dickson Carr (1906-77), who published
some of his works under the name Carter Dickson and set his British amateur detectives Dr.
Gideon Fell (see Hags Nook, 1932) and Sir Henry Merrivale (see The White Priority Mur-
ders, 1934) loose amongst the English countryside in impossible murder stories of the
Conan Doyle type; Rex Stout (1886-1975), creator of the gourmet detective and misogynist
Nero Wolfe (see The Golden Spiders, 1953, and the TV series); and Mickey Spillane
(1918-2006) and Ed McBain (1926-2005), who have continued writing into the 1990s.
Spillane initiated the "hard-boiled" thriller peppered with sex and sadism and featuring
private detective Mike Hammer. The latter has done honour to his name in a long series of
books (see I, The Jury, 1947; The Big Kill, 1951; Kiss Me, Deadly, 1952) and in a TV
series. After 1953, Spillane laid his chauvinist avenger to rest but brought him back in 1962
with The Girl Hunters. Although outdated in many ways by his pre-war attitudes (especially
about women) and his extreme violence, but recently turning into a Wagner music fan, the
unbeatable Hammer has survived to the 1990s, outliving his fictional colleagues Philip Mar-
lowe and Lew Archer. In Black Alley (1996), Spillane has him wake up from a coma and
track down a treasure of $89 billion. Since the 1960s, Ed McBain has clearly staked his
terrain in what has been termed the "police procedural" (as opposed to the private eye fic-
tion) in the 87th precinct of Isola (a fictive New York City), where his streetwise police
45 For surveys and discussions of recent developments in American crime fiction see Hans
Bertens and Theo D'haen, Contemporary American Crime Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2001); Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); Peter Messent, ed.
Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel (London: Pluto, 1997), and
Priscilla L. Walton and Marina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled
Tradition (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
detectives go about their unpleasant business (see Dead Man's Song, 2000). In McBain's
Money, Money, Money (2001), Detectives Steve Carella and Fat Ollie Weeks (repellent but
clever) investigate the death of a beautiful ex-airforce pilot, Cassandra Lee Ridley, lately
involved with Mexican drug lords. McBain's police characters have different racial back-
grounds (Italian, Jewish, black), a subject that is thematized repeatedly, but together they
face the sickness of postmodern American society racism, financial greed, dishonesty, and
the obsession with success in the media.
The most remarkable outsider among the McBain generation was Charles Willeford (1919-
1988) whose Miami Blues (1984) features a mentally unstable protagonist and criminal as
bizarre as his detective hunter, Hoke Moseley. Willeford planned for the next Miami novel
to have Moseley murder his own daughers but the publishers persuaded him to produce
three riveting and slightly surrealistic sequels before he died in 1988.
Until the arrival on the scene in the 1980s of the American ladies of crime and ethnic crime
writers, detective and mystery fiction was firmly in the hands of male authors. Among
themselves they created specific subgenres, such as those by McBain (the police procedural)
and Spillane (the private-eye or gumshoe novel). The masculinization was restricted to a
few forms that can be traced back to Conan Doyle, and was then further developed by such
writers as Hammett and James M. Cain (see The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1934), who
introduced unsentimental realism, a seedy world of accidental criminals, and an existential-
ism that was to spill over into the ultra-realism of Ellroy and Leonard in the 1980s and
1990s. But already by the time Spillane's Mike Hammer was serialized on TV, even a half-
ironic leading actor could not disguise the fact that the tough-guy image and macho be-
haviour had become outdated as both male and female spectators were already used to other
role models. These had been provided by women
authors. Still, some of the well-established authors
have continued to produce award-winning works
into the 1990s. The most interesting and inno-
vative writers are Elmore Leonard (born 1925),
Robert B. Parker (1932-2010), Lawrence Block
(born 1938), and Stuart Kaminsky (1934-2009).
Leonard is slowly being recognized as a novelist
whose works transcend the constraints of crime
fiction.46 He has also extended the limits and genres
by writing books that are not concerned with de-
tection as such. In fact, Leonard has written how-
dunits instead of whodunits, a good deal of his
fiction offering precise and deadpan social obser-
vation in an inimitable colloquial American Eng-
lish. Leonard has extended the genre of crime writ-
ing by catching up with American reality in a way
for by the 1980s casual murders were so com-
mon in the United States that most were not re- Levine's portrait of Elmore Leonard
46 See Margaret Atwood's praise of the intertextual qualities of Leonard's fiction in her superb and
witty review of his Tishomingo Blues (2002) in The New York Review of Books, 23 May 2002:
21-23.
ported. Leonard's fiction reflects this and other social and political facts (e.g., the CIA
encouraging and trading narcotics to finance foreign adventures) by showing the former line
between law and law breakers not to be a firm one anymore. His novels feature amiable
rogues occasionally straying on the wrong side of the law. With this rather naturalistic spirit
inspiring most of his works (he seldom uses recurring characters), Leonard has been one of
the top crime writers of the 1990s, and some of the film versions of these novels were box
office hits (see Touch, 1988; Get Shorty, 1990; Rum Punch, 1992; Riding the Rap, 1995;
and Out of Sight, 1996). Tishomingo Blues (2002) is one of the best works he has ever
written.
The setting is Tunica, a small town in Mississippi, where one of the protagonists, the good guy
Dennis Lenahan, seeks his fortune in a casino by plummeting from an 80-foot ladder as a high-
diver. Lenahan witnesses the murder of a small-time criminal by the Dixie Mafia before the
arrival of the bad guy, Robert Taylor, a cool black gangster from Detroit whose job is the
elimination of the local hoodlums. Taylor draws Lenahan into his fray by offering him the head
position of a clean front business for laundering money. Apart from a fast and gripping plot, as
Taylor tries to become the local padrone, the book offers a rich background in allusions to and
discussions of racism in the South (Taylor's grandfather was lynched by a Dixie clan), jazz,
popular culture (Robert Taylor was the name of an actor starring in crime and Western movies),
fairy tales, and literature. Leonard manages to wrap all this up in a deadpan and succinct style
that makes the subtlety of his book look easy. One can fairly predict that the award given to
Leonard in 1992 (a Grand Master of crime fiction) will be matched, one of these years, by a
Pulitzer for fiction that is both entertaining and educational in the best senses.
Regular male private eyes have featured in the novels of Robert B. Parker and Lawrence
Block. In 1973, Parker's The Godwulf Manuscript introduced Spenser, the hard-boiled hero
of a series that has proved popular into the 1990s. Spenser is an ex-boxer and gourmet cook
who, assisted by a delicate female psychologist (Susan Silverman) and a black alter ego,
Hawk (the three representing the Freudian trio of id, ego, and super-ego), solved cases in 24
novels (see Small Vices, 1997) and turning into a slightly, timeless, stereotyped hero. Per-
haps because he felt this too, Parker changed tack in 1997 with Night Passage, introducing
the new protagonist Jesse Stone and a new setting, Paradise, Massachusetts, and venturing
even further ahead in what is new territory for Parker with the creation of a female private
eye, Sunny Randal in Family Honor (1999). Lawrence Block's answer to Parker's Spenser
is Matt Scudder; he debuted in 1976 (In the Midst of Death) and earned his inventor critical
recognition in the late 1980s and 1990s when Block received crime fiction awards for A
Dance at the Slaughterhouse (1992) and The Devil Knows You're Dead (1993). Like
Spenser, Scudder is a private investigator and ex-police officer in New York City. He also
has a female partner, Elaine. But he differs from Parker's hero through class and behaviour:
Scudder is an alcoholic trying to get off the booze by meeting his clients in coffee shops and
joining Alcoholics Anonymous. Both Parker and Block offer not only suspense but also
reflection on topical social issues (e.g., pornography, arms deals, homeless people). After
trying a new formula in the 1990s with his Bernie Rhodenbarr novels, Block returned to his
Matt Scudder in Everybody Dies (1998), and facing the same series problems (stereotypes)
as Parker. Perhaps Stuart Kaminsky is the most fascinating of the writers listed above
because his setting is Moscow, and his hero is Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, a Moscow
police inspector assisted by investigators Emil Karpo and Sasha Tkach (see Death of a
Dissident, 1981; and Hard Currency, 1995). In later books, they are joined by younger in-
vestigators. As Kaminsky portrays a post-Communist Russia (Karpo stays a Communist
even after the big changes) with its various ethnic groups (including Jews) facing a greedy
capitalism (see Tarnished Icons, 1996), the psychology of his characters is well rendered in
a panorama of a troubled period for America's former enemy.
The male post-war crime fiction writers who have taken furthest the genre of the police
procedural are James Ellroy (born 1948), Michael Connelly (born 1956), and James Lee
Burke (born 1936). Ellroy has written crime novels depicting the moral and political decay
of an America ruled by corrupt officials at all levels, from the FBI and the government
down to state troopers. Like Connelly's fiction, Ellroy's crime novels imply that the very in-
stitutions that should safeguard America are already decayed from within (see L.A. Con-
fidential, 1990; American Tabloid, 1996). If Ellroy aims to be dead serious all the way (see
his own conspiracy version of the Kennedy and Oswald murders in The Cold Six Thousand,
2001), if he sees evil at the core of American society, it might well be that one reason behind
his mission is the brutal murder in 1958 of his mother (a thinly disguised fictionalized ac-
count is contained in Clandestine, 1982). Many of his characters are tortured souls and the
serial killer is a familiar figure in his works (Blood on the Moon, 1984; The Black Dahlia,
1987; see also his Lloyd Hopkins trilogy republished as L.A. Noir in 1997). With his recent
fiction, Ellroy has moved closer to the concerns of Elmore Leonard and Don DeLillo as his
thrillers focus on the relations between politics and organized crime: The Cold Six Thousand
is the second of a trilogy about "Underworld U.S.A." covering the years 1963-73. Providing
nightmare visions of the second half of the past century in a taught, no-nonsense style, Ellroy
holds up the mirror to an America in the stranglehold of greed, lust for power, and voyeurism.
This is a typical Ellroy passage (the opening of chapter 3 of The Cold Six Thousand) that
introduces the shady French-Canadian killer and secret service man Pete Bondurant:
The bridal suite. The fuck pad supreme.
Gilt wallpaper. Cupids. Pink rugs and chairs. A fake-fur bedspread baby-ass pink.
Pete watched Barb sleep.
Her legs slid. She kicked wide. She thrashed the sheets []
I fucked Jack in '62. It was lackluster and brief. You bugged some rooms. You got his voice.
You taped it. The shakedown failed. Your pals regrouped. You killed Jack instead.
In Michael Connelly's similar Harry Bosch novels, featuring Harry Bosch as a detective in
the robbery and homicide section of the Hollywood branch of the LA. Police Department,
the guardians of official society turn into criminals, sometimes because they have been
slighted or humiliated by that same society (see The Black Echo, 1992; The Black Ice, 1993).
In each novel, Bosch's cases immediately affect his own personal life (he has been demoted
for shooting and killing a suspect), and his later career (see Angels Flight, 1999) shows him
as the reincarnation of the classic hard-boiled detective. While Ellroy, like Leonard, seems
to be moving into mainstream American literature, Connelly takes up the same themes but
stays within the genre. This is also the case with James Lee Burke's novels concerned with
the fight of his Louisiana Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux. Thus Robicheaux, a single
father taking care of his child, is up against a band of neo-Nazis threatening the fabric of
society in Dixie City Jam (1994); and in Jolie Blon's Bounce (2001), he faces the corrupt
legal system while taking the side of Tee Bobby Hulin, a small-time black hustler and
musician of genius. Purple Cane Road (2001) was Burke's eleventh novel with the familiar
bayou hero who (like Ellroy's and Leonard's major characters) is quite aware that evil is
there to stay, that it cannot be traced to villainous individuals (see also Burke's A Stained
White Radiance, 1992).
A special subgenre of crime fiction is the caper novel, i.e., parodic or satirical works where
playful allusions actually expect the reader to know the mystery genres to be mocked and
subverted. Kinky Friedman (born 1944) is a writer who has developed this to perfection,
as his New-York based "Texas Jew boy" (aptly called Kinky Friedman) makes asides to the
reader that are reminiscent of Groucho Marx. Offering pungent social commentary, the
Friedman novels are remarkable less for their quirky plots but rather for their verbal pyro-
techniques and an approach one finds in metafiction (see The Kinky Friedman Crime Club,
1992; and God Bless John Wayne, 1995).
However, the most significant change in American crime fiction was brought about by
women writers. The female contribution has been recognized since the 1980s, when the first
generation of American Grand Old Ladies Sue Grafton (born 1940); Marcia Muller
(born 1944); and Sara Paretsky (born 1947) created their particular varieties of the
contemporary female private investigator. Grafton introduced her private eye Kinsey Mill-
hone in 'A' Is For Alibi (1982), a novel that reminds one of Chandler's settings and char-
acters. Twice divorced and living alone, Millhone solved a series of cases in subsequent
books listing the letters of the alphabet ('B' Is For Burglar, 1985; until 'M' Is For Malice,
1997), but showing little change in the major character apart from the fact that the personal
and the professional become inextricably interwoven. Marcia Muller's leading figure,
Sharon McCone, an investigator for a co-operative law firm, started out as an impressive
woman gumshoe (see Edwin of the Iron Shoes, 1977; and Games to Keep in the Dark, 1984)
but then turned into a female version of James Bond and a one-woman rescue team (see A
Wild and Lonely Place, 1995). Paretsky is no doubt the most versatile among these authors,
as her outspoken feminist protagonist (V. I. Warshawski) underwent a significant change in
one decade of writing. A tough, urban private investigator, Warshawski never discloses her
first names in order to avoid the harassment she knows to be connected with gender and
names in American institutions and particularly on her home turf, Chicago. A feminist at
first in words and at every encounter, Warshawski also brings in her family background at
several instances (see the first novels, Indemnity Only, 1982; Deadlock, 1984). She is not
afraid of antagonizing her clients, the police, and the criminals whenever she faces corrup-
tion in the city, and she also suffers for her courage by being beaten up and ending up in
hospitals. In Paretsky's novels to date, V. I. Warshawski thus stood up against the trade
unions in Indemnity Only, the Catholic Church in Killing Orders (1985), and the social
security and medical systems in Bitter Medicine (1987). By 1994, however, when Paretsky
published Tunnel Vision, Warshawski's feminism had changed: while it had been an attitude
frequently flaunted in the first novels, it had now become an integral part of her life as she
does volunteer work for women's groups. Thus, while Grafton feminizes her private in-
vestigator in her novel sequence and Muller takes McCone from humble origins to the
world of glamour, Paretsky uses her character to convey a feminism that is fairly radical for
the genre (but still liberal in general terms) and thus gains an interesting political dimension
through its fully developed gender issue.
Today, women writers are present in every subgenre of American crime fiction. Patricia
Cornwell (born 1956) pioneered the forensic medicine novel with her debut Postmortem
(1990), and has taken her brainchild, Kay Scarpetta the self-obsessed medical examiner
for the State of Virginia all the way to paranoia and the intrusion of the personal (see
Cause of Death, 1997; and The Last Precinct, 2000). Katherine V. Forrest (born 1939) has
given us a lesbian cop with her Kate Delafield working in the LAPD in Apparition Alley
(1997), while ecological mysteries have been written by Nevada Barr (born 1952; see
Track of the Cat, 1993; Endangered Species, 1998), the creator of Anna Pigeon who roams
the National Parks; Judith Van Gieson (born 1941; Parrot Blues, 1995), about endangered
species; and Karin McQuillan about African wildlife (see The Cheetah Chase, 1994). In
her Cincinatti police procedurals, Lynn S. Hightower has invented with Sonora Blair an
overworked single mother working as a homicide detective and gaining self-empowerment
in her job (see Flashpoint, 1995; and Eyeshot, 1996). These novelists have brought to crime
fiction a higher degree of psychological realism, as the female detectives are shown close to
paranoia and despair; and a sense of the regional, with female policewomen doing their
unpleasant jobs in the big cities (Chicago, Cincinatti) as well as in rural areas.
Together with female detectives, more credible ethnic detectives also had appeared in crime
fiction in the 1980s. Predecessors had, by then, been denounced as racist or stereotyped
images of Asian-Americans e.g., the Honolulu-born Chinese-American Charlie Chan in
the series written in the 1920s by the Ohio-born and Harvard-educated Earl Derr Biggers
(there were also Charlie Chan movies starting in 1926). Asian-American crime fiction has
been written by Dale Furutani (born 1946; see his Ken Tanaka series, e.g., The Toyotomi
Blades, 1996) and by Qiu Xiaolong (born in Shanghai in 1953), who came to the USA in
1988 and had to remain there after the Tiananmen Square massacre in China (see his Death
of a Red Heroine, 2000, which won the Anthony
Award for best first novel in 2001); and Chicano
mysteries the Henry Rios novels have come
from the Mexican-American gay rights activist
Michael Nava (born 1954; The Hidden Law, 1992).
With Chester Himes (1909-84) as a pioneer, Afro-
Americans have also written crime fiction. Himes
was an expatriate black American who began his
career after serving a prison term for armed robbery.
He started with angry protest novels against racism
in America (see If He Hollers Let Him Go, 1945;
Cast the First Stone, 1952; and The Primitive,
1955). In the early 1950s Himes moved to France
and there began writing detective novels set in Har-
lem and featuring two black police detectives, nick-
named Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones. Himes's
best works, apart from a bawdy satire on the sexual
relations between the races called Pinktoes (1965),
are The Real Cool Killers (1959), Cotton Comes to
Harlem (1965), of which there is a good film, The
Heat's On (1966) and the outstanding Blind Man
With a Pistol (1969), reissued as Hot Day, Hot Edward Burra, Harlem. 1930s.
Night (1971). Himes's detective fiction impresses Cover illustration for
with its naturalistic details describing a violent ghetto The Real Cool Killers
from which there seems to be no escape. This rea-
listic aspect, which includes black slang, is matched with some elements of occasionally
grotesque and surreal humour. Himes wrote what has been categorized as hard-boiled
detective fiction, and he found a follower in Walter Mosley (born 1952). If Himes set most
of his novels in Harlem, Mosley's terrain is Watts, the black ghetto of Los Angeles, where
Detective Easy Rawlins has to do his unpleasant job. Lacking the humorous streak of
Himes's fiction, Mosley's novels seek occasional relief from the daily horror of crime in
sentimental scenes between the hero and his adopted children.
This is the case in Black Betty (1994), which deals melodramatically with child prostitution in a
novel dominated by violent scenes in which the detective, cheated by white investors, appears
as neurotic and aggressive as the criminals. The major plot turns around the story of Black
Betty, prosecuted for the murder of her former lover and pimp. The (white) family of the dead
man try to cheat Betty out of her inheritance while trying to employ Rawlins for their purposes.
As the murderer is revealed to be the dead man's son, the novel depicts an American society
incapable of accepting racial equality and obsessed by money, an obsession that leads to murder
and mayhem.
Easy Rawlins is a reluctant sleuth quite aware of the moral ambiguity and the isolation of
his universe. Mosley also writes for a cultural agenda while exploring problems of race,
class, and property in the rigid social order of Los Angeles between the 1940s and 1960s.
Read together, the Rawlins books compose a sprawling novel of manners about mid-
twentieth-century African-American Los Angeles, a social panorama that owes much to
Dickens and Zola as well as to the aesthetics of noir. Mosley's major concerns social
commentary, the race issue, and the relation between literature and genre fiction have all
been woven into Bad Boy Brawly Brown (2002), his sixth Easy Rawlins mystery. If the
hard-boiled detective fiction of Himes and Mosley draws on Chandler and Hammett as well
as on Faulkner, Barbara Neely (born 1941), a black woman crime writer, invented with her
heroine Blanche a successor to Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Neely's
terrain in Blanche Among the Talented Tenth (1994) is not the black urban ghetto but an all-
black resort on the Maine coast dominated by rich mulattoes. As the socially inferior
Blanche (a maid whose skin colour is deep black) investigates in Amber Cove, she en-
counters racism, intolerance, and despicable behaviour on the part of a (half)black society
that seems to have adopted all the stereotypes formerly attributed to whites. Neely's more
recent Blanche Cleans Up (1998) is held in a much more aggressive tone, as Blanche lives
in Boston with two adopted children, rejects Christian beliefs and whatever faith she has
had in American justice in order to side with her race. Thus the detective novel gains a
socio-political dimension through its treatment of race and segregation in postmodern times.
The twenty-first century has seen further novels47 from the major authors discussed above,
though none of them has written anything that could really be termed innovative. It seems
that once crime writers have created their protagonists they will carry on with them as long
as readers want to buy their books. This is true for James Lee Burke with his Cajun Detec-
tive Robichaux (see The Tin Roof Blowdown, 2007, set in New Orleans after the devasta-
tions of the hurricane Katrina), and Elmore Leonard with his bank robber Jack Foley (see
Road Dogs, 2009). It applies to James Ellroy who concluded his Underworld USA Trilogy,
an investigation of the matrix of American politics and crime in the 1960s and 1970s (see
American Tabloid, 1996, The Cold Six Thousand, 2001, and Blood's a Rover, 2009), and
many others, including Black writers such as Barbara Neely with her heroine Blanche
White (Blanche Passes Go, 2000), and other women authors like Sara Paretsky (see Fire
Sale, 2005). If crime writers do change tack, it is mostly to introduce new private eyes in the
47 On recent American crime fiction see chapters 9, 11, and 12 in Martin Priestman (2003) listed
in the bibliography of this book.
hope of starting successful series. An example is Walter Mosley while he has marketed
further Easy Rawlins novels set in Los Angeles (e.g., Blonde Faith, 2007), The Long Fall
(2009) featured a P.I. named Leonid McGill, an ex-boxer and hard drinker based in
Manhattan, New York City, who faces essentially the same criminal and racial problems as
his alter ego in Los Angeles.
A great exception among crime writers is Susanna Moore (born 1943). Moore has written
in a variety of genres and only few thrillers. When she did write in the genre, she turned to
areas mostly avoided by classic crime fiction, in particular its sexual premises. Moore's In
the Cut (1995), filmed by Jane Campion in 1997, focuses on a woman's fixation upon male
language and power while embedding it within the growing panic about a serial killer in
downtown New York. The book addresses female angst and desire in the context of horror,
threat, and their representation in word and image. In The Big Girls (2007), Moore's sixth
novel, similar subjects are investigated. Set in a women's prison on the Hudson River, this
psychological crime novel chronicles the aftermath of a highly publicized murder and its
impact on four intertwined lives. The story is told in the alternating voices of Helen, a
schizophrenic serving a life sentence for killing her two children; Helen's psychiatrist, a
single mother who came to work at the prison out of guilt over a patient's suicide; a cor-
rections officer who becomes involved with the psychiatrist; and an ambitious Hollywood
star whom Helen believes to be her sister. Moore gradually traces Helen's psychosis to its
shocking origins, while also delivering a nuanced and devastating account of the brutality
that constitutes prison life.
7. Nonfiction
As in Britain, travel writing in America is one of the most popular genres of nonfiction and
travel writers are read in both countries, especially if they live in one and write about the
other. This has been the case with the two Americans who have shaped this genre in non-
fiction in the second part of the century Paul Theroux (born 1941) and Bill Bryson (born
1951). Also a distinguished novelist and short-story writer, Theroux was born in Massa-
chusetts and educated in the United States. He then taught in Africa (Malawi and Uganda)
and Singapore and he also lived in
England for more than a decade.
Theroux made his name through a
series of vivid travel books that
show the instincts of a novelist and a
satirist who both enjoys and loathes
what he experiences. His records of
epic railway travels are contained in
The Great Railway Bazaar (1975),
about a journey through Europe and
Asia to Japan on the Orient Express,
the Khyber Mail, and the Trans-
Siberian Express; The Old Patago-
nian Express (1979), depicting a
voyage from Texas to South Ameri-
ca, where he talks to Jorge Luis Thomas Morran, Rock Towers of the Rio Virgin. 1908
Borges who, in turn, gives him advice about travelling in the United States; and Riding the
Iron Rooster (1988), an account of a crossing of China. Theroux's books about travel by
other means and to other places include Sailing Through China (1984) and Sunrise with
Seamonsters (1985), about travels and discoveries between 1964-1984 (e.g., in Afghanistan,
Nyasaland, Burma, India) as well as profiles of people (V. S. Naipaul, John McEnroe et al.);
and The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992). The latter chronicles his voyage across the South
Pacific in a collapsible sailing kayak; it also takes in New Zealand and Australia while
providing a cynical vision of paradise lost. The Pillars of Hercules (1995) is what Theroux
ironically calls his travel report about a grand tour of the Mediterranean where he proves
bored among the ruins and entertains his readers with his familiar acerbic remarks. As the
sub-title suggests (grand tour), Theroux enjoys engaging with the older genres of travel
writing precisely by not fulfilling readerly expectations connected with the genres. Thus in
The Kingdom by the Sea (1983), sub-titled "A Journey Around Great Britain", he turns back
to the example of Dr Johnson and Daniel Defoe while providing his own American and cos-
mopolitan view of the coastline of Britain. Theroux explored the country by a land journey
and the book introduces some rather nasty areas and exceptionally boring people, thus re-
fusing to confirm international prejudices about the British. His most fascinating works are
those that have baffled the critics by showing no respect for the line separating fact from fic-
tion, travel reports from novels. Thus Theroux's My Secret History (1990), purportedly a
nonfiction work, explains how he split his time between England and America and acquired
"two of everything"; whereas My Other Life (1996), an imaginary memoir, mixes fact and
fiction in a way that Margaret Drabble, among others (see her Oxford Companion to English
Literature, s.v. Theroux), finds disconcerting. This is so because Theroux is quite aware of
the fact that any kind of confession is both a revelation and a fictionalization of the self.
Like Jonathan Raban, he has taken the travel memoir to new horizons with these works.
Bill Bryson has confessed to being influenced by Theroux, although finding him too grum-
py. Yet Bryson can be quite a curmudgeon too as he proved repeatedly. Educated in the
United States, he moved to England and lived there for many years before returning to
America and settling with his family in New Hampshire. Like Theroux, Bryson made his
name as an anti-travel writer, going to accessible places and finding them the opposite of
exotic and interesting. His books combine the English ironic and detached view of things
and people with a benign American vision. When, after two decades in England, he returned
to America, he provided vignettes of an almost strange country for him in The Lost Con-
tinent: Travels in Small Town America (1990). After moving back to New Hampshire, he
decided to explore his native country during a hike on the Appalachian Trail that stretches
from Maine to Georgia. The result can be studied in A Walk In the Woods (1999), a hilarious
book about two middle-aged men finding themselves hopelessly out of their depths in the
American wilderness. Bryson provided an ironic view of England in Notes from a Small
Island (1997) and also went back on the trail across Europe he first took in the 1970s (see
Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, 1993). His latest works cover his experiences
in Australia, where A-bombs go off unnoticed and prime ministers disappear in the surf (In
a Sunburned Country, 2000), and his feelings and thoughts about his own country (gun
laws, capital punishment, the FBI, junk food, and an increasingly threatened nature) that he
found newly strange upon returning (see I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to
America After 20 Years Away, 2000).
Important books in the social sciences which often created "schools" include David
Riesman's sociological analysis of the isolated and conformist American in The Lonely
Crowd (1950), C. Wright Mills's study of the irresponsible and selfish elites in The Power
Elite (1956), B. F. Skinner's behaviorist assertion that happiness and freedom can be con-
ditioned in Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), and the books
that started the "sex revolution", such as those of Sigmund Freud and the German exiles
Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, and the analyses of sexual behaviour
made by Alfred Kinsey (1948, 1953) and Masters/Johnson (1966). After the 1980s, a new
pragmatism was propagated by such philosophers and cultural critics as Richard Rorty
(Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1980) and Gerald Graff (Beyond the Culture Wars:
How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, 1992), who both cham-
pion dialogue as the best means in the search for truth.
H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken (1880-1956) was beyond doubt the most gifted journalist and
essayist in the first decades of the twentieth century. He attacked the imperfections of
democracy in America as well as the alleged cultural superiority of Europe. Mencken en-
couraged and supported several major authors, such as Dreiser, Lewis, and Anderson, and
had a great influence on American public opinion with such publications as The American
Language (first published in 1919 and revised several times), which deals with the develop-
ment of the English language in the United States, and Prejudices (1919-27), a series of cri-
tical and iconoclastic essays on a wide range of topics, which had first appeared in news-
papers and a selection from which was published in book form in 1927.
American nonfiction in the past decades has especially benefited from the deep interest
several gifted authors have taken in politics and writing. The most obvious results of this
dual interest are the movements called "new journalism" and "feminism". Both emerged in
the 1960s. The term "new journalism" covers a new style of writing in non-fiction prose (not
only journalism proper) that implies the writer's questioning of his own role and viewpoint
and borrows techniques and elements from the novel: scenic construction, complete record-
ing of dialogues, investigation of social mores, and even the stream-of-consciousness repre-
sentation. Always ready to admit to their subjectivity, the "new journalists" have written
about contemporary American culture, from its popular heroes to its alternative lifestyles.
Among the "new journalists" Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Seymour Krim, Jimmy
Breslin, and Joan Didion Wolfe and Thompson have been the leading exponents. The very
titles of their books provide an impression of their uninhibited pop style. Of special interest
are Tom Wolfe's (born 1931) The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), which is partly about
Ken Kesey and his fellow hippies, and the satirical description of various social groups in
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970). Hunter S. Thompson (1939-
2005) freely admitted to his use of drugs in the composition of his reportorial works. The
hallucinatory style became his hallmark, from the early Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
(1971), concerned with narcotics and their various effects on those who take them, to his
surrealistic coverage of the Honolulu Marathon in The Curse of Lono (1983). Shortly after
Thompson had committed suicide with a shotgun, Robert S. Boynton, dean of the Faculty
for Journalism at New York University, proclaimed a "New New Journalism" in an an-
thology containing works by, inter alia, Jon Krakauer, Susan Orlean, William Lange-
wiesche and Calvin Trillin. Even if they do not form a real new school of newspaper
journalists, these writers demonstrate an approach in nonfiction that is radically different
from that of the New Journalists. While the latter were greatly interested in the borders
between fact and fiction and tended toward fictionalizations of their writing, the younger
writers insist on detailed research, factual reporting and a style marked by literary tech-
niques. More often than not, the result is a book that provides the fascination of a novel. A
good example is Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer-price winning Death Will Find You (2005),
which traces the intricate political, religious and economic developments, including the
deadly rivalries between the FBI and the CIA, that culminated in Al Qaida's attack on the
World Trade Center in 2001. Like his colleagues mentioned above, Wright writes for such
distinguished magazines as The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly and he even orchestrated
public performances focusing on his work ("My Road to Al Qaida") that cast a rather
strange light on his alleged moral concern.
In the field of literary history the twentieth century has seen the completion of several multi-
volume histories, of which The Cambridge History of American Literature, edited between
1917 and 1921 by a group of scholars, and Robert E. Spiller's Literary History of the
United States (1948-1959) remain the most interesting, albeit now outdated, works. In 1988,
Emory Elliott edited the Columbia Literary History of the United States, which makes a
chivalric gesture to Native Americans by giving the first word to N. Scott Momaday open-
ing the batting with a chapter on the native voice. Sacvan Bercovitch served as editor for a
new edition of the Cambridge History of American Literature in 8 volumes (1994-2004). In
the wake of postmodernism, some American scholars have corrected Ian Watt's theory con-
cerning the rise of the novel; major contributions in this area include Michael McKeon's The
Origins of the English Novel (1988) and Margaret A. Doody's The True Story of the Novel
(1996). Many critics have discussed literature in philosophical contexts. Important books in-
clude Vernon Louis Parrington's (1871-1929) Main Currents of American Thought (3
vols., 1927-30) and the studies of American thought written by Henry Steele Commager
(born 1902; see The American Mind, 1951). F(rancis) O(tto) Matthiessen (1902-50; see
American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, 1941)
established the principles of the American literary canon that would inform American
literary historiography until the feminist challenge of the 1970s. Perry Miller (1905-63; see
The New England Mind, 2 vols., 1939-1953), who taught at Harvard, laid bare the Puritan
roots of American thinking and aesthetic judging.
In literary criticism the Marxist view was especially popular in the 1930s; it was later
modified by Kenneth Burke (1897-1993; see his The Philosophy of Literary Form, 1941)
and Edmund Wilson (1895-1972; see The Wound and the Bow, 1941). Today, Fredric
Jameson (born 1934) is perhaps the foremost and the most prolific American Marxist critic.
He has published studies on cultural imperialism, the effects of postmodernism, and post-
industrial capitalism. Occasionally, he also relies on deconstruction and other approaches,
but his abiding commitment has been to Marxist critical methodology. Among his more
influential works are The Prison-House of Language. A Critical Account of Structuralism
and Russian Formalism (1972); The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Sym-
bolic Act (1981); The Ideologies of Theory, 2 vols. (1988); Postmodernism, or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (1991); and The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the
World System (1992).
The most influential movement in the early post-war period was the New Criticism. It was
by no means a unified theory, and there were always some differences of opinion between
the various members of the movement. Yet they all subscribed to the need for structural
analysis of works of art, stressing the form and make-up of texts (mostly poems) rather than
their relations to the author or to history and politics. American writers associated with the
New Criticism are the poets John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) and Allen Tate (1899-
1979) as well as Cleanth Brooks (1906-94) and Robert Penn Warren (1905-89); R. P.
Blackmur (1904-65) and Yvor Winters (1900-68). Brooks and Warren published several
exemplary college books in which they explained and applied the New Critical approach
(see, for instance, Understanding Poetry, 1938, reprinted and revised in many editions).
These helped in the establishment of what proved an enormously influential method in the
study of literature. The work of these scholars and authors contributed to a re-evaluation of
the autonomy of the literary work of art and to a recognition of its specific structural and
formal aspects. Until the arrival in America of post-structuralist theory in the late 1960s, the
New Criticism was the dominant movement in academic criticism. It was exported to
Europe and merged there with the French "explication de texte" to rule academic teaching
far into the 1970s. Compared to New Criticism, myth criticism or archetypal criticism as
developed by Northrop Frye (1912-91) was less influential. A Canadian scholar vastly en-
amoured of William Blake, Frye established a vocabulary and a precedent for the systematic
analysis of imaginative structures, genres, and archetypes and for the theorization of litera-
ture in Anatomy of Criticism (1957). In this seminal book as well as in The Great Code
(1982), about the Bible, he stressed the importance of symbols, myths, and archetypes in
literary judgments. Not necessarily in opposition to the New Criticism, but advocating
different principles of literary evaluation, the Chicago School of Criticism, led by R(onald)
S(almon) Crane (1886-1967) wanted to revive Aristotelian principles (see Crane's Critics
and Criticism, 1952).
If the New Criticism was a critical theory developed in America and then also adapted in
Europe, poststructuralist approaches were imported into American universities from Europe
in the late 1960s and early 70s. Paradoxically, they rebounded and hit Europe again in the
1980s. The new radical literary theories (e.g., Deconstruction, Reader-response, Cultural
Studies) were popularized in American universities, partly by the "inventors" themselves
(Deconstruction by Jacques Derrida) and also by the so-called Yale critics (J. Hillis Miller,
Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartmann and Paul de Man). The propagators of post-structuralist
theory in America were the "Yale critics" associated with Jacques Derrida (1930-2004),
the major representative and "inventor" of deconstruction. Since the 1960s, Derrida has
been teaching courses at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and the University of California at Irvine. At
Yale, Derrida was supported by Paul de Man (1919-1983), Harold Bloom (born 1930), J.
Hillis Miller (born 1928), and Geoffrey Hartman (born 1929), and together they dis-
seminated post-structuralism in the American academy, as Bloom and Miller moved to
other universities and created their own "schools". Like the New Critics, they do not stand
for a closed system, although they share a common complicated rhetoric that is also in-
debted to the work and style of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-81). A
Belgian by birth, de Man emigrated to the United States in 1960, teaching at Cornell, Johns
Hopkins, and Yale Universities. Sharing Derrida's views on deconstruction, he was espe-
cially concerned with symbolism and allegory; he saw the latter as a figure for literature it-
self, playing as it does with the rhetoric of language (see his Blindness and Insight, 1971;
Allegories of Reading, 1979; and the later collections containing his essays, The Rhetoric of
Romanticism, 1984; The Resistance to Theory, 1986; and Aesthetic Ideology, 1992). After
his death, the discovery of de Man's anti-Semitic publications in his early twenties fanned a
heated discussion in the late 1980s that was concerned not only with his life and work but
also with the political implications of deconstruction. From the beginning of his academic
career, Harold Bloom has been concerned with Romanticism and with questions of literary
value and judgment. He applied Derridean deconstruction and Freudian psychology, with a
shot of Nietzsche, to literary history and criticism. One of his major theses is that each new
generation of writers (poets) engages in a kind of Oedipal struggle with their predecessors in
an intergenerational conflict that implies the will to power and a wish to outdo the "father".
Much of Bloom's work of the 1970s and 1980s develops this theory of "misreading" (i.e.,
younger writers deliberately "misread" their precursors) in literary influence (see, for in-
stance, Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, 1973; A Map of Misreading, 1975; and Agon: To-
ward a Theory of Revisionism, 1982). With Derrida he shared assumptions about the muta-
bility of textual meaning, its dependence on repression, and its implications in historical
relations. More recently, Bloom has addressed problems of canonization and value of the
Bible (see The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages, 1994; and The Book of
J, 1991). Important books by J. Hillis Miller are The Linguistic Moment (1985), The Ethics
of Reading (1986), and Illustration (1992), the latter providing a superb and witty discus-
sion of what happens with meaning when texts are illustrated or when pictures are repre-
sented in words. Geoffrey Hartman has explained his view of literature (under the in-
fluence of Freud and Bloom) in The Fate of Reading (1975), Criticism in the Wilderness
(1980), which levels literary production with critical commentary, and Saving the Text
(1981, repr. 1995), which welcomes deconstruction in the process of close reading.
Apart from gender/women's studies, other post-structuralist theories and approaches that
developed in the 1970s include New Historicism, Reader-Response theory, and Cultural
Studies, with the important American branches labelled post-colonial studies, as represented
by the work of Said and Spivak, and Afro-American Studies, initiated by Henry Louis Gates.
Under the influence of Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault, American scholars like
Louis Montrose and Stephen Greenblatt developed what Greenblatt termed New Histor-
icism, a new contextualized form of historical inquiry
that was partly adopted by literary critics too. Stephen
Greenblatt (born 1943) coined the term "New Histori-
cism". Initially a specialist of Renaissance literature, he
has been the principal theorist and practitioner of the
movement. Drawing on ideas of Michel Foucault's dis-
course analysis and Clifford Geertz's cultural anthropo-
logy as well as on Marxism, the New Historicists (Green-
blatt, Montrose, Goldberg) argue that literature as well as
historiography form part of a larger network of social and
cultural institutions, practices, and beliefs and must be
understood in relation to the power structures of the
historical period under observation. They thus reject both
the autonomy of literature and the objectification of
material history while insisting on the interdependence of
textual and political practices. Greenblatt's most impor-
tant publications include studies of Shakespearean Eng-
David Levine's view of land Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), Shake-
Stephen Greenblatt. 2001 spearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy
in Renaissance England (1988), and of Hamlet (see
Hamlet in Purgatory, 2001) and studies of Renaissance culture (Learning to Curse:
Essays in Early Modern Culture, 1990) and the European "discovery" of America New
World Encounters (1990); and Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World
(1991). Stanley Fish (born 1938), who is at present the highest paid literary scholar in the
United States, has been the leading American exponent of Reader-Response theory that
insists on the importance of the reader in the establishment of textual meaning. Like Green-
blatt, Fish was originally a Renaissance scholar and a specialist of John Milton. His theory
of the relationship between textual significance and readerly experience was fully arti-
culated in Is There a Text in This Class? (1980). In his later works, Fish argued, among
other points, that meaning is created not only by the individual reader but also by "inter-
pretive communities" (e.g., at the university). Taking meaning to be relational and histori-
cal, Reader-Response theory thus takes a post-structuralist position. Fish has further ex-
plained his views, partly arguing against any form of "abstract theory", in Doing What
Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Legal Studies (1989) and
Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change (1995).
In the larger field of Cultural Studies, Post-colonial Studies in America has been associated
with the names of Edward Said (1935-2003) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (born
1942). A Palestinian Arab, Said studied in Jerusalem and Cairo, finishing his education at
Princeton and Harvard. His personal history has made him conscious of the fact that judg-
ments whether literary, political or ethical are made from particular "wordly" view-
points. Convinced that (racial, cultural, and national) identity is produced by a variety of
factors, Said has written about the dialectic of personal, intellectual, and political involve-
ment, sometimes taking sides for the Palestine cause in the conflicts involving Israel and its
neighbours (see, for instance, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine
How We See the Rest of the World, 1981). His influential monographs include The World,
the Text, and the Critic (1983), a brilliant analysis of the Western "creation" of the Orient
through institutional power entitled Orientalism (1978, rev. ed. 1995) and a general critique
of the relationship between culture and hegemony, Culture and Imperialism (1993). Like
Said, Spivak was educated outside the United States. A Bengali, Spivak grew up in Calcutta
and came to America in 1962 to study literature at Cornell. She has taught literature and
cultural studies at a number of American universities, including Emory, the University of
Texas at Austin, and the University of Pittsburgh. In her important contributions to post-
colonial studies, Spivak draws on feminism, Marxism, and deconstruction while exploring
questions of racial and sexual identity, and the material situation in the so-called Third
World (see her In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 1989; The Post-Colonial
Critic, 1990; and Outside in the Teaching Machine, 1992).
African-American studies has been boosted as a field by the work of Henry Louis Gates
(born 1950), who has taught English and African American Studies at Yale, Cornell, Duke,
and Harvard. Establishing black literary criticism by retrieving the cultural and literary
tradition of Afro-Americans, Gates has explored literary history and cultural and critical
theory as editor, publicist, lecturer, and theorist. His works bring the "language of black-
ness" and the "idiom of critical theory" into dialectical relation; they include the seminal
Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the 'Racial Self' (1987), and The Signifying Monkey
(1988), and his more recent Reading Black, Reading Feminist (1990), Loose Canons: Notes
on the Culture Wars (1992), and Colored People: A Memoir (1994).
Women's studies and gender studies also emerged in the 1960s, although feminism has a
longer history. As a reform movement aiming at the social and political equality of women,
feminism goes back to the Blue Stocking Ladies48 of the late eighteenth century. In the
United States, women gained suffrage (the right to vote) in 1920. Feminism received a new
impetus in the 1960s with the creation of the National Organization for Women (NOW),
and the cause of feminism came to be known as "Women's Lib", i.e. women's liberation.
American feminist writers have drawn on the earlier work of Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86),
especially on her Le Deuxime Sexe (1949). But the strongest contribution in these new
fields of inquiry, which seek to integrate approaches from both socio-political and literary
studies, came from feminist writers. In the wake of Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own,
1924) and Simone de Beauvoir, and under the influence of recent French feminist writers
(Julia Kristeva, Hlne Cixous and Luce Irigaray), American feminist authors such as Kate
Millett and Elaine Showalter (The New Feminist Criticism, 1985) have practiced what
Showalter terms gynocriticism in their new search for a true feminine culture. An outstand-
ing example was the ground-breaking study by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The
Madwoman in the Attic (1979), which reacted to Harold Bloom's study of male literary
influence and anxiety while demonstrating the difficulties women authors faced in the
nineteenth century. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, released in 1985, was a
milestone in that it formalized a canon of female writing and made it accessible to a large
readership. Works that were widely read and became best-sellers include Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique (1963), Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970), and Germaine
Greer's (an Australian-born critic who moved to England) The Female Eunuch (1971).
There are now many spokeswomen of feminism, and Gloria Steinem's Ms., founded in
1971, is just one of many journals for women. Among the more important theorists of
feminism, Lillian Robinson (born 1941) has been a foremother with her work that linked
feminist with Marxist critique while exploring intersections of gender, class, and modern
culture (see her essays in Sex, Class, and Culture, 1978; and her collection of works by
various feminist critics, Feminist Scholarship, 1985). The contemporary star on the feminist
critical horizon is Judith Butler (born 1956). Originally a philosopher, she teaches at the
University of California at Berkeley. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (1990), she developed her major argument about the performative nature of gender
roles while arguing that there is no logical correspondence between gender and anatomy and
exploring the implications of multiple gendered subjectivities. She went one step further in
Bodies That Matter (1993), explaining how sex/gender relate in their performative construc-
tion as an effect of discourse. Butler has also tackled the issues of lesbian and gay identities
in such works as Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic (1993)
and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997), covering the political and legal
discourse about gender and homosexuality. These works helped define the fields of gay and
lesbian criticism. Her sophisticated critique of the workings of heterosexual hegemony in
the establishment of matters sexual and political belongs to the most widely cited theory in
current Queer Studies (i.e., Gay and Lesbian Studies).
While Butler writes in the wake of French and American feminist and gay criticism, with a
readership largely restricted to universities, Camille Paglia (born 1947) is a cultural critic
48 Also called Blue Stocking Circle or Blue Stocking Ladies, several intelligent and learned
women met regularly in London in the second half of the eighteenth century. They were often
ridiculed by male writers but were quite successful in their aims of furthering women's edu-
cation and information. Their social gatherings became very popular and were also attended by
men, such as Horace Walpole, Dr. Johnson, Boswell, and Samuel Richardson.
who received great media attention because of her attacks on academics in iconoclastic
books and lectures. Paglia made international headlines with a best-seller, Sexual Persona:
Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), a book that purports to write a
new history of Western culture as a product of nature and sexuality, including amorality,
voyeurism, and pornography. Attacking established thinking on literature, religion, gender,
and feminism, Paglia challenged the assumptions of conservatives and liberals alike, but in
particular the conventional scholarly establishment (e.g., deconstruction as a foolish move-
ment and a baneful influence on American scholarship). Since journalism and the media
always welcome simplifications, Paglia's second book also proved a huge success: Sex, Art,
and American Culture (1992) collects her polemical assessments of various cultural phe-
nomena (art, cinema, literature, rock and movie stars) combined with further attacks on
poststructuralist criticism.
In addition to these movements, several studies by independent critics have also gone down
as seminal works in literary and cultural criticism. Susan Sontag (1933-2004) has argued
for a more emotive and less intellectual response in Against Interpretation and Other Essays
(1966), and she provided thoughtful studies of the social and cultural roles of photography
(On Photography, 1977) while her own suffering from cancer has inspired such brilliant
works as Illness as Metaphor (1978), Under the Sign of Saturn (1980), and AIDS and Its
Metaphors (1988). Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003) made headlines with his lively and often
witty criticism (see his Love and Death in the American Novel, 1960; and What Was Liter-
ature?, 1982) while advocating the closing of the gap between lite and popular literature
(see also his The Return of the Vanishing America, 1968, about the Western and America's
West; and Fiedler on the Roof, 1991, which mocks philosemitism while discussing Fiedler's
own Jewish identity). Lionel Trilling (1905-75) insisted on seeing literature as social action
(see his Speaking of Literature and Society, 1980). Unwittingly, Samuel P. Huntington
predicted the terrible events of 11 September 2001 in his study of the confrontation to be
expected between the cultures and religions of the West and Africa/Asia in The Clash of
Civilizations (1996).
Outside the fields of literary history and criticism, a few books had a profound influence on
American intellectual life. In addition to the works briefly discussed in the introduction to
this chapter, mention must be made of Richard Hofstadter's (1916-70) study of the role of
the American intellectual in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
(1963) and of Lewis Mumford's (1895-1990) critique of the
American belief in technology (see The Myth of the Machine, 2
vols., 1967 and 1970; and The Pentagon of Power, 1970). With
his A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993),
concerned with the status of political philosophy in the West and
basic liberties in a pluralistic society respectively, John Rawls
(1921-2002), a defender of the liberal American model of society,
stands as the most notable and controversial political theorist of
the twentieth century. There are also some magnificent histories,
Samuel Eliot Morison's (1887-1976) The European Discovery of
America (2 vols., 1971 and 1974) and Sydney A. Ahlstrom's A
Religious History of the American People (1972) being two of the David Levine's portrait
more prominent examples. Books that deserve more attention of John Rawls
since they provide views of the dark sides of America (often
denied and ignored at a time when the world seems to adopt the United States as role
model) include Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
(2001), a report about American underclass poverty; and James Loewen's Lies My Teacher
Told Me (1996) and Lies Across America (1999), concerned with the embellishment and
mythification of dark chapters in American history.
Important nonfiction books in the field of science include
Stephen Jay Gould's (1941-2002) studies of evolution,
summarized in his magnum opus The Structure of Evolu-
tionary Theory (2002), which tries to combine Darwinian
ideas with recent criticism as expressed in the synthetic
theory of the twentieth century.
Stephen Jay Gould

as seen by David Levine
APPENDIX
Chronological Tables
British and Irish Literature

__________________________________________________________________________
Sovereign Date Political and Social History Literature

__________________________________________________________________________
450 Invasions by Angles and Saxons
787 Invasions by Danes. England Beowulf
divided into five Kingdoms.
Alfred the
Great
871-899 871 Alfred becomes King of Wessex. Anglo-Saxon
878 Alfred defeats the Danes. Chronicle
Edward the
Elder
899-924
Canute
1016-35
Harold I
1035-40
Hardicanute
(or Harda-
canute)
1040-42
Edward the
Confessor
1042-66
Harold II
1066 1066 The Normans defeat the English
at Hastings.
______________________________________________________
The Normans
______________________________________________________
William the The feudal system begins.
Conqueror
1066-87
504 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLES
William II 1095 First crusade

1087-1100
Henry I
1100-35
Stephen
1135-54 1136 Geoffrey of
Monmouth,
Historia Regum
Britanniae
______________________________________________________
The Plantagenets
______________________________________________________
Henry II
1154-89 1146 Second crusade
1170 Thomas Becket murdered at
Canterbury.
Richard I
1189-99 Further crusades
John (Lack-
land)
1199-1216 1205 Layamon, Brut
1215 John signs Magna Carta.
Henry III
1216-1272 Roman de la
rose
Edward I
1272-1307 Edward conquers Wales and
Scotland.
Edward II
1307-1327 Hundred Years' War (1337-
1453)
Edward III
1327-1377 1346 The French are defeated at
Crcy.
1356 The French are defeated at
Poitiers.
1362 Langland, Piers
Plowman
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLES 505
Richard II
1377-1399 1386 Chaucer begins
Canterbury Tales
Henry IV
(Boling-
broke)
1399-1413
Henry V
1413-1422 1415 The French are defeated at
Agincourt.
Henry VI 1422 Henry becomes King of France.

1422-1461 1431 Joan of Arc executed.
1455 Beginning of the Wars of the Roses.
Edward IV
1461-1483 1476 Caxton starts printing press.
Edward V
1483
Richard III
1483-1485 1485 Malory, Morte
d'Arthur
______________________________________________________
The Tudors
______________________________________________________
Henry VII 1485 End of the Wars of the Roses.
1485-1509 1492 Columbus arrives in the West
Indies.
Henry VIII
1509-1547 1516 More, Utopia
1517 Luther publishes his theses.
1534 Henry abolishes papal power in
England.
Edward VI
1547-1553 1553 Heywood, Play
of the Wether
Mary Udall, Ralph

1553-1558 Roister Doister
Elizabeth I
1558-1603 1578 Lyly, Euphues
1582 Hakluyt, Voyages
1588 Defeat of the Spanish Armada
1590 Sidney, Arcadia
______________________________________________________
The Stuarts
______________________________________________________
James I
1603-1625 1611 Authorized Version
of the Bible
1620 Pilgrim Fathers land in New
England.
1621 Burton, Anatomy
of Melancholy
1623 Folio edition of
Shakespeare's
plays
Charles I
1625-1649 1629 Charles dissolves the Third
1633 Parliament. Donne, Poems
1642 The Civil War
1645 Milton, Poems
1649 Execution of Charles I
______________________________________________________
The Commonwealth
______________________________________________________
1649-1658 1651 Charles II fails in his invasion Hobbes,
of England and flees to France. Leviathan
1653 Cromwell becomes Lord Protec-
tor of England.
1658 Death of Cromwell
______________________________________________________
The Restoration of the Stuarts

______________________________________________________
Charles II
1660-1685 1667 Milton, Paradise
Lost
1678 Bunyan, Pilgrim's
Progress
James II
1685-1688 1688 Protestants appeal to William
of Orange for help against the
Catholic James.
William lands in England,
James flees to France.
William and
Mary Locke, Essay Con-
1688-1702 1690 William defeats James in cerning Human
Ireland. Understanding
1700 Congreve, The
Way of the World
Anne
1702-1714 1709 Steele, The Tatler
1711 Addison/Steele,
The Spectator
______________________________________________________
The Hanoverians
______________________________________________________
George I
1714-1727 1719 Defoe, Robinson
Crusoe
1726 Swift, Gulliver's
Travels
George II
1727-1760 England at war with France,
Holland and Spain. Conflicts
between France and England
in America and India.
1740 Richardson,
1745- Failed Jacobite Rebellion Pamela
1746
1749 Fielding,
Tom Jones
1760 Sterne,
Tristram Shandy
George III
1760-1820 1766 Goldsmith, The
Vicar of Wakefield
1768 Gray, Poems
1776 American Declaration of
Independence
1786 Burns, Poems
1789 Beginning of the French Blake, Songs
Revolution of Innocence
1793 Execution of Louis XVI
1798 Wordsworth/
Coleridge
Lyrical Ballads
1804 Napoleon becomes Emperor.
1805 Nelson wins, but dies in Battle
of Trafalgar.
1812 Byron, Childe
Harold
1813 Napoleon defeated at Leipzig.
1816 Coleridge,
Kubla Khan
George IV
1820-1830 1830 Louis Philippe becomes King
of France.
William IV 1832 First Reform Bill

1830-1837 1833 Britain abolishes slavery.
1836 Dickens,
Pickwick Papers
Victoria
1837-1901 1847 E. Bront,
Wuthering Heights
1848 Revolutions on the Continent
1850 Tennyson,
In Memoriam
1855 Browning, Men

and Women
1859 Britain acquires colonies in G. Eliot,
Africa. Adam Bede
1872 Butler, Erewhon
1896 Industrial and colonial develop- Hardy, Jude the
ment Obscure
1898 Plays by Shaw
1900 Sinn Fin founded in Ireland. Conrad, Lord Jim
1901 Death of Queen Victoria
Edward VII
1901-1910 1908 Bennett, The Old
Wives' Tales
1910 Wells, Mr. Polly
George V
1910-1936 1912 China becomes a republic.
Irish Home Rule denied.
1913 Lawrence, Sons
and Lovers
1914 Beginning of World War I
1915 Maugham, Of
Human Bondage
1916 Joyce, A Portrait
of the Artist
Easter Rising in Ireland; Irish
rebels executed.
1917 USA enter World War I. T.S. Eliot,
Prufrock
1918 End of World War I
Women over 30 receive the vote.
1921 Ulster is given a Parliament.
1922 Ireland achieves self-government T.S. Eliot, The
(Eire=Irish Free State). Waste Land
Joyce, Ulysses
1924 First Labour Government
1925 Woolf, Mrs
1928 All women over 21 receive vote. Dalloway
1929 Collapse of New York Stock
Exchange
1932 Huxley, Brave
New World
1933 Hitler comes to power.
1935 Eliot, Murder in

the Cathedral
Edward VIII
1936 1936 Edward abdicates in December.
1936- Spanish Civil War

1939
George VI
1936-1952 1939 Germany invades Poland: be- Joyce, Finne-
ginning of World War II. gans Wake
1940 Greene, The
Power and the
Glory
1941 Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; USA
enters World War II.
1945 End of World War II Orwell, Animal
Labour Government elected Farm
in Britain.
1947 Public welfare programmes Lowry, Under
introduced by Labour the Volcano
Government. India and Pakistan
are granted independence. Orwell, 1984
1948 Israel established in Middle East.
Elizabeth II 1953 Amis, Lucky Jim

1952- 1954 Golding, Lord
of the Flies
1955 Beckett, Waiting
for Godot
1956 Suez crisis: Britain and France
support Israel against Egypt.
1957 Pinter, The
Dumb Waiter
1958 Burgess,
Malayan Trilogy
1960 Pinter, The
1961 Berlin Wall is erected. Caretaker
1962 Burgess, A Clock-
work Orange
1963 Britain is refused entry into the
Common Market.
1964- Labour Party under Harold Wilson; Larkin, The Whit-
1970 youth and pop culture in Britain sun Weddings
1965 Churchill dies. Bond, Saved

1968 Censorship of theatre is Durrell, Tunc
abolished in Britain; riots in
Paris and Ireland.
1969 Abolition of capital punishment
1970 British troops control Ulster. Hughes, Crow
1972 Stoppard,
1973 Britain and Ireland join Common Jumpers
Market.
1974 Labour government under
Harold Wilson.
1975 Heaney, North
Stoppard,
Travesties
1976 Wilson resigns; Callaghan
becomes Prime Minister.
1977 Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee Tolkien, The
Silmarillion
1978 Great Newspaper strike in Hill,
Britain Tenebrae
1979 Mrs. Margaret Thatcher (Con-
servative) becomes Prime Minister; Golding, Dark-
in tune with US President Reagan, ness Visible
she survived until 1990.
Heaney, Field
Work
Raine, A Martian ...
Shaffer, Amadeus
1980 Brenton, The
Romans in Britain
Pinter, The
Hothouse
Burgess, Earthly
Powers
1981 Race riots in several British Rushdie, Midnight's
cities Children (1981)
1982 Britain at war with Argentina in a
dispute over the Falkland Islands
Boyd, An Ice-
Cream War (1982)
1987 Arthur Scargill leads un-
successful miners' strike.
Rupert Murdoch buys several Fowles,

British and American Mantissa (1982)
newspapers and TV-stations. Greene, Monsignor
Fowles,
Quixote (1982)
Amis, Stanley
and the Women
(1984)
Golding, The
Paper Men (1984)
Britain and France agree Burgess, The
to build a tunnel linking Kingdom of the
the two countries. Wicked (1985)
1988 Rushdie, The
Satanic Verses
1989 Revolutions in Eastern Europe
topple Communist regimes.
1990 Fall of Margaret Thatcher; John Byatt,
Major (Conservative) becomes Possession
Prime Minister (1990-97).
1990-91 Britain, with France and the USA,
at war with Iraq (Persian Gulf War)
1991 Collapse of the Soviet Union Carter, Wise
Children
1992 Gunn, The Man
With Night Sweats
1993 IRA negotiates ceasefire; agree-
ment breaks down in 1996, Stoppard,
but new accord reached on Good Arcadia
Friday 1998.
1995 Kane, Blasted
1996 Ian Wilmut clones a sheep (Dolly). Ravenhill,
Shopping and
Fucking
1998 Election of Labour Government Hughes,
under Tony Blair; return of Hong Birthday Letters
Kong to China
Anglo-American bombing of Iraq
1999 Scottish Parliament and Welsh
Assembly created.
2001 In October the UK joins the US Heaney, Electric

military operation Enduring Light
Freedom in Afghanistan, starting
a war that eventually involved
65,000 (ISAF) troops from 42
nations stationed there. By 2010,
neither of the targets of the allied
forces had been reached: Al Qaeda
was still active and the Taliban,
originally ousted from power, had
again taken over large areas of the
country.
2002 Stoppard, The Coast
of Utopia
2003 Britain and the USA bomb and Welsh, Porno
invade Iraq, despite international
protest.
2005 Ian McEwan,
Saturday
Zadie Smith,
On Beauty
2005 Foundation of the Scottish Ravenhill,
Theatre The Cut
2007 Gordon Brown elected leader of the Simon Stephens,
Labour Party and Prime Minister Pornography
Winterson,
The Stone Gods
2008-09 International financial crisis David Hare,
caused by the bursting of the US Gethsemane (2008)
housing bubble and speculation Jez Butterworth,
in securitized mortgages Jerusalem (2009)
2009 Carol Ann Duffy
elected Poet Laureate
American Literature
__________________________________________________________________________
Date Political and Social History Literature

__________________________________________________________________________
1564 Fort Caroline founded by French.
1565 Spanish build Saint Augustine
(Florida).
1584 Sir Walter Ralegh unsuccessfully
tries to found a colony in North
Carolina.
1603-35 Champlain's voyages
1607 Captain John Smith founds the
Colony of Virginia at Jamestown.
1608 Smith, A True
Relation
1609 Henry Hudson explores Hudson River.
1620 Plymouth Colony founded by the
Pilgrim Fathers.
1624 Smith, The General
History of Virginia ...
1626 The Dutch establish New Netherland
Colony on the Hudson River.
1630 The Puritans found the Colony of
Massachusetts.
1640 The Bay Psalm Book
1662 Wigglesworth, The Day of
Doom
1678 Bradstreet, Poems
1692 Witchcraft trials at Salem
1702 C. Mather, Magnalia
Christi Americana
1708 E. Cook, The Sot-Weed
Factor
1732 Franklin, Poor Richard's
Almanack
1741 Edwards initiates "Great Awakening"
with his sermons.
1754 Anglo-French War in America
1770 Boston "Massacre"
1773 Boston Tea Party
1774 Woolman, Journal
1776 Declaration of Independence Trumbull, McFingal
1781 General Cornwallis surrenders to

Washington at Yorktown.
1782 Crvecur, Letters from
an American Farmer
1783 End of American War of Independence
1789 Washington first President of the USA
1791 Franklin, Autobiography
1798 Brown, Wieland
1803 Louisiana territory bought from France.
1812 War between the USA and Britain
1820 Irving, The Sketch Book
1823 Monroe Doctrine Cooper, The Pioneers
1826 Cooper, The Last of the
Mohicans
1828 Webster, American
Dictionary
1831 Poe, Poems
1835 Tocqueville, Democracy
in America
1836 Emerson, Nature
1837 Hawthorne, Twice-Told
Tales
1840 Meetings and publications of the Poe, Tales
Transcendentalists Cooper, The Pathfinder
1841 Emerson, Essays
1845 Annexation of Texas Poe, The Raven
1846 Mexican War begins. Melville, Typee
1848 End of Mexican War Melville, Omoo
Beginning of California gold rush Lowell, Biglow Papers
1850 Hawthorne, The Scarlet
Letter
1851 Melville, Moby-Dick
1852 Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
1854 Thoreau, Walden
1855 Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Longfellow, Hiawatha
1856 Melville, The Piazza Tales
1860 Abraham Lincoln elected President.
1861 Beginning of the Civil War
1862 Whittier, Snow-Bound
1863 Lincoln proclaims emancipation of

slaves.
1865 End of Civil War Whitman, Drum-Taps
Assassination of Lincoln
1866 Ku Klux Klan founded in Tennessee.
1867 Alaska bought from Russia. Alger, Ragged Dick
1869 Completion of Union Pacific and Central Twain, The Innocents
Pacific Railroads Abroad
1876 Alexander Bell receives patent for his Twain, Tom Sawyer
telephone; Edison invents phonograph.
1884 Twain, Huckleberry Finn
1885 Howells, The Rise of Silas
Lapham
1886 James, The Bostonians
1890 Dickinson, Poems
1892 Earthquake in California causes disaster. Whitman, final edition of
Leaves of Grass
1893 Crane, Maggie
1898 Spanish-American War James, The Turn of the Screw
1899 Norris, McTeague
1900 Dreiser, Sister Carrie
1903 London, The Call of the Wild
1906 Earthquake in San Francisco Sinclair, The Jungle
1909 Ford builds his Model T car. Pound, Personae
Freud lectures in the USA.
1913 Post-Impressionist exhibitions (Armory Cather, O Pioneers!
Show) in New York and Chicago
1915 Masters, Spoon River
Anthology
1917 The USA enters World War I. Eliot, Prufrock
1919 Anderson, Winesburg,
Ohio
1920 Period of prohibition of sales of S. Lewis, Main Street
alcoholic drinks starts (until 1933). O'Neill, The Emperor
All adult women are allowed to vote. Jones
1922 Eliot, The Waste Land
1923 Stevens, Harmonium
1925 Dos Passos, Manhattan
Transfer
Fitzgerald, The Great
Gatsby
1926 Execution of Sacco and Vanzetti Hughes, The Weary Blues

1929 US stock exchange collapses; Faulkner, The Sound and
beginning of Great Depression. the Fury
Hemingway, A Farewell to
Arms
1930 Unemployment increases to four million. Hart Crane, The Bridge
1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt elected President.
1933 End of Prohibition West, Miss Lonelyhearts
1935 "New Deal" era begins. Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
1936 Faulkner, Absalom!
Absalom!
Mitchell, Gone With the
Wind
1938 Cummings, Poems
Wilder, Our Town
1939 Steinbeck, The Grapes of
Wrath
1940 Unemployment at over eight million Hemingway, For Whom
the Bell Tolls
Wright, Native Son
1941 USA enters World War II after
bombing of Pearl Harbour by Japan.
1944 Bellow, Dangling Man
1945 Truman becomes President after Williams, The Glass
death of Roosevelt. Menagerie
Japan surrenders after the USA drops Wright, Black Boy
atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
1947 Williams, A Streetcar
Named Desire
1948 Mailer, The Naked and
the Dead
1949 NATO established Miller, Death of a
Salesman
1950 Beginning of the Korean War
1951 Salinger, The Catcher in
the Rye
1952 Eisenhower elected President. Hemingway, The Old Man
and the Sea
1953 End of the Korean War
Bellow, The Adventures of

Senator McCarthy starts his hunt Augie March
for communists in America. Ellison, Invisible Man
1953-61 President Dwight D. Eisenhower Miller, The Crucible
1954 Supreme Court orders desegregation
of schools.
1955 Beginning of black resistance to Nabokov, Lolita
segregation in the South
1956 Ginsberg, Howl
1957 Racial disturbances in Arkansas Kerouac, On the Road
1958 Albee, The Zoo Story
1959 Alaska and Hawaii become 49th and Updike, The Poorhouse
50th states. Fair
1960 John F. Kennedy defeats Nixon in Barth, The Sot-Weed
presidential election. Factor
Updike, Rabbit, Run
1961 The USA assists exiles in attempt to
invade Cuba.
A. B. Shepard is first American in Heller, Catch-22
manned space expedition.
1962 Confrontation over Soviet missiles Albee, Who's Afraid of
in Cuba almost leads to war. Virginia Woolf?
1963 President Kennedy is assassinated. Pynchon, V.
Civil rights march on Washington Williams, Paterson
1963-69 President Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat)
1964 The USA bombs North Vietnamese Bellow, Herzog
military bases. Berryman, 77 Dream
Race riots in several cities Songs
1965 The USA engages openly in Vietnam Plath, Ariel
War.
Race riots in Los Angeles
Assassination of Malcolm X
1966 Further race riots Capote, In Cold Blood
National Organization for Women
founded.
1967 Greatest race riots in American history Baraka, Black Magic
Demonstrations against the war in Brautigan, Trout Fishing
Vietnam in America
Black power movement
1968 Assassination of Robert Kennedy and Updike, Couples
of Martin Luther King Cleaver, Soul on Ice
Nixon elected President.
1969 The USA is first nation on the moon. Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
1969-74 President Richard M. Nixon (Republican) Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse
Five
1970 National guardsmen kill four student Lowell, Notebook
protesters at Kent State University in Welty, Losing Battles
Ohio.
1972 Beginning of the Watergate affair Barth, Chimera
1973 Ceasefire in Vietnam Pynchon, Gravity's
Rainbow
1974 Nixon resigns and is pardoned by Heller, Something
his successor, Gerald Ford. Happened
1974-77 President Gerald Ford (Republican)
1975 Continuation of Watergate trial Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a
Convex Mirror
Doctorow, Ragtime
Gaddis, JR
1976 The USA celebrates Bicentennial. Haley, Roots
Bellow receives Nobel Price.
1977 James Earl Carter becomes President. Coover, The Public
(Democrat); in office until 1981. Burning
Morrison, Song of
Solomon
1978 Updike, The Coup
1979 Sioux Indians receive financial Barth, Letters
compensation for the confiscation Roth, The Ghost Writer
in 1877 of the Black Hills of
Dakota.
1980 American hostages are held in Iran. Toole, A Confederacy
Ronald Reagan is elected President. of Dunces
1981 American hostages are freed by Updike, Rabbit Is Rich
Iranians.
Columbia space shuttle goes into
orbit.
1981-89 President Ronald Reagan (Republican)
1982 Bellow, The Dean's
December
1983 Walker, The Color Purple
1984 Ashbery, A Wave
1986 Seven astronauts killed in explosion Updike, Roger's Version
of space shuttle Challenger.
1987 Morrison, Beloved
1989-93 President George Bush (Republican)
1990-91 Persian Gulf War in which Britain,

France, and the USA defeat Iraq. Ellis, American Psycho (1991)
1993-2000 President Bill Clinton (Democrat)
1994 Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own
1995 Gass, The Tunnel
1997 Vogel, How I Learned to Drive
Pynchon, Mason & Dixon
DeLillo, Underworld
1998 McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
2000 George W. Bush is declared winner Updike, Rabbit Remembered
of a dubious election and becomes Bellow, Ravelstein
President (Republican). Roth, The Human Stain
2001 11th September: terrorist attack on WTC
in New York and on Pentagon. President
Bush declares war on terrorism.
2002 USA and Britain attack Afghanistan Jonathan Franzen,
and initially oust the Taliban regime. The Corrections
But even the support of the ISAF troops
(involving 65,000 soldiers from 42 E. A. Proulx, That Old Ace
nations) did not produce satisfying results in the Hole
in a continuing war. By 2010, the Taliban
had regained power in several provinces
of the country and Osama Bin Laden's
Al Qaeda organization was still active.
2003 March: USA bombs and invades Iraq, Margaret Atwood,
ignoring international protest and strong Oryx and Crake
opposition by France and Germany.
2004 George W. Bush re-elected Sam Shepard, The God of Hell
2006 John Updike, Terrorist
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
2007 Charles Simic appointed Poet
Laureate
2008 Speculation by banks and insurance
companies in US housing and mortgages
leads to a global financial and economic
crisis lasting for more than two years.
Barack Hussein Obama is elected
President of the United States, the first
African American to reach this office.
2009 Against strong resistance from the Pynchon, Inherent Vice
Republican Party, President Obama
attempts to institute a radical reform that Atwood, The Year of the Flood
would guarantee medical treatment for all
Americans.
Further Reading
British and Irish Literature
I. The Anglo-Saxon Period

Stephan Kohl, "Altenglische Literatur", in Hans Ulrich Seeber, ed. Englische Literatur-
geschichte. 3rd enlarged ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999: 1-18; Ewald Standop, "Altenglische
Literatur", in Ewald Standop and Edgar Mertner, Englische Literaturgeschichte. 5th ed.
Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1992: 11-60; Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, eds. The
Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991.
II. The Middle English Period

Richard Beadle, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994; Stephan Kohl, "Mittelenglische Literatur", in Hans
Ulrich Seeber, ed. Englische Literaturgeschichte. 3rd enlarged ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999:
19-42; Ewald Standop, "Mittelenglische Literatur", in Ewald Standop and Edgar Mertner,
Englische Literaturgeschichte. 5th ed. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1992: 61-164; W. J. R.
Barron, English Medieval Romance. London: Longman, 1987; James Simpson, 1350-1547:
Reform and Cultural Revolution. Vol. 2 of The Oxford English Literary History. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002; Piero Botani and Jill Mann, eds. The Cambridge Companion
to Chaucer. Sec. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

GENERAL BACKGROUND AND SURVEYS
John Guy, The Tudors. A Very Short History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000;
Dietrich Schwanitz, Englische Kulturgeschichte. Vol. 1: Die frhe Neuzeit 1500-1760.
Tbingen: Francke, 1995; Manfred Pfister, "Die Frhe Neuzeit: Von Morus bis Milton", in
Hans Ulrich Seeber, ed. Englische Literaturgeschichte. 3rd enlarged ed. Stuttgart: Metzler,
1999: 43-144; Edgar Mertner, "Die Renaissance", in Ewald Standop and Edgar Mertner,
Englische Literaturgeschichte. 5th ed. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1992: 165-256; Arthur
F. Kinney, ed. The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000; James Simpson, 1350-1547. Vol. 2 of The Oxford
English Literary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
POETRY
Gary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century. London: Longman, 1986.
522 FURTHER READING
DRAMA
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980; A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway, eds. The
Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990; Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton, eds. New Historicism and Renaissance Drama.
London: Longman, 1992.

John Morrill, Stuart Britain. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
[1984] 2000; Graham Parry, The Seventeenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural
Context of English Literature, 1603-1700. London: Longman, 1989; Dietrich Schwanitz,
Englische Kulturgeschichte. Vol. 1: Die frhe Neuzeit 1500-1760. Tbingen: Francke, 1995.
POETRY
George Parfitt, English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. London: Longman, 1985.
DRAMA
Alexander Leggatt, English Drama: Shakespeare to the Restoration, 1590-1660. London:
Longman, 1988; Stanley Wells, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway,
eds. The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990; Ulrich Suerbaum, Shakespeares Dramen. Tbingen: Francke, 1996; Michael
Dobson and Stanley Wells, eds. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001; Annette Simonis, "Das elisabethanische Drama und Theater:
Gattungsgeschichte und neuere Perspektiven (New Historicism, Diskursanalyse und studies
of gender)", in Ansgar Nnning, ed. Eine andere Geschichte der englischen Literatur. Trier:
WVT, 1996: 25-42; Alexander Leggatt, Introduction to English Renaissance Comedy.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.
PROSE
Roger Pooley, English Prose of the Seventeenth Century, 1590-1700. London: Longman,
1992.

James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English
Literature, 1700-1789, London: Longman, 1986; Dietrich Schwanitz, Englische Kultur-
geschichte. Vol. 1: Die frhe Neuzeit 1500-1760; Vol. 2: Die Moderne 1760-1914,
FURTHER READING 523
Tbingen: Francke, 1995; John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture
in the Eighteenth Century, London: HarperCollins, 1997; John Sweetman, The Enlighten-
ment and the Age of Revolution 1700-1850: Arts, Culture and Society in the Western World,
London: Longman, 1998; Steven N. Zwicker, ed. The Cambridge Companion to English
Literature 1650-1740, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
POETRY
Brean Hammond, Pope, Brighton: Harvester, 1986; Ellen Pollack, The Poetics of Sexual
Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985; Christopher Fox, ed. Teaching Eighteenth-Century Poetry, New York: AMS
Press, 1990; Ulrich Broich, The Eighteenth-Century Mock-Heroic Poem, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991; Hermann J. Real, ed. Teaching Satire: Dryden to Pope,
Heidelberg: Winter, 1992; J. R. Watson, English Poetry of the Romantic Period, 2nd ed.
London: Longman, 1992.
DRAMA
Ian Donaldson, The World Upside Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1970; Heinz Kosok, ed. Das englische Drama im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,
Berlin: Schmidt, 1976; Richard W. Bevis, English Drama: Restoration and Eighteenth
Century, 1660-1789, London: Longman, 1988.
PROSE
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel [1957], Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972; Lennard J. Davis,
Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, New York: Columbia University Press,
1983; Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century
English Culture and Fiction, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986; Dale Spender,
Mothers of the Novel, London: Pandora Press, 1986; Clive T. Probyn, English Fiction of the
Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789, London: Longman, 1987; John Mullan, Sentiment and
Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1990; Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility:
Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992;
E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800, Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1995; Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, London: Routledge, 1995;
Margaret A. Doody, The True Story of the Novel, New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1996; John Richetti, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Richard Kroll, ed. The English Novel, vol.
1: 1700 to Fielding, vol. 2: Smollett to Austen, London: Longman, 1998.
Jean Vivis, English Travel Narratives in the Eighteenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate,
2002.
524 FURTHER READING

Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. 5 vols. London: HarperCollins,
1984-1998; Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of
English Literature, 1830-1890. London: Longman, 1993; Dietrich Schwanitz, Englische
Kulturgeschichte. Vol. 2: Die Moderne 1760-1914. Tbingen: Francke, 1995; Stuart Curran,
ed. The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993; Hans-Ulrich Seeber, "Romantik und Viktorianische Zeit", in Seeber, ed.
Englische Literaturgeschichte. 3rd enlarged ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999: 217-306; Iain
McCalman, ed. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999.
POETRY
J. R. Watson, English Poetry of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830. 2nd ed. London: Longman,
1992; Peter Hhn, Geschichte der englischen Lyrik. Vol. 2. Tbingen: Francke, 1995: 9-
131.
DRAMA
Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 1660-1900. Vol. 6. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1959; Heinz Kosok, ed. Das englische Drama im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert.
Berlin: Schmidt, 1976; Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama 1890-1990. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992; Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack, English Drama: A
Cultural History. Oxford. Blackwell, 1996: 188-275; Jean Chothia, English Drama of the
Early Modern Period, 1890-1940. London: Longman, 1996; Dagmar Kift, The Victorian
Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
PROSE
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979;
Michael Wheeler, English Fiction of the Victorian Period. London: Longman, 1985; Gary
Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830. London: Longman, 1989;
Dennis Walder, ed. The Realist Novel. London: Routledge and The Open University, 1995;
Hilary P. Dannenberg, "Der englische Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts: Erzhlformen, Plot,
Figurendarstellung und Kultur", in Ansgar Nnning, ed. Eine andere Geschichte der
englischen Literatur. Trier: WVT, 1996: 151-70; Hilary Fraser with Daniel Brown, English
Prose of the Nineteenth Century. London: Longman, 1997; David Punter, The Literature of
Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. 2 vols. London:
Longman, 1996; Vera Nnning, Der englische Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart:
Klett, 2000.
FURTHER READING 525

Dietrich Schwanitz, Englische Kulturgeschichte. Vol. 2: Die Moderne 1760-1914. Tbin-
gen: Francke, 1995; Peter Stansky, On or About 1910. Early Bloomsbury and its Intimate
World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996; Michael Levenson, ed. The
Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; John
Oakland, British Civilization. An Introduction. London: Routledge, 4th ed. 1998; Chris
Baldick, 1910-1940: The Modern Movement. Vol. 10 of The Oxford English Literary
History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Bruce King, 1960-2000. The Internation-
alization of English Literature. Vol. 13 of The Oxford English Literary History. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004.
POETRY
John Silkin, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1972, repr. 1993; David Trotter, The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in
Modern American, British and Irish Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1984; John Lucas, Modern
English Poetry: From Hardy to Hughes. London: Batsford, 1986; Neil Corcoran, English
Poetry since 1940. London: Longman, 1993; Stan Smith, The Origins of Modernism: Eliot,
Pound, Yeats. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994; Peter Hhn, Geschichte der englischen
Lyrik. Vol. 2. Tbingen: Francke, 1995: 132-322; James Longenbach, "Modern Poetry", in
Michael Levenson, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999: 100-129; Randall Stevenson, 1960-2000. The Last of England? Vol.
12 of The Oxford English Literary History. Part 2. Poetry: 1960-2000. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004: 165-272; Matt McGuire and Colin Nicholson, eds. The Edinburgh
Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2009.
DRAMA
Allardyce Nicoll, English Drama 1900-1930: The Beginnings of the Modern Period.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973; Christian W. Thomsen, Das englische
Theater der Gegenwart. Dsseldorf: Bagel, 1980; C. W. E. Bigsby, ed. Contemporary Eng-
lish Drama. London: Arnold, 1981; Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama 1890-1990.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992; Klaus Peter Mller, ed. Englisches Theater der Gegen-
wart: Geschichte(n) und Strukturen. Tbingen: Narr, 1993; Gottfried Krieger, Das eng-
lische Drama des 20. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Klett, 1998; Jean Chothia, English Drama of
the Early Modern Period 1890-1940. London: Longman, 1996; Kathryn Ann Berney, ed.
Contemporary Women Dramatists. London: St. James, 1994; Jale Abdollahzadeh, Das zeit-
genssische englische Frauendrama zwischen politischem Engagement und sthetischer
Reflexion. Trier: WVT, 1997; Janelle Reinelt and Elaine Aston, eds. The Cambridge Com-
panion to Modern Women Playwrights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000;
Bernhard Reitz and Mark Berninger, eds. British Drama of the 1990s. Heidelberg: Winter,
2002; Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber & Faber,
2000; Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2002; Eberhard Bort, The State of Play: Irish Theatre in the
'Nineties. Trier: WVT, 1996; Shaun Richards, The Drama of Modern Ireland. London:
526 FURTHER READING
Macmillan, 2001; Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002; Shaun Richards, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Irish
Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Margarete Rubik and Elke Met-
tinger-Schartmann, eds. (Dis)Continuities: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Theatre
and Drama in English. Trier: WVT, 2002; Kathleen Starck, 'I Believe in the Power of
Theatre': British Women's Drama of the 1980s and 1990s. Trier: WVT, 2005.
John R. Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1995; Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values, and Cultural Change. Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1997; John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British
Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
PROSE
Heinz Kosok, Geschichte der anglo-irischen Literatur. Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1990; Rdiger
Imhof, ed. Contemporary Irish Novelists. Tbingen: Narr, 1990; Susanne Hagemann, ed.
Studies in Scottish Fiction 1945 to the Present. Frankfurt: Lang, 1996; Christine Hunt
Mahoney, Contemporary Irish Literature. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998; Rdiger
Imhof, A Short History of Irish Literature. Stuttgart: Klett, 2002; Ansgar Nnning, Der
englische Roman des 20. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Klett, 1998; Willi Erzgrber, Der eng-
lische Roman von Joseph Conrad bis Graham Greene. Tbingen: Francke, 1999; Dominic
Head, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002; Brian W. Shaffer, ed. A Companion to the British and
Irish Novel. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004; Linden Peach, The Contemporary Irish Novel.
London: Palgrave, 2004; Peter Childs, Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970.
London: Palgrave, 2005; Nick Rennison, Contemporary British Novelists. London: Rout-
ledge, 2005; Christoph Ribbat, ed. Twenty-First Century Fiction: Readings, Essays, Con-
versations. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005; John Wilson Foster, The Cambridge Companion to
the Irish Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; Christa Jansohn, ed. Com-
panion to the New Literatures in English. Berlin: Schmidt, 2002; James Acheson and Sarah
C. E. Ross, eds. The Contemporary British Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2005; Nick Rennison, Contemporary British Novelists. London: Routledge, 2005; Randall
Stevenson, The Last of England?. The Oxford English Literary History. Vol. 12. Part 4:
Narrative: 1960-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 397-522; Robert L. Caserio,
ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2009; Duncan Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2004; Ian Brown and Alan Riach, eds. The Edinburgh Com-
panion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2009; Margaret Kellerher and Philip O'Leary, eds. The Cambridge History of Irish Litera-
ture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Recent British Short Story Writing (anglistik & englischunterricht 50: 1993); Heinz Kosok,
"Be Prepared: Die anglo-irische Kurzgeschichte", in anglistik & englischunterricht 52
(1994); Barbara Korte, The Short Story in Britain. A Historical Sketch and Anthology.
Tbingen: Francke, 2003; Arno Lffler and Eberhard Spth, eds. Geschichte der englischen
Kurzgeschichte. Tbingen: Francke, 2005; Adrian Hunter, The Cambridge Introduction to
the Short Story in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
FURTHER READING 527
CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, POPULAR FICTION

Deborah Cogan Thacker, Introducing Children's Literature. London: Routledge, 2002;
Kimberley Reynolds, ed. Modern Children's Literature. London: Palgrave, 2005; Peter
Stockwell, The Poetics of Science Fiction. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000; Paul K.
Alkon, Science Fiction Before 1900. London: Routledge, 2002; Brooks Landon, Science
Fiction After 1900. London: Routledge, 2002.
Ursula LeGuin and Brian Attebery, The Norton Book of Science Fiction. New York: Norton,
1993; Dirk Vanderbeke, "Science Fiction: bersicht ber ein unbersichtliches Genre",
Fremsprachenunterricht 1 (2001): 4-14; 63-67; Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992; George P. Landow, Hypertext. The Con-
vergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992; Hilmar Schmundt, "Autor ex machina. Electronic Hyperfictions:
Utopian Poststructuralism and the Romanticism of the Computer Age", Arbeiten aus
Anglistik & Amerikanistik 19:2 (1994): 223-46; Stuart Moulthrop, "Pushing Back", Modern
Fiction Studies 43 (1997): 651-74; Peter Paul Schnierer and Thomas Rommel, eds. Litera-
rische Hypertexte. Tbingen: Niemeyer, 2003; Edward James, ed. The Cambridge Com-
panion to Science Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Joseph Grixti, Terrors of Uncertainty. The Cultural Context of Horror Fiction. London:
Routledge, 1989; Richard Mathews, Fantasy. The Liberation of Imagination. London: Rout-
ledge, 2002.
Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell. British Women Writers in Detective
and Crime Fiction. London: Macmillan, 2001; Ed Christian, ed. The Post-Colonial Detec-
tive. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001; Wesley Wark, ed. Spy Fiction, Spy Films, and Real Intel-
ligence. London: Cass, 1991; Martin Compart, ed. Noir 2000. Cologne: DuMont, 2000; Lee
Horsley, The Noir Thriller. London: Macmillan, 2001; Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction
1880-2000. London: Palgrave, 2004; Martin Priestman, ed. The Cambridge Companion to
Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Vera Nnning, ed. Der ame-
rikanische und britische Kriminalroman: Genres Entwicklungen Modellinterpretatio-
nen. Trier: WVT, 2008.
Casey Blanton, Travel Writing. London: Routledge, 2002;Peter Hulme, ed. The Cambridge
Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
528 FURTHER READING
American Literature

Gert Raeithel, Geschichte der Nordamerikanischen Kultur. Vol. 1: Vom Puritanismus bis
zum Brgerkrieg 1600-1860. Weinheim: Quadriga, 1988.
Rudolf Haas, Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte. Vol. 1: Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer,
1972: 49-107; Daniel B. Shea, "Beginnings to 1810", in Emory Eliot, ed. Columbia Literary
History of the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988: 3-127; Hans
Galinsky, Geschichte amerikanischer Kolonialliteratur. 2 vols. Darmstadt: Wissenschaft-
liche Buchgesellschaft, 1991; articles by Myra Jehlen, Emory Elliott, David S. Shields,
Michael T. Gilmore in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed. The Cambridge History of American Litera-
ture. Vol. I: 1590-1820. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Hartwig Isern-
hagen, "Anfnge", in Hubert Zapf, ed. Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte. Second ed.
Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004: 1-34.

Gert Raeithel, Geschichte der nordamerikanischen Kultur. Vol. 1: Vom Puritanismus bis
zum Brgerkrieg 1600-1860. Weinheim: Quadriga, 1988.
Rudolf Haas, Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte. Vol 1: Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer,
1972: 108-73; Daniel B. Shea, "Beginnings to 1810", in Emory Elliott, ed. Columbia Lit-
erary History of the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988: 137-204;
Hans Galinsky, Geschichte amerikanischer Kolonialliteratur. 2 vols. Darmstadt: Wissen-
schaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991; articles by Myra Jehlen, Emory Elliott, David S.
Shields, Michael T. Gilmore in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed. The Cambridge History of American
Literature. Vol. I: 1590-1820. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Helm-
brecht Breinig and Susanne Opfermann, "Die Literatur der frhen Republik", in Hubert
Zapf, ed. Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte. Second ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004: 35-84.

Gert Raeithel, Geschichte der nordamerikanischen Kultur. Vol. 1: Vom Puritanismus bis
zum Brgerkrieg 1600-1860. Vol. 2: Vom Brgerkrieg bis zum New Deal 1860-1930. Wein-
heim: Quadriga, 1988; Donald Pizer, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism
and Naturalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Rudolf Haas, Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte. Vol. 1. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer,
1972: 174-91; Vol. 2. Sec. ed. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1982: 7-235; Terence Martin,
"1810-1865", in Emory Elliott, ed. Columbia Literary History of the United States. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1988: 205-692; articles by Michael Davitt Bell, Eric J.
Sundquist, Barbara L. Packer, and Jonathan Arac in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed. The Cambridge
History of American Literature. Vol. II: Prose Writing 1820-1865. Cambridge, MA: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995; Vol. III: Prose Writing 1860-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge
FURTHER READING 529
University Press, 2005; Hubert Zapf, "Romantik und 'American Renaissance'", and Win-
fried Fluck, "Realismus, Naturalismus, Vormoderne", in Hubert Zapf, ed. Amerikanische
Literaturgeschichte. Second ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004: 85-153, 154-217.

GENERAL BACKGROUND
Gert Raeithel, Geschichte der nordamerikanischen Kultur. Vol. 2: Vom Brgerkrieg bis zum
New Deal. Vol. 3: Vom New Deal bis zur Gegenwart. Weinheim: Quadriga, 1989; Christos
M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal, ed. American Art in the Twentieth Century:
Painting and Sculpture 1910-1993. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1993; Robert Hughes,
American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. London: The Harvill Press, 1997.
POETRY
Rudolf Haas, Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte. Vol. 2. Sec. ed. Heidelberg: Quelle &
Meyer, 1982: 235-337; David Mintner and Marjorie Perloff, "Poetry", in Emory Elliott, ed.
Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York: Columbia University Press,
1988: 911-992; 1079-1100; articles by Hubert Zapf, Heinz Ickstadt, Alfred Hornung, Heiner
Bus, Renate Hof et al., in Hubert Zapf, ed. Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte. Second ed.
Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004: 218-560; Sacvan Bercovitch, ed. The Cambridge History of Ameri-
can Literature. Vol. 5: Poetry and Criticism, 1910-50. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2003; article on poetry by Robert von Hallberg in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed. The
Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. VIII: Poetry and Criticism, 1940-1995.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996: 11-261.
Daniel Albright, Quantum Poetics. Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry:
Modernism and After. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1987; Jerome Mazzaro, Post-
modern American Poetry. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980; Franz Link, Make it
New: US-amerikanische Lyrik des 20. Jahrhunderts. Paderborn: Schningh, 1996; Christo-
pher Beach, The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Martina Pfeiler, Sounds of Poetry: Contem-
porary American Performance Poets. Tbingen: Narr, 2003.
DRAMA
Marjorie Perloff, "Twentieth-Century Drama", in Emory Elliott, ed. Columbia Literary
History of the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998: 1101-1125;
Christopher Bigsby and Don Wilmeth, eds. The Cambridge History of American Theatre, 3
vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998-2000; Herbert Grabes, Das amerika-
nische Drama des 20. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Klett, 1998; "American Drama of the 1960s",
special number of Amerikastudien/American Studies, ed. Herbert Grabes, 45:2 (2000);
Christopher Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1999; Christopher Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945-2000. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000; Brenda Murphy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to
American Women Playwrights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Annette J.
530 FURTHER READING
Saddik, Contemporary American Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007;

Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch, eds. A History of African American Theatre. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003; William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird, eds. The Cam-
bridge Companion to the Musical. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
PROSE FICTION
Marjorie Perloff, "The Present", in Emory Elliott, ed. Columbia Literary History of the
United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988: 1159-1200.
Kenneth Millard, Contemporary American Fiction. An Introduction to American Fiction
Since 1970. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; Walter Gbel, Der afroamerikanische
Roman im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine Einfhrung. Berlin: E. Schmidt Verlag, 2001; Sacvan
Bercovitch, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. VI: Prose Writing
1910-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; vol. VII: Prose Writing 1940-
1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Alan Bilton, An Introduction to Con-
temporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002.
Wolfgang Karrer and Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, eds. The African American Short Story
1970 to 1990. Trier: WVT, 1993; Wolfgang Galenski, Continuity and Change: Die ame-
rikanische short story in den 80er Jahren. Trier: WVT, 1995; Robert Bone, Down Home.
Origins of the Afro-American Short Story. 1975. New York: Columbia University Press,
1988; Gnter Ahrends, Die amerikanische Kurzgeschichte. Trier: WVT, 5th ed. 2008;
Martin Scofield, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Tony Tanner, The American Mystery. American Literature from Emerson to DeLillo. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000: 166-238.
POPULAR FICTION, SCIENCE FICTION, HYPERFICTION, CRIME FICTION, NON FICTION

Steven Bruhm, "The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It", in Jerrold E. Hogle, ed. The
Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002:
259-77; Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1996; George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Con-
temporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1992; George P. Landow, Hypertext Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1994; Hilmar Schlundt, "Autor ex Machina: Electronic Hyperfictions: Utopian Poststructur-
alism and the Romanticism of the Computer Age" Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik
19:2 (1994): 223-46; Peter Paul Schnierer, "Graphic 'Novels', Cyber 'Fiction', Multiform
'Stories' Virtual Theatre and the Limits of Genre", in Bernhard Reitz and Sigrid Rieuwerts,
eds. Anglistentag 1999: Proceedings. Trier: WVT, 2000: 535-47; Katherine Hayles, Writing
Machines. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002; Tim Parks, "Tales Told by the Computer",
The New York Review of Books 24 October 2002: 49-51.
Mark Dery, ed. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1994; N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999; Peter
Stockwell, The Poetics of Science Fiction. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000; Dani
Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson.
London: Athlone, 2000; David Bell, An Introduction to Cybercultures. London: Routledge,
2001.
FURTHER READING 531
Peter Messent, ed. Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel. Lon-
don: Pluto, 1997; Woody Haut, Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Lon-
don: Serpent's Tail, 1999; Priscilla L. Walton and Marina Jones, Detective Agency: Women
Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999;
Lee Horsley, The Noir Thriller. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001; Hans Bertens and Theo
D'haen, Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001; Martin
Priestman, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2003; Georg Schmid, Profiling the American Detective. Parker's Prose on the
Coded Game of Sleuth and Rogue and the Tradition of the Crime Story. Frankfurt: Lang,
2004.
Alfred Bendixen, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Glossary of Literary Terms
aestheticism A movement during the last two decades of the 19th century which demanded
"art for art's sake" and flourished in French, English, and American literature. It was also
much ridiculed by contemporaries.
affective fallacy A type of commentary on or interpretation of a literary text which is
mainly an account of the emotional, imaginative, or physiological reactions of the critic. See
also PATHETIC FALLACY, concerned with the author's emotions.
allegory A manner of fictional representation in which events, settings, and characters have
a second, symbolical meaning and also signify abstract ideas or moral qualities.
alliteration A device used in poetry and sometimes in prose: the repetition of similar initial
consonants, in a group of words or line of poetry.
alternating rhyme Usually refers to the rhyme pattern abab, also called cross rhyme; en-
velope rhyme is applied to the pattern abba.
ambiguity The presence of more than one possible meaning.
analogy A comparison between two essentially different things to show their similarity.
anapaest A foot of three syllables, the first two unstressed and the third stressed.
archetype Literally, a. means the first model or form from which subsequent forms are
derived. In Jung's psychology, it refers to inherited ideas or ways of thinking that are present
in the subconscious of the individual.
assonance A device used in poetry and sometimes in prose: the repetition of similar vowel
sounds.
author Term for the creator of a text. S/he is to be distinguished from the narrator of a text.
Literary criticism has been concerned for a a long time with the intention of the author (see
INTENTIONAL FALLACY); since the death of the author, proclaimed by poststructural-
ism, the focus of critical interest has been on the author function in literary communication.
ballad A short and simple narrative poem written to be sung or recited. Folk ballads belong
to the earliest forms of literature. The literary ballad imitates the anonymous popular form.
The ballad stanza consists of four lines, with the rhyme pattern abcb, and four stresses in the
first and third and three stresses in the second and fourth lines.
baroque Originally, the florid architecture from the mid-16th to the 18th centuries. The term
is also used broadly for literature that is highly ornamented, exaggerated, and emotionally
expressive.
beat generation The writers coming of age after World War II who rejected the values of
American society and used their writings as forms of protest. Loose structures and col-
loquial diction are hallmarks of their literature. "Beat" has been interpreted in musical terms
(rhythm), in the sense of "beaten", and even in the context of "beatitude".
blank verse Unrhymed verse with five stresses in each line and an iambic pattern (iambic
pentameter). It has been a popular form of dramatic verse in English, and was used by
Milton, Shakespeare, and Romantic writers.
GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS 533
blues A sad or melancholy song of Afro-American origin. It usually consists of three-line

stanzas, with the second line repeating the first.
burlesque A literary or dramatic imitation intended to ridicule the original form by exag-
geration. It usually implies the treatment of an elevated subject in a trivial way or of a low
subject with mock dignity.
calligramme A poem in which the arrangement of the typography underlines the theme. e.
e. cummings made use of this device. It is also referred to as concrete poetry.
canto One of the sections of a long poem. Dante's Divine Comedy, Byron's Don Juan, and
Pound's major collection of poems are arranged by cantos.
Cavalier poets "Cavalier" refers to the followers of Charles I in his struggles with Par-
liament. The Cavalier poets include Thomas Carew (pronounced Carey; 1595-1640),
Richard Lovelace (1618-58), and Sir John Suckling (1609-42).
chiasmus A rhetorical figure (from the Greek letter X or cross position) in which
elements are repeated in a syntactic placing that is crosswise and parallel (abba), as in
Remember March / the ides of March remember.
classicism A movement in art and literature representing the qualities for which the early
Greeks and Romans were famous: clarity of expression, balanced and well-proportioned
forms, and a concern for reason and universal themes. Ben Jonson, John Milton, and
Alexander Pope are often cited as classicists.
clich A word, phrase, or idea that has lost its originality through constant use. The term is
also applied to overused types of characters and ways of characterization.
closet drama A play, often written in verse, more suitable for reading than for acting.
comedy A literary work usually a drama that is humorous in its treatment of theme and
character and has a happy ending.
comedy of manners A humorous play making fun of the conventions and manners of the
middle and upper classes of society.
conceit A complicated or elaborate image or metaphor combining seemingly incompatible
and vastly different things or ideas. The best conceits, such as those of the metaphysical
poets, achieve a new meaning and insight that is often startling.
concrete poetry See CALLIGRAMME.
connotation Unlike "denotation", which signifies the accepted linguistic meaning of a
word, "connotation" refers to all the meanings suggested by, or attached to, a word, i.e., the
emotions and associations created by the sound or the look of a word. Poetry makes much
use of connotations.
couplet A pair of successive lines of poetry that rhyme. The English or Shakespearian
sonnet closes with a couplet.
cyberpunk A term combining computer technology and subversive behaviour. In litera-
ture, it refers to works (e.g., by William Gibson) of postmodern science fiction in which
rebellious heroes face and fight a computerized world dominated by international com-
panies. The characters act in real space and in cyberspace, a computer-generated virtual
world.
534 GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS
dactyl A foot of three syllables, the first stressed and the others unstressed.
decadence Term used for periods free from social, political, and moral conventions. There
were periods of decadence in all ages. The term is often applied to the 1890s (see also
AESTHETICISM) when writers were trying to shake off the inhibitions and prohibitions of
Victorianism.
deconstruction A POSTSTRUCTURALIST critical theory, inspired by the psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan (1901-81) and the philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), which tries to
prove that any kind of text, whether literary or non-literary, eventually undermines its own
claims to a convincing logical or coherent meaning. This is so, the p.s argue, because lan-
guage works with signifiers (e.g., written words) refering to (absent) meanings and supple-
ments that are constantly deferred (postponed) even while the literary text pretends they are
present. One might compare this to the belief of Catholics that God or the Holy Spirit is
present in the tabernacle, the latter being the signifier and the former being meaning. The
role of the reader, speech act theory, and structuralist ideas concerning the functioning of
language are central to this theory, which has been popular in Anglo-American academic
circles since the late 1970s.
doggerel Badly written and trivial poetry, often very sentimental and monotonous. It is
usually intentionally, and sometimes unintentionally, humorous.
dramatic poetry Verse that uses dramatic form, such as the dramatic monologue, in which
a character speaks to one or more listeners and reveals something about his/her personality.
The term also refers to plays written in verse (see CLOSET DRAMA).
dystopian Term sometimes used to describe anti-utopian fiction, i.e., works presenting
nightmare visions of the future.
eclogue A pastoral or idyllic poem in praise of country life.
elegy A melancholy poem, usually mourning or lamenting a dead person or persons. An
elegiac stanza is the quatrain (four lines of verse) in iambic pentameter rhyming alternately.
emblem A sign or symbol representing an idea or a tradition of a society.
enjambement A line of verse that is not end-stopped, i.e., has no logical pause at the close
and runs over to the next line. Also called run-on line.
epic A lengthy narrative poem and often concerned with heroes and courageous actions.
epigram A brief and witty statement or saying, often in the form of a poem.
epigraph A motto or quotation at the beginning of a literary work which provides a guide-
line for the work itself.
epitaph An inscription on a tombstone; also a brief poem praising a deceased person.
epode The third stanza of an ODE.
euphemism An indirect word or expression used for one that is thought to be offensive or
obscene.
euphuism An affected and artificial style of writing that was popular in the 16th century. It
implies the excessive use of alliteration, allusions, and conceits.
expressionism In the fine arts, the term refers to techniques in which natural forms are
exaggerated and distorted and in which colour is intensified. In drama, it means a style of
writing and producing that stresses emotional concern, subjective reactions of characters,
and symbolic representations of reality. In fiction, the term involves the representation of
the world through the intensified impressions and reactions of characters. Generally, e. aims
at a deliberate distortion of reality.
eye rhyme Two or more words which to the eye seem to rhyme, but when pronounced do
not, e.g. rough/cough; through/plough.
fantasy A type or genre of popular literature that has close affinities with science fiction,
horror fiction, and fairy tales. The Hobbit books by J. R. R. Tolkien are usually discussed as
fantasy literature, as are some works by Ursula Le Guin. F. literature is written for children
and adults alike.
farce A humorous, light play or comedy involving ludicrous action and dialogue, usually
with stereotyped characters. The farce has much situational humour and slapstick.
feminism Also termed gender studies, feminism as literary theory and social practice has
seen several waves. In the last century, Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir were
important first-wave figures. In the wake of POSTSTRUCTURALISM, f. has developed
many directions while adopting ideas from cultural studies, Marxist theory, and psycho-
analysis. Important schools are the language-based French f. (represented by H. Cixous and
L. Irigaray), the socially oriented and partly Marxist British f. (works by C. Belsey and
Mary Jacobus), and American f. (works by E. Showalter, J. Butler), which is interested in
the history of women (authors) and the gendering of the subject.
fin de sicle See AESTHETICISM and DECADENCE.
formalism A critical theory of literature developed around 1915 by Russian philologists
(W. Shklowskij, R. Jakobson) who considered it an "exact science" of literature as linguistic
art. Formalists continually questioned their own aims and results and their theory later
(1930s) developed into STRUCTURALISM.
free verse Verse without regular metre or line length but relying upon the natural rhythm of
language.
gender studies See FEMINISM.
genre A category or type of literature having a particular form or technique. The term is
applied to such literary forms as the novel, the short story, the essay, etc., but also to types
within these genres: thus there are lyrical and pastoral genres of poetry.
Georgian The term applied to authors during the later reign of George V (1910-1936), but
(in historical literature) also to the reigns of the four Georges (1714-1830) and to the styles
of architecture and art during that period.
Gothic A term with several meanings, including a medieval style in architecture, anything
pertaining to the Middle Ages (and, by implication, considered barbaric), and, in literature, a
style that is marked by gloomy settings, violent and bizarre actions, and a general feeling of
decadence and decay. This third definition applies to the gothic novel of the late 18th and
early 19th centuries.
graveyard school A group of 18th-century English poets who wrote sad and gloomy verse
about death.
haiku A Japanese poetic form that is made up of three lines containing a set number of syl-
lables. The haiku usually uses allusions and comparisons. It influenced European imagism.
Harlem Renaissance The fiction and poetry of the 1920s, written by authors from Harlem,
a section of upper Manhattan (New York City) inhabited mainly by blacks. Its leading fig-
ures were Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay.
heroic couplet A couplet in iambic pentameter (ten syllables with five stresses in each
line). It was the most popular verse form of the 18th century.
history play A drama based on English history and as such very popular in Shakespeare's
time. Shakespeare wrote 10 h. p.s, among them the two tetralogies that cover the Wars of
the Roses from the deposition of King Richard II in 1398 to the accession of Henry VII in
1485.
hymn A lyric poem in verse form designed to be sung; also a song in praise of God.
iambus (iamb) A poetic foot of two syllables, of which the second is stressed. It is the
most common metrical foot in English.
imagery The use of language to create actions, persons, and objects in the reader's mind.
Imagery can be both literal and figurative, i.e. symbolical.
imagism The poetry and the theory of a group of early 20th-century poets in America and
England who held that poetry should use everyday language and common themes, should
create new rhythms, and present clear, precise, and concentrated images. Imagist poets in-
cluded Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), and Amy Lowell.
impressionism A style of writing in which the author describes characters and scenes as
they appear to him/her at a given moment rather than as they are (or may be) in reality.
intentional fallacy The error of critics and readers of judging the meaning of a literary
work of art in terms of the author's expressed purpose in writing it. This is a common error
most students are reluctant to abandon. While the New Criticism and most poststructuralist
theories operate without (the reconstruction of) authorial intention, conservative critics like
E. D. Hirsch still champion the search for the author's intention and the meaning of a text,
Hirsch distinguishing between original meaning and significance established by the reader.
interior monologue A form of writing recording the inner thoughts and feelings of a
character, usually using the tenses of reported speech. See also STREAM OF CON-
SCIOUSNESS.
Irish Literary Renaissance The rise of Irish writers, mainly dramatists, in Dublin at the
beginning of the 20th century. The writers who came to prominence then were George
Moore, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, W. B. Yeats, and J. M. Synge.
Lake Poets (Lake School) A term applied to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Words-
worth, Robert Southey, and also to Thomas De Quincey, who all lived in the Lake District
in Cumbria, England.
lampoon An aggressive satire, in verse or prose, against individuals or institutions. It ridi-
cules the behaviour and the character of the attacked and was a popular form of satire in the
17th and 18th centuries.
limerick A form of light verse consisting of five lines rhyming aabba. The limerick is often
naughty or obscene.
lyric A short, personal or subjective poem expressing the author's intense feelings. A lyric
often has a melodic quality.
masque A theatrical form of entertainment that was popular in 16th- and 17th-century Eng-
land. It involved dancing, pantomime, songs, and dialogue.
melodrama A form of drama that exaggerates emotion, has stereotyped characters, and re-
lates sensational events. Melodramas (from Greek "song" and "play") were originally plays
with music. The modern kind developed in the 18th century, and melodramatic elements
often dominate gothic novels and 20th-century films.
metaphor A figure of speech by which one thing is imaginatively identified with another.
There is no linking "like" or "as", as in a SIMILE. Thus, W. B. Yeats writes about an "aged
man" who is "a tattered coat upon a stick".
metaphysical poetry Verse that is highly intellectual and philosophical, but also marked
by verbal wit and imaginative images (CONCEITS) and irregular metre. The outstanding
metaphysical poet in English literature was John Donne, and in American literature, Edward
Taylor.
metre The regular pattern or measure of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. The
metrical units, or groups of syllables, most commonly used in English poetry are called
IAMB(US), TROCHEE, ANAPAEST, and DACTYL. Each of these metrical units is called
a foot. The number of feet in a line of verse determines its name: thus verse of five feet is
called pentameter. The spondee is a rare form of foot: two stressed and successive syllables.
mimesis The Greek word for imitation. In literature, it refers to the attempt to "hold the
mirror up to nature", as Hamlet puts it in act 3, scene 2.
miracle plays see MYSTERY PLAYS.
mock epic (mock heroic) A long and comic poem in which a trivial subject is treated in
the exalted style of the epic. Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock is written in this style.
modernism A general term for new developments in the arts and in literature in the first
half of the 20th century. In English literature, it especially refers to the works of T. S. Eliot,
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and W. B. Yeats; and in American literature, to the pre-
modernists, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and the experimental and innovative authors
who wrote after 1914 (Lowell, Pound, Williams, and Stevens). A main feature is the impact
upon literature of the works and research of Freud and of a search for new forms of
expression. Modernist literature rejected the procedures and values of the immediate past
(Victorianism) and may be described as a literature of discontinuity.
montage In literature, the term means a series of rapidly presented impressions or obser-
vations that serve to create an atmosphere or to establish a theme.
morality plays English dramatic form, popular from the late 15th century to the mid-16th
century and primarily characterized by its use of allegory (e.g., personfications of virtues
and ideas, such as honour, death, and faith) to convey a moral lesson. They developed into
interludes (short plays performed at court or in front of aristocrats) and had a great influence
on Elizabethan drama. See also MYSTERY PLAYS. Everyman (1509-19) is one of the
better known m. p.s.
mystery plays Short plays based on biblical texts, popular in England from the 14th century
until the late 16th century when the government prohibited this form of drama. They derive
from the sketches introduced to the Catholic liturgy, performed at Easter and Christmas.
Gradually, the plays moved outside the church, and Latin was replaced by the English
language. Various cycles of plays developed, of which the most famous are the York,
Towneley (Wakefield), Chester, and Coventry cycles. The feast of Corpus Christi was the
most popular occasion for performances.
myth A legendary story, usually dealing with supernatural events, and dating from ancient
times. Myths arose out of man's need to give meaning to the mysteries of the world. Myths
have been used in modern literature as a structural device (for instance, in Joyce's Ulysses).
narrative poetry Verse that tells a story, such as the ballad or the epic.
naturalism An extreme form of realism that rejects idealized portrayals of life and stresses
the powerful influence, often tragic, of heredity and environment. Fiction in this movement
emphasizes the animal nature of man and the coarse and cruel sides of life.
neoclassicism A style of writing that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries with the revival
of classical standards of form, order, and harmony in literature. Neoclassicists advocated
rationalism, logic, elegant diction, and emotional restraint.
new criticism A form of literary evaluation that calls for a close and detailed analysis of
language and form rather than a study of biography or the historical settings of works of
literature. N. c. was supported by such American writers as Allen Tate, R. P. Warren, Yvor
Winters, and Kenneth Burke.
new historicism A literary theory and method of interpretation that considers all texts
(fictional and nonfictional) in their particular discursive environment while showing how
writing (and speech) depends on, and in turn embodies and gives voice to, the politics (in
the widest sense: institutions, literary genres, gendering) of the time in which the text was
produced. After the death of Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt is the most influential
representative of n. h.
nouveau roman A term applied to the work of a number of modern French novelists, in-
cluding Claude Simon (who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1985) and Marguerite
Duras. They reject the traditional techniques of the novel (narrator, plot, time sequence) and
create an intentional disorder that is meant to give collective significance to events.
novel A form of fictional prose narrative that arose in the 18th century and was rapidly
developed by Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. Every novel involves
characters, sometimes a dramatised narrator, action, settings, and theme.
ode Originally, a poem meant to be sung. It now refers to a longer lyric poem in an elevated
style and with a dignified theme. The Pindaric ode has several stanzas, each consisting of
three sections (strophe, antistrophe, and epode), sung by a chorus.
ottava rima A stanza form that has eight iambic pentameter lines rhyming abababcc.
pageant An elaborate public event celebrating a date in history; also a theatrical outdoor
performance.
panegyric A solemn or dignified speech or work of literature (usually brief) in praise of

someone or some achievement.
parody The satirical, humorous imitation of a person, event, or work of literature. It
achieves humour mainly by exaggeration, though good parody implies a sound and valid
criticism of the original.
pastiche The imitation of the style and form of a literary work with the intention of criti-
cising and showing its limits.
pastoral A poem dealing with country life in an idealized way.
pathetic fallacy Ascribing emotions and characteristics of human beings to inanimate ob-
jects in the natural world.
pathos The power of works of art to create strong feelings of pity and sadness for a char-
acter.
persona In literature, the term refers to the person figuring in a poem or novel, serving as a
"mask" (the meaning of the Latin word) for the author. Authors often invent a p. who nar-
rates the events in a novel.
Petrarchan sonnet See SONNET.
petrarchism The style, introduced by the Italian poet and scholar Petrarch (1304-74),
which is distinguished by its formal perfection, grammatical complexity, and elaborate
imagery.
picaresque A type of fiction in which the mostly humorous adventures of a character from
low life are narrated. (The Spanish word "pcaro" means rascal or rogue.) The p. novel was
popular in 18th-century England, and it was again revived in the 1950s.
plot Sequence of events in a work of fiction, a play, or a narrative poem.
poet laureate The title given to a poet who receives a certain amount of money (stipend),
now very small and merely a token sum, as an officer of the Royal Household in London.
His duty used to be to write poems for court festivities. The first modern p. l. was Ben
Jonson. 20th-century laureates: Bridges, Masefield, Day-Lewis, Betjeman, Ted Hughes, and,
at present, Andrew Motion. In 1985, the United States also introduced a salaried post of p. l.
poetic diction A style or way of writing that is different from ordinary speech and prose.
An elevated style was especially popular in the 18th century; 20th-century poetry has gener-
ally tried to avoid it, arguing that there should be no differences between the language of
poetry and that of speech.
poetic license The liberty taken by a writer, usually a poet, in deviating from the rules of
pronunciation, grammar, and style to produce a desired effect.
poetics Literary criticism dealing with poetry, or the art and technique of versification.
positivism A philosphical movement that considers only facts and excludes speculation
about causes and spirituality.
postmodernism A term that is still vague. It refers to a new approach in the arts and in
literature that began in the late 1950s and implies the questioning of the meaning of history
and of the real, an experimentalism that includes playing with forms and meanings, and a
revolt against the seriousness of the modernists and their hope for formal coherence. In
literature, some postmodernists are concerned with playful exercises in fantasy and gro-
tesquery, others explore the process of writing and the formation of texts, and others again
write fiction of excess and encyclopedic mass. One point all p.s have in common is the
expression of formal and ideological questions about the nature of fiction.
poststructuralism Term used for critical theories developed in the 1960s in the wake of,
and often against major ideas of, structuralism. DECONSTRUCTION, NEW HISTO-
RICISM, radical forms of FEMINISM, and Lacanian psychoanalysis are, for instance, post-
structuralist theories. What they share is often termed anti-Enlightenment thinking, a radical
plurality, a preference for playful interpretation that ignores the author and champions the
reader in the establishment of meaning, and the study of texts as products of cultures. P. is at
times used synonymously with POSTMODERNISM.
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood A group of English writers and artists who, around 1850,
tried to revive the style and spirit of Italian art before the time of Raphael (1483-1520).
Their poetry shows sensuousness, symbolism, and a preference for the exact depiction of
the physical details of nature.
primitivism This belief flourished in 18th- and 19th-century France and England. It holds
that contemporary civilization is artificial and corrupt and suggests a return to nature.
Rousseau in France, and Blake and Wordsworth in England, expressed primitivist views in
some of their works.
prose poem A section or passage of prose with poetic qualities, such as alliteration,
rhythm, and rich connotations.
prosody The study of verse structure, such as rhythm, metrical scheme, rhyme, stanza
form, and metre.
quatrain A poem or stanza of four lines.
reader-response theory A structuralist critical theory that stresses the importance of the
recipient of texts in the process of establishing meaning. Various schools exist under the
umbrella term r. r. t. Thus the Konstanzer Schule, represented by W. Iser and H. R. Jau,
stress the field of experience between the reader of a text and the object of the experience as
the reader fills the "gaps" left for him in a given text. David Bleich practices subjective
criticism by assuming that literary interpretation is closely linked to a person's desires and
motivations; and Stanley Fish and Jonathan Culler have developed another variant by
insisting on the structural openness of texts that is eventually limited by interpretive
communities (e.g., English Departments at universities) that produce, and force readers to
accept, valid interpretation.
realism A way of writing, with respect to technique and content, in which the ordinary and
familiar aspects of (everyday) life are shown in a straightforward manner. Realist writers
usually depict the lives of the middle and lower classes, and many concentrate on the
description of misery and decay.
regionalism The literary description of a particular section or area of a country, with an
attempt at accurate representation of the local speech, manners, and beliefs. In the USA the
term has been applied to several authors from the West and from the South (another term
used in this context is "local colour"); in England, the Wessex novels of Thomas Hardy are
regional literature.
Renaissance The period from about 1350 to 1650, when art, learning, and literature were
revived in Europe. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world. In
literature, the works of classic authors were studied and translated, and many great works of
fiction and poetry were written.
rhetoric The theory and study of the effective use of language in writing and speaking.
Modern r. has been concerned with the methods of achieving literary quality.
rhyme The repetition of the same or similar sounds in different words that appear close to
each other. There are different kinds of rhyme: internal rhyme occurs within the same line
of verse; end rhyme occurs at the ends of lines. Rhyme can be identical or approximate. One
type of approximate rhyme is ASSONANCE, where the stressed vowels in the words agree
but the consonants do not (e.g., back/rat); in CONSONANCE, the vowels do not agree (e.g.,
live/leave). See also ALTERNATING R.
rhyme royal A stanza of seven lines of iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme ababbcc.
romance Originally, this meant a medieval narrative in prose or verse about heroic persons
and events. It now applies to any kind of fiction that deals with heroic achievements,
passionate love, and supernatural experiences. William Shakespeare also wrote some plays
that are categorized as r.s: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.
Romanticism A literary and artistic movement which considered imagination more im-
portant than formal rules and reason. It dominated European cultural life to a large extent
between the 1780s and the 1830s. Romanticists rejected the ideas of classicism, emphasized
the role of the individual, and were concerned with mystery, the supernatural, and feelings.
satanic school A group of 19th-century English poets, including Byron and Shelley, who
led unconventional lives and were at odds with contemporary society.
satire The ridiculing in verse, prose, or drama of persons and institutions that the author
considers foolish or bad. As a form or genre of literature, s. blends humour and wit with a
critical attitude.
semiotics The study of signs and symbols. This involves the theory of symbolism,
including the meaning of words (semantics), structural relations (syntax), and the relations
between behaviour and symbols (pragmatics).
sensibility The responsive awareness and the emotionalism that characterizes an author and
helps the reader to an emotional appreciation of a literary work of art.
sentimentalism The excessive use of sentiment or emotion in literature.
simile A comparison in which two essentially different things are linked by the use of such
words as like, as, and than.
sonnet A poem of 14 lines, normally in iambic pentameter, with rhymes arranged ac-
cording to the Italian or Petrarchan manner (consisting of an octave, i.e. eight lines, and a
sestet, i.e. six lines: for instance, abbaabba cdecde), the English or Shakespearean manner
(consisting of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, abab cdcd efef gg), and the less
frequent Spenserian manner (abab bcbc cdcd ee). The parts of the sonnet refer to each other
in a variety of ways; Shakespeare's final couplet, for instance, allows a sort of general
conclusion or a summing up of the argument.
Spenserian stanza A stanza of eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a line of

iambic hexameter (i.e. six stresses in a line); the rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc. It was in-
vented by Edmund Spenser (1552-99) for his epic poem The Faerie Queene and was
popular with the Romantic poets.
spondee A foot of two stressed syllables as in the word Amen.
sprung rhythm A term invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins to designate a metre in which
a stressed syllable may be followed by a number of unaccented syllables. All feet, however,
are given equal time length in pronouncing. Poems which feature sprung rhythm have an
irregular metre and resemble natural speech.
stanza Lines of verse grouped in a pattern. The most common forms are the couplet, tercet,
quatrain, rhyme royal, ottava rima, sonnet, and villanelle.
stream of consciousness A way of writing that tries to record a character's ideas and
feelings as they are allegedly experienced in the character's mind. This means that there is
sometimes no logical sequence and no distinction between several levels of reality and
imagination. Novels in this manner were written by Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner.
structuralism A continental European movement in the human sciences which has deeply
influenced literary theory and criticism. It was developed by, among others, Roland Barthes
(1915-80) and Claude Lvi-Strauss (1908-2009), two brilliant French critics who drew on
the work of the Russian formalists (Jakobson) and on the linguistic studies of Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857-1913). Structuralists see any text, and even any cultural event, as the result
of a system of signification, or code, and argue that the relations between the elements of
such a system allow it to "mean" something, and that it is not the relationship between the
system and reality which establishes meaning. They question the idea that a text reflects or
holds a given reality, or that it expresses the self of an author. This implies an attack on the
humanist ideas of traditional literary scholarship. The most radical challenge has come from
the poststructuralist writers, such as Jacques Derrida (see DECONSTRUCTION).
surrealism A style in the arts and in literature that stresses the nonrational and subcon-
scious aspects of man's/woman's personality. It sprang up in France at the end of World War
I, with Andr Breton (1896-1966) as one of the leading figures. Surrealists were influenced
by the theories of Freud and the inhuman brutality of war, which some painters and writers
had experienced. One of the most distinguished surrealist painters is Salvador Dal; in
literature, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake demonstrates some aspects of s.
syllabic verse Poetry in which the lines are measured by the number of syllables rather
than by accents. The American poet Marianne Moore has written s. v.
symbol Something or someone representing an idea. Usually, a s. is a word or phrase with
a complex of associated meanings or connotations. Thus a flag is a s. of a nation.
symbolism A literary movement in the art and literature of late 19th-century France, a
revolt against realism. The symbolist poets used symbols and images to suggest life rather
than direct statements of meaning. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine were the more in-
fluential writers in this movement.
synesthesia The association (and poetic representation) of images and sensations perceived
by different senses, e. g. sight and sound (as in "blue cry") or touch and sight ("cool red").
terza rima A series of tercets (three lines of verse) with interlinking verse, with the rhyme
scheme aba bcb cdc, etc.
tragedy A literary work usually a drama with a sad or sombre theme that is carried to a
disastrous end. It traces the downfall of a noble character who becomes a victim of fateful
events he/she cannot control or of a flaw in his/her personality.
tragicomedy A play combining elements of comedy and tragedy.
travesty A form of satire which treats a dignified topic frivolously or absurdly. Unlike a
PARODY, which changes the content of the object of literary ridicule, a travesty keeps the
content of the satirical target and treats it in a new and ludicrous form.
trilogy A series of three novels, plays, or operas.
trochee A foot of two syllables; the stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed one.
utopian Derived from a Greek word meaning "no place" or "nowhere". In literature, it is
often applied to fiction showing an ideal society. Thomas More's book Utopia (1516) was
the prototype of such works. The opposite of "utopian" is "dystopian".
villanelle A verse form of French origin consisting of 19 lines on merely two rhymes. It has
six stanzas, of which five have three lines, and the last four lines. The rhyme scheme is aba
aba aba aba aba abaa. Certain lines recur in a fixed pattern. It was originally used in pastoral
verse and for songs and has been put to a variety of uses by poets in the 19th and 20th
centuries e. g. Dylan Thomas ("Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night").
vorticism An artistic movement related to cubism that began in the early 20th century. It
favoured the imaginative reconstruction of nature in formal or mechanistic designs and
related art forms to the machine and modern industrial society. Vorticists saw art as a vortex
or whirl in which energy was transformed into forms. Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and T.
S. Eliot were temporary supporters.
List of illustrations
The illustrations have been arranged according to historical periods and literary genres (e.g.,
The Nineteenth Century: General Survey, Poetry, Drama, The Novel, Nonfiction). Captions
held in bold type refer to those illustrations that appear in the text of the book and on the
CD-ROM; the other captions in lightfaced type refer to the illustrations on the CD-ROM
only.
BRITISH AND IRISH LITERATURE
Preface
1. Major Irish Writers as seen by David Levine (p. VIII)
I. The Anglo-Saxon Period

2. A Map of the British Isles and Ireland in the Anglo-Saxon Period (p. 3)
3. A Page of Old English verse, from the Junius manuscript in the Bodleian Library (p. 5)
4. A Page from the Beowulf manuscript (c. 1000) in the British Library
5. An Illuminated Page probably showing The Venerable Bede. From an MS. in the British
Library
II. The Middle English Period

6. A Poet at Work. From an MS. of Layamon's Brut
7. Frontispiece to a copy of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (p. 9)
8. Illustrated Page from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The Prioress (Ellesmere MS)
9. The Knight from Caxton's edition of The Canterbury Tales
10. Thomas Hoccleve presents a Copy of his Regement of Princes to the future Henry V
11. Les Trs Riches Heures de Jean Duc de Berry: August. Illuminated by the Limburg
brothers (p. 11)
12. E. De Monstrelet, Chronique (1510): Battle scene

13. An engraving of Henry VIII by Cornelius Metsys. 1548 (p. 12)
14. Portrait of Elizabeth I. Anonymous Portrait
15. Portrait of Elizabeth I. The Ditchley Portrait (p. 13)
16. Isaac Oliver, An Elizabethan Musing
17. Hans Holbein, Sir Thomas Wyatt. Detail
18. Titian, Venus and Adonis. c. 1550s (p. 16)
19. The Spanish Tragedy
20. Dr. Faustus
21. Arcadia (p. 18)
22. Hans Holbein, Sir Thomas More. Detail
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 545

23. Anthony Van Dyck, The King at His Hunt. 1635. Portrait of Charles I
24. The Execution of Charles I. 1649 (p. 19)
25. Oliver Cromwell in a print after William Faithorne for The Emblem of England's Distraction
(1658)
26. Charles II
27. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. Frontispiece (p. 20)
28. Peter Lely, Nell Gwyn as Agnes. 1675
29. Peter Lely, Nell Gwyn. 1688 (p. 21)
Poetry:
30. Portrait of William Shakespeare by John Taylor (The Chandos Portrait)
31. Portrait of John Donne. c. 1595
32. Shakespeare's patron, the earl of Southampton. 1594
33. Herbert, Pattern poem (p. 24)
34. John Milton as portrayed by William Faithorne (?)
35. Blake. Illustration for Milton's Comus
36. Les Trs Riches Heures de Jean Duc de Berry: The Garden of Eden. Illuminated by the
Limburg brothers (p. 25)
37. Blake. Illustration for Milton's Paradise Lost
38. Frontispiece for Butler's Hudibras
39. Engraving by W. Hogarth for Butler's Hudibras. 1726 (p. 27)
Drama:
40. Portrait of Shakespeare. Engraving by Droeshout. 1623 (p. 29)
41. Engraving after a painting by Fuseli illustrating Iv.i in A Midsummer Night's Dream. "Titania
Awakes". 1803
42. Engraving after Fuseli for Henry IV. 1803. Falstaff at Hearne's Oak
43. Engraving after Fuseli for Richard II. 1803
44. Engraving after Fuseli for Hamlet. 1796
45. Engraving after Fuseli for King Lear. 1792
46. Engraving after Fuseli for Macbeth. 1785 (p. 32)
47. Engraving after Fuseli for Macbeth. 1784
48. Engraving after Fuseli for The Tempest. 1797
49. The Globe Theatre (a + b)
50. Title-page of Bartholomew Fair
51. Title-page of 'Tis Pitty she's a Whore
52. Wren's Theatre Royal. Drury Lane. 1674 (p. 35)
53. Title-page of The Country Wife
54. Title-page of The Provoked Wife
Fiction:
55. Frontispiece of 3rd ed. of The Pilgrim's Progress
56. Engraving from The Pilgrim's Progress. Vanity Fair (p. 37)
Nonfiction:
57. Frontispiece of Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (p. 38)
58. The Fool's Cap World Map. 1590. Anonymous satirical print showing the outlines of the
world known around 1600 (p. 39)
546 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

59. Portrait of George III. Detail
60. James Gillray. Un petit souper la Parisienne. Cartoon. 1792
61. James Gillray, The Zenith of French Glory. 1793 (p. 41)
62. W. Hogarth, Marriage -la-Mode. Plate 1. 1745 (p. 42)
63. W. Hogarth, Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism. 1762
64. W. Hogarth, Sir Francis Dashwood at his Devotions
65. W. Hogarth, John Wilkes. 1763
66. W. Hogarth, The Four Times of the Day: Noon. 1738 (p. 44)
67. Thomas Gainsborough, The Blue Boy. 1770
68. Thomas Gainsborough, The Mall. St James's Park. 1783
69. W. Hogarth, Gin Lane. 1751
70. Richard Newton, A Nightmare. c. 1798
71. Anonymous satire on Fuseli's painting, A Nightmare. 1795
Poetry :
72. Satire on Pope (p. 46)
73. Frontispiece for James Thomson, The Seasons. 1730
74. Illustration by W. Blake for Edward Young, Night Thoughts. 1797
75. Gainsborough, Diana and Actaeon. 1785
76. W. Blake, The Man Who Taught Blake to Draw in His Dreams. c. 1818 (p. 50)
77. W. Blake, Songs of Innocence: The Divine Image. 1793
78. W. Blake, Songs of Experience: The Tyger. 1793
79. W. Blake, America. Fronstispiece. 1793
80. W. Blake, Title-page to Milton (p. 51)
81. W. Blake, P. 1 of Milton
82. W. Blake, P. 3 of Jerusalem
83. W. Blake, P. 78 of Jerusalem
84. Henry Fuseli, Symplegma eines Mannes und zweier Frauen zu Fssen eines Priapos-Altars.
c. 1775
85. T. Rowlandson, A French Frigate. c. 1785
Drama:
86. Portrait of Congreve by G. Kneller
87. Title-page of The Way of the World. 1700
88. Title-page of The Recruiting Officer
89. Peter Angellis, A Company at Table. 1719 (p. 53)
90. W. Hogarth, The Beggar's Opera. 1731
91. W. Hogarth, Frontispiece for Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies. 1731
92. W. Hogarth, Masquerades and Operas. 1724 (p. 55)
93. W. Hogarth, A Just View of the British Stage. 1724
The Novel:
94. Title-page of Robinson Crusoe. 1719
95. Frontispiece by Clark and Pine for Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. 1719 (p. 57)
96. Title-page of Defoe's Roxana. 1724
97. Engraving for Roxana. Frontispiece of 1742 edition
98. Title-page of Gulliver's Travels. 1726
99. W. Hogarth, The Punishment inflicted on Lemuel Gulliver. 1726 (p. 59)
100. J. Gillray, The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver. 1803
101. W. Hogarth, A Harlot's Progress (pp. 60-61)
102. H. Gravelot, Illustration for Richardson's Pamela. 1742
103. J. Highmore, Pamela and Mr B in the Summer House. 1743/44

104. J. Highmore, Pamela is Married. 1743/44
105. Engraving by Hogarth of Henry Fielding (p. 63)
106. W. Hogarth, A Rake's Progress. 1735 (pp. 67-69)
107. Henry Fuseli, Illustration for Peregrine Pickle. 1769
108. Thomas Rowlandson, Matthew Bramble's Trip to Bath: Private Practice Previous to the
Ball (p. 70)
109. Thomas Rowlandson, Dr Graham's Earth Bathing Establishment. c. 1785-90
110. Joshua Reynolds, Laurence Sterne. 1760
111. W. Hogarth, Engraving for Tristram Shandy. Vol. 1. 1760
112. W. Hogarth, Engraving for Tristram Shandy. Vol. 4. 1761
113. Bunbury, Illustration forTristram Shandy. 1773 (p. 71)
114. S. Newton, Yorick and the Grisette in the Glove Shop. c. 1830
115. Thomas Rowlandson, The Man of Feeling. 1788. Satire on Mackenzie's novel of 1771
116. Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare. 1782 (p. 73)
117. James Gillray, Tales of Wonder. 1802. Satire on the popularity of Gothic novels
118. William Hogarth, Before and After. 1736 (p. 75)
Nonfiction:
119. Kneller, Portrait of Joseph Addison. c. 1703-10
120. J. Closterman, Portrait of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. c. 1701/02
121. Illustration from William Combe, The English Dance of Death. 1815-16 (p. 77)
122. William Gilpin, Landscape with Ruined Castle. c. 1790 (p. 78)

123. Portrait of George IV. Detail
124. William Nicholson, Queen Victoria (1837-1901). 1897 (p. 79)
125. Anonymous Satire on Catholic Emancipation (and Ireland). 1828
126. Darwin Testing the Speed of an Elephant Tortoise in the Galapagos Islands. Engraving
127. J.M.W. Turner, The Great Falls of the Reichenbach. 1804 (p. 80)
128. J.M.W. Turner, Dartmouth Cove. 1826
129. W.H. Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple. 1860
130. E. Landseer, The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner. 1837
131. S. Forbes, A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach. 1885
132. A. Beardsley. Ali Baba. 1897
Poetry:
133. J.M.W. Turner, Tintern Abbey. 1834. Illustrating Wordsworth's poem of the same title (1798)
134. John Martin, The Bard. 1817. Inspired by Thomas Gray's poem of 1757 (p. 82)
135. Gustave Dor, Illustration from a German edition of The Ancient Mariner
(Der alte Matrose). 1877 (p. 84)
136. Portrait of Byron in Albanian dress
137. J.M.W. Turner, Death on a Pale Horse. c. 1825-30 (p. 85)
138. Portrait of John Keats by Benjamin Robert Haydon. 1817
139. Emily Mary Osborn, Nameless and Friendless. 1857
140. Portrait of Robert Browning by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 1855
141. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Found. 1854-81 (p. 90)
142. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith. 1864 (p. 92)
143. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frontispiece and title-page for Christina Georgina Rossetti's Goblin
Market
144. William Morris, Wallpaper Design. 1892

145. J.A.M. Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl. 1862
146. Oscar Wilde with Lord Alfred Douglas. Photograph. 1890s
147. A. Beardsley, Illustration from The Savoy. 1896 (p. 94)
148. A. Beardsley, Illustration from The Savoy. 1896
149. Portrait of G.M. Hopkins
Drama:
150. John Martin, Manfred on the Jungfrau. 1837
151. W.H. Hunt, The Awakening Conscience. 1854
152. Augustus Egg, Past and Present. 1858 (p. 97)
153. Oscar Wilde and the Lord Chaimberlain. c. 1892
154. A. Beardsley, Illustration for Wilde's tragedy Salom (p. 98)
The Novel:
155. G. Cruikshank, Mer de Glace. 1821 (p. 99)
156. Portrait of Mary Shelley
157. Drawing of Jane Austen
158. C.R. Leslie, Charles Dickens as Captain Bobadil in Ben Jonson's Everyman in His Humour as
performed in 1845
159. G. Cruikshank, Illustration for Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz. 1839. The Streets. Morning
160. R. Seymour and Phiz. Illustration for The Pickwick Papers. The Unexpected Breaking
up of the Seminary of Young Ladies. 1837 (p. 101)
161. G. Cruikshank, Illustration for Oliver Twist. Oliver asking for more
162. G. Cruikshank, Illustration for Oliver Twist. Oliver amazed at the Dodger's mode of
'going to work' (p. 102)
163. H.K. Browne, Cover design for wrapper of monthly parts of David Copperfield
164. H.K. Browne, Illustration for David Copperfield. Mrs. Gummidge casts a damp on our
departure. 1850
165. Illustration by Thackeray for Vanity Fair. Rebecca makes Acquaintance with a Live Baronet.
1848
166. Illustration by Thackeray for Vanity Fair. Miss Crawley's Affectionate Relatives. 1848
(p. 104)
167. Illustration by Thackeray for Vanity Fair. Major Sugarplums. 1848
168. F.W. Burton. Portrait Drawing of George Eliot
169. W.H. Hunt, Isabella and the Pot of Basil. 1867 (p. 107)
170. F. Leighton, Summer Slumber. Quite a different view of women from Hardy's. 1894
171. A. G. Morrow, Poster for The New Woman. 1894
172. Book-cover for a novel by G.A. Henty. 1890s
173. Oscar Wilde as seen by a Punch caricaturist. 1892
174. Illustration for Alice in Wonderland
175. Illustration for Alice in Wonderland (p. 110)
Nonfiction:
176. Portrait of John Ruskin
177. Portrait of Walter Pater
178. F. Lewis, The Noonday Halt. 1853 (p. 113)

179. Walter R. Sickert, Edward VIII. 1936
180. Mark Boxer, The Prince of Wales. 1981 (p. 114)
181. Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled. 1919 (p. 115)
182. Duncan Grant, Handicapped. 1909. Poster in support of women's suffrage
183. Lucian Freud, Naked Girl with Egg. 1980-81 (p. 116)
184. Gerald Scarf, Mick Jagger and Cecil Beaton. 1966
185. Duncan Grant, Interior. 1918
186. Henry Moore, Reclining Figure. 1936
187. Francis Bacon, Sleeping Figure. 1959 (p. 118)
188. Gilbert and George, Are You Angry or Are you Boring?. 1977
189. Tracey Emin, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1994. 1995 (p. 120)
190. Grayson Perry at the 2003 Turner Prize reception (p. 121)
191. The 2008 Turner Prize poster (p. 121)
Poetry:
192. Sydney Carline, The Destruction of an Austrian Machine in the Gorge of the Brenta Valley,
Italy. 1918
193. Portrait of Rupert Brooke
194. Eric Kennington, The Kensingtons at Laventie. 1915
195. David Bomberg, The Mud Bath. 1912-13
196. William Strang, Bank Holiday. 1912 (p. 125)
197. Photograph of T.S. Eliot as he wanted himself to be seen
198. W. Roberts, Bank Holiday in the Park. 1923
199. Photograph of W. H. Auden (p. 129)
200. Photograph of Louis MacNeice
201. Percy Horton, Unemployed Man. 1936 (p. 130)
202. Graham Sutherland, Lithograph for David Gascoyne's Poems 1937-42. 1943
203. Edward Burra, Saturday Market. 1932 (p. 132)
204. Paul Nash, Landscape of the Vernal Equinox. 1944
205. Photograph of the occasionally caustic Philip Larkin (p. 134)
206. Ted Hughes, the way he looked when Sylvia Plath fell in love with him
207. Ian Hamilton Finlay, Acrobats (p. 138)
208. Book cover for Ted Hughes's Crow. 1970
209. Edward McGuire, Seamus Heaney. 1974
210. Seamus Heaney as a young man (p. 141)
211. Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. 1991
(p. 145)
212. Gilbert and George, Bum Holes. 1994
213. R.B. Kitaj, Cecil Court W.C. 2 The Refugees. 1983-84
Drama:
214. Poster for a play by G. B. Shaw (p. 157)
215. Illustration for Peter Pan. N.d.
216. Actor wearing a mask for Yeats's At the Hawk's Well. 1916 (p. 160)
217. Actor wearing a mask for Yeats's At the Hawk's Well. 1916
218. Clive Branson, Selling the Daily Worker Outside the Projectile Engineering Works. 1936
(p. 163)
219. Edward Middleditch, Cow Parsley. 1956
220. Scenic photograph. P. Shaffer, Equus (p. 169)
221. A painting that inspired Beckett for his seminal Waiting for Godot:
Caspar David Friedrich, Zwei Mnner in Betrachtung des Mondes. 1819 (p. 173)
222. G. Divine as Hamm in Endgame. Royal Court Theatre, 1958
223. Photograph of Harold Pinter as a young man. N.d.
224. Lucian Freud, Large Interior. 1980-81
225. Nicolas Poussin, Les bergers d'Arcadie. c. 1640 (p. 177)
226. A. Sher as a 5-year-old girl. Joint Stock production of Cloud 9
227. Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. 1768
228. Jake and Dinos Chapman, Chapmanworld. Detail. 1997 (p. 182)
The Novel:
229. Duncan Grant, The Tub. 1912
230. Roger Fry, E.M. Forster. 1911
231. Christopher Wood, China Dogs in a St Ives Window. 1926
232. Poster of the Paris Dada exhibition. 1921
233. Paul Nash, Landscape from a Dream. 1936-38 (p. 195)
234. James Joyce as he looked when Nora fell in love with him
235. Richard Hamilton, Illustration for Ulysses (p. 197)
236. Virginia Woolf in a Pre-Raphaelite pose
237. Harold Gilman, Tea in the Bedsitter. 1916
238. Wyndham Lewis, The Crowd. 1914-15
239. George Orwell by David Levine
240. Stanley Spencer, Shipbuilding on the Clyde: Furnaces. 1946 (p. 202)
241. Book Cover for Peake's Titus Groan. 1946
242. Peter Blake, Children Reading Comics. 1954
243. Richard Hamilton, Just What is it That Makes Today's Homes so Different, so Appealing?
1956
244. R.B. Kitaj, The Ohio Gang. 1964
245. Iris Murdoch, photographed before Alzheimer's disease set in (p. 208)
246. Margaret Drabble as a dashing young woman
247. Graham Greene, journalist, travel writer, novelist
248. Book jacket for Pincher Martin. 1956
249. John Hilliard, 765 Paper Balls. 1969 (p. 216)
250. Gilbert and George, Fallers. 1984
251. M.C. Escher, Waterfall. Lithograph. 1961 (p. 217)
252. R.B. Kitaj, If Not, Not. 1975-76
253. Gilbert and George, George the Cunt, Gilbert the Shit. 1970
254. Barry Flanagan, Leaping Hare. 1980 (p. 220)
255. David Levine, Cartoon of Ian McEwan. 1998
256. Alasdair Gray, Frontispiece for Lanark. 1981
257. Alasdair Gray, Illustration for Lanark. 1981 (p. 228)
258. Alasdair Gray, Illustration for Poor Things. 1992
259. Alasdair Gray, Illustration for Poor Things. 1992
260. Barry Flanagan, Soprano. 1981
261. Gilbert and George, Prick Ass. 1978
262. Antoine Watteau, L'embarquement pour l'Ile de Cythre. 1717 (p. 234)
263. Salman Rushdie in the pose of a skeptical young man
264. Malcolm Morley, Macaws, Bengals, With Mullet. 1982
265. Lucian Freud, Naked Portrait with Reflection. 1980 (p. 238)
The Short Story:
266. Louis le Brocquy, Study Towards an Image of Samuel Beckett. 1979
267. Ren Magritte, Tentation de l'impossible. 1928 (p. 248)

268. Francis Bacon, Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Innocent X. 1953
269. Lucian Freud, A Factory, North London. 1972
270. Book cover of Welsh's Ecstasy. Paperback 1997
Children's Literature:
271. Illustration for Peter Rabbit (p. 253)
272. Jacket cover of the paperback edition of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. 1999
Popular Fiction:
273. Peter Blake, HOMAGE JJ MM RR KS . 1991
274. Jacket cover illustration for Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory. 1984 (p. 259)
275. A page from J. Derrida's Glas (p. 263)
276. Book cover of The Tailor of Panama
277. Roy Porter, smiling and helpful, before he died in 2002 (p. 275)
278. Sir Roger Penrose
279. David Levine's portrait of C. P. Snow (p. 278)
280. F. R. Leavis as seen by David Levine (p. 279)
AMERICAN LITERATURE

281. John White, The Savage. 1585, engraving of a Roanoke medicine man
282. Captain John Smith. Engraving from a map in his The General History of Virginia. 1624.
Engraved by Robert Clerke after (?) Simon van de Passe (p. 283)
283. Portrait of John Winthrop by an anonymous artist. 1629
Poetry:
284. Westover Plantation, Charles City County, Va. 1730
285. Title-page from John Smith's The General History of Virginia, 1624. Engraved by Jan
Barra (p. 289)
286. Captain John Smith and the King of Pamaukee, from A Map of Old Virginia, in Smith's The
General History of Virginia, 1624. Engraved by Robert Vaughan
287. Pocahontas, from John Smith's The General History of Virginia, 1624. Engraved by
Compton Holland after Simon van de Passe (p. 290)
288. Peter Pelham, Cotton Mather. 1727

289. Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe. 1770 (p. 293)
290. Charles Wilson Peale, Thomas Jefferson
291. Benjamin Franklin as seen by David Levine (p. 299)

292. US soldiers and Moro children in the Philippines (Mindanao). 1899 (p. 301)
293. Sitting Bull. Photo from the US Signal Corps
294. J. M. Stanley, Osage Scalp Dance. 1845 (p. 302)
295. E. Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way. 1861
296. J.J. Audubon, Golden Eagle. 1833-34
297. Albert Bierstadt, The Last of the Buffalo. 1889 (p. 303)
298. The Plantation. Anonymous painting. c. 1825
Poetry:
299. Thomas Cole, View From Mount Holyoke. 1836
300. Edgar Allan Poe
301. Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits. 1849 (p. 304)
302. Illustration for Longfellow's Evangeline. 19th century
303. Illustration for Longfellow's Evangeline. 19th century
304. Illustration for Longfellow's Hiawatha. 19th century (p. 307)
305. Winslow Homer, Prisoners from the Front. 1866
306. Daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson. 1848
307. Karl Bodmer, Pehriska-Ruhpa. 1832-34 (p. 313)
308. G. Catlin, Archery of the Mandans. 1841
309. T.H. Matteson, The Last of the Race. 1847
The Novel:
310. Thomas Cole, Daniel Boone and His Cabin on the Great Osage Lake. c. 1826. (p. 316)
311. Portrait of N. Hawthorne as a young man
312. Scene from John Huston's (dreadful) film, Moby-Dick. 1956. With Gregory Peck as Ahab
313. Boat Destroyed by a Whale. 19th-century engraving (p. 317)
314. Advertisement for Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1852
315. Portrait of Mark Twain as a young man
316. G. C. Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. 1845 (p. 320)
317. G. C. Bingham, The Jolly Flatboatmen. 1846
318. Thomas Anshutz, The Ironworkers' Noontime. 1880
319. Charles Graham, The New Building of the New York Times. 1888
320. Winslow Homer, Croquet Scene. 1866 (p. 323)
321. Childe Hassam, Fifth Avenue at Washington Square. 1891
The Short Story:
322. F.O.C. Darley's illustration of Ichabod Crane for Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. 1848
323. Currier & Ives, American Farm Yard Morning. Engraving. 1857 (p. 327)
324. Winslow Homer, Eaglehead, Manchester, Mass. 1870
325. Winslow Homer, The Bridlepath, White Mountains. 1868
326. Winslow Homer, Undertow. 1886 (p. 328)
Nonfiction:
327. Portrait of Emerson
328. G. Catlin, Buffalo Hunt, Chase
329. Sitting Bull. Detail from a photograph by the US Army
330. Cochise. Reproduced from a painting in the Arizona Historical Society (p. 330)
331. A. F. Randall, Geronimo. 1886
332. Chief Joseph. National Archives
333. G. Catlin, North American Indians (p. 331)

334. Palmer Hayden, Midsummer Night in Harlem. 1936 (p. 332)
335. Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Want. 1943
336. R.D. Kitaj, Bill Clinton. 1995

337. Bill Clinton and female aide
338. George W. Bush as seen by David Levine. 2000
339. David Hockney, Rocky Mountains and Tired Indians. 1965 (p. 334)
340. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #34. 1979
341. Cindy Sherman. Untitled Film Still #35. 1979
342. A. Stieglitz, The Terminal. Photogravure. 1892
343. Marcel Duchamp, LHOOQ. 1919 (p. 337)
344. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain. 1917
345. Man Ray, Le violon d'Ingres. 1924
346. Edward Hopper, Automat. 1927
347. Cindy Sherman, Untitled #210. 1989
348. Cindy Sherman, Untitled #225. 1990 (p. 339)
349. Cindy Sherman, Untitled #276
Poetry:
350. Charles Demuth, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. 1928
351. Walker Evans, Brooklyn Bridge, N.Y. 1929 (p. 340)
352. John Marin, Brooklyn Bridge. 1910
353. Grant Wood, Spring Turning. 1936 (p. 344)
354. Robert Penn Warren as seen by David Levine
355. A view of Robinson Jeffers by David Levine. 2002
356. Edward Hopper, Eleven a.m. 1926 (p. 348)
357. Max Ernst, Above the Clouds Midnight Passes. 1920
358. Max Ernst, La belle jardinire. 1923 (p. 351)
359. Photograph of the elderly, attractive Marianne Moore
360. A view of Anthony Hecht by David Levine. 1986
361. A photograph of Charles Olson. 1985
362. A photograph of Allen Ginsberg. 1984
363. Denise Levertov photographed by David Geier
364. David Hockney, A Bigger Splash. 1967 (p. 354)
365. Photograph of James Dickey. 1984
366. Photograph of the young Bob Dylan
367. Robert Lowell in a pensive mood. 1984
368. John Berryman facing the camera. 1970s
369. Sylvia Plath as Ted Hughes sometimes saw her
370. Robert Lowell as seen by David Levine (p. 358)
371. Anne Sexton seen through Arthur Furst's lens (p. 360)
372. Dave Smith drawn by David Levine. 2001
373. David Levine's portrait of Gjertrud Schnackenberg. 2001 (p. 361)
374. Susan Howe's iconotext Eikon Basilike (p. 363)
375. David Levine's 2001 view of Brad Leithauser
376. A painterly view of Langston Hughes
377. Photograph of Lucille Clifton. 1980
378. Gwendolyn Brooks. 1984. Photograph by Thomas Victor
379. Le Roi Jones alias Baraka as a young man
380. Quincy Tahoma, In the Days of Plentiful. 1946 (p. 370)
Drama:
381. Charles Sheeler, American Landscape. 1930
382. Ben Shan, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. 1931-32
383. Walker Evans, Country Store. 1936 (p. 376)
384. Photograph of Eugene O'Neill

385. Edward Hopper, Room in New York. 1932 (p. 378)
386. A scene from Oklahoma. 1947
387. Photograph of Tennessee Williams
388. Walker Evans, Chicago. 1946 (p. 382)
389. Edward Hopper, New York Office. 1962
390. Sam Shepard as a promising young playwright
391. Duane Hanson, The Housewife. 1970 (p. 390)
395. Cindy Sherman, Untitled. 1982
396. Cindy Sherman, Untitled. 1989
397. Walker Evans, Minstrel Show Bill. 1936 (p. 398)
398. Photograph of James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano
The Novel:
399. Charles Demuth, Buildings, Lancaster. 1930
400. Man Ray, Sinclair Lewis. c. 1925
401. Walker Evans, Hale County, Alabama. 1936 (p. 409)
402. Grant Wood, American Gothic. 1930
403. Ernest Hemingway in one of his macho roles
404. Max Ernst, Virgin Spanking the Christ Child. 1926
405. Man Ray, Henry Miller. 1945
406. T.H. Benton, The Bootleggers. 1927
407. Edward Hopper, Office at Night. 1940 (p. 414)
408. Walker Evans, Mississippi. c. 1935
409. Mark Rothko, Baptismal Scene. 1945 (p. 420)
410. Edward Hopper, Evening. 1947
411. John Updike as he wanted to be seen as a young writer
412. Duane Hanson, Couple With Shopping Bags. 1976 (p. 422)
413. David Hockney, We Two Boys Together Clinging. 1961
414. Roy Lichtenstein, We Rose Up. 1960s
415. Andy Warhol, Triple Elvis. 1963
416. Roy Lichtenstein, The Kiss. 1961
417. The real Little Big Man. Photo from the U.S. Signal Corps (p. 430)
418. Robert Motherwell, Unglckliche Liebe. 1975
419. Claes Oldenburg, Two Cheeseburgers With Everything. 1962
420. A rare photograph of Thomas Pynchon as a sailor (p. 434)
421. Claes Oldenburg, Clothespin. 1976
422. Photograph of Jerzy Kosinski
423. Bruce Naumann, Carousel. 1988
424. David Levine draws Don DeLillo. 2000
425. Willem de Kooning, Pirate. 1981
426. Walter de Maria, The Lightning Field. 1977
427. Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson with Bubbles. c. 1990 (p. 439)
429. David Levine's drawing of William Kennedy. 1992
430. Andy Warhol, Dolly Parton. 1985
432. Photograph of the young Erica Jong
433. Photograph of the young Norman Mailer

434. Zora Neale Hurston as seen by David Levine. 1978 (p. 449)
435. David Levine, Count Basie. 1985
436. Rafael Medina, Koshare. 1968 (p. 452)
The Short Story:
437. Cartoon by James Thurber
438. A photograph of William Faulkner
439. The dashing Truman Capote
440. John Barth as a university professor
441. One of the rare photos of Thomas Pynchon as young man (p. 463)
442. A photograph of I.B. Singer
443. Saul Bellow in his role as university professor
444. Native Americans Then and Now. Mural Painting. n. d. (p. 466)
Children's Literature:
445. Walt Disney, Magician Mickey. 1937
446. Walt Disney, Snow White. 1953
447. Walt Disney, Donald's Cousin Gus. 1989
448. Andy Warhol, Mickey Mouse. From the portfolio Myths. 1981 (p. 470)
449. Andy Warhol, Superman. From the portfolia Myths. 1981
Popular Fiction:
450. Keith Haring, Andy Mouse Bill. Money Magazine. 1986
451. Keith Haring, Untitled. 1987 (p. 475)
452. Keith Haring, Billboard. 1987
453. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Photograph. 1990
454. David Levine's view of Ursula Le Guin. 2002 (p. 480)
455. Photograph of Marge Piercy by Thomas Victor. 1984
456. Photograph of Astro Teller. N.d.
457. Alfred Leslie, The 7 a.m. News. 1976
458. Levine's portrait of Elmore Leonard (p. 485)
459. Photograph of James Ellroy
460. Edward Burra, Harlem. 1930s. Cover illustration for The Real Cool Killers (p. 489)
Nonfiction:
461. Thomas Moran, Rock Towers of the Rio Virgin. 1908 (p. 491)
462. David Levine's view of Stephen Greenblatt. 2001 (p. 496)
463. David Levine imagines Stanley Fish
464. Photograph of Judith Butler. 2001
465. David Levine's portrait of John Rawls (p. 499)
466. Stephen Jay Gould as seen by David Levine (p. 500)
Index
The index covers the main text (not the notes and appendices) and contains names and
important subjects in literary history as well as terms from cultural history that are relevant
for literature. Individual works are listed under the authors' names. Brief definitions of
literary terms can be found in the glossary.
Abbey, Edward 477 Aldington, Richard 123, 340 Winesburg, Ohio 343,
Abbott, George 380 Aldiss, Brian 257 408, 460, 461
Abbott, Jacob 469 Aldrich, Thomas B. 471 Andrewes, Lancelot 39, 128
Abish, Walter 406, 431 Alexie, Sherman 370, 467 Andrews, Terry 443
Abstract expressionism 119, Poetry 370 Angelou, Maya 451
338, 355, 437 Stories 467 Angellis, Peter 53
Acker, Kathy 474 Alfred, King 3-5 Anglican Church 12
Blood and Guts in High Alger, Horatio Jr. 325, 407, Angry Young Men 119, 165,
School 474 412, 471 203, 204, 211, 213, 227,
Empire of the Senseless Ragged Dick 471 249
474 Algren, Nelson 409 Anjou, Francis, duke of 13
Other Novels 474 Allen, Fergus 156 Anne, Queen 41, 58
Ackroyd, Peter 221, 240, Allen, Paula Gunn 454 Ansa, Tina McElroy 451
276 Allingham, Margery 264 Apollinaire, Guillaume 409
The Plato Papers 221 Allston, Washington 303 Aragon, Catherine of 12-13
Other Novels 221 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 81 Archer, William 97, 156
Acosta, Oscar Zeta 454 Alsop, George 290 Arden, John 166-167, 168
Adams, Douglas 260 Alsop, Richard 293 Armstrong's Last Good-
Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Alther, Lisa 444 night 167
470 Althusser, Louis 273 Serjeant Musgrave's
Adams, Henry 328, 434 Alurista 372 Dance 166
Adams, John 298, 301 Alvarez, Lynne 402 Arias, Ron 451
Adcock, Fleur 150 Alvi, Moniza 153 Ariosto, Ludovico 15
Addison, Joseph 54, 76, 77, Ambler, Eric 268 Orlando Furioso 15
294, 300, 326 American Dream Armitage, Simon 152, 272
Cato 54 see note p. 385 Arnold, Matthew 80, 91-92,
Aelfric 5 American Literary Re- 112, 201, 278, 353
African-American Studies naissance 302, 316, 319 Artaud, Antonin 171
497 American War of Arthur, King 3, 7, 10, 15, 55,
Agar, Eileen 119 Independence 42, 51, 158, 81, 90, 194, 255, 344, 477
Agard, John 153 292, 293, 392 Ash, John 139
Agbabi, Patience 153 Amis, Kingsley 134, 203, Ashbery, John 357-358
Ahern, Cecelia 245 204, 205, 206, 227, 249 Self-Portrait in a Convex
Ahlstrom, Sydney A. 499 Lucky Jim 205 Mirror 357
Ai 371 Amis, Martin 222, 240-241, Other Poems 357-358
Aiken, Conrad 340, 352 249, 252 Asimov, Isaac 471, 477
Aiken, Joan 254 Night Train 222 Foundation trilogy 477
Albee, Edward 384, 385, Yellow Dog 240-41 Atkinson, Conrad 120
391, 398 Other Novels 222 Attlee, Clement 114
The Zoo Story 385 Ammons, A. R. 364 Atwood, Margaret 480, 481
Three Tall Women 385 Anaya, Rudolfo A. 454 The Handmaid's Tale 480
Who's Afraid of Virginia Anderson, Laurie 369, 402 Auchincloss, Louis 421
Woolf? 385, 398 Anderson, Maxwell 375-376 Auden, W. H. 129-131, 162,
Other Plays 385 Anderson, Sherwood 343, 272, 349
Alcott, Louisa May 470 407-408, 410, 415, 460, Poetry 129-131
Alden, Isabella 470 461 Audubon, John James 303
INDEX 557
Augustine, Saint 3 Barnes, Peter 172 218, 229, 232, 234, 248,
Austen, Jane 100-101, 219, Barr, Nevada 489 251, 253, 383, 389, 390,
227, 228, 276 Barrett, Andrea 465 403, 406, 417, 419, 426,
Mansfield Park 100 Barrie, J(ames) M(atthew) 438, 457
Auster, Paul 436, 437-439, 157, 253 How It Is 200
457 Barth, John 217, 289, 426, Other Novels 200
Moon Palace 438 432, 433-434, 463 Waiting for Godot 173-
Mr Vertigo 438 Giles Goat-Boy 426, 433 174, 200, 383, 390
New York trilogy 437- Letters 427, 433 Other Plays 174
438 Sabbatical 426, 433 Stories 248, 403
The Book of Illusions 439 The Sot-Weed Factor 426, Beckford, William 73, 77
The Music of Chance 438 433 Vathek 73
Timbuktu 438 Other Novels 433-434 Bede, Venerable 5
Other Novels 437-439 Stories 463 Beerbohm, Max 278
Ayckbourn, Alan 180 Theory of Postmodern Behan, Brendan 58, 162, 165
Fiction 426 Behrman, Samuel Nathaniel
Bacon, Francis 38, 117, 119 Barthelme, Donald 428, 439, 380
Bainbridge, Beryl 220, 249, 463 Belasco, David 315
272 Barthelme, Frederick 439 Madame Butterfly 315
Baker, Bobby 119 Barthes, Roland 217, 219, Bell, Betty Louise 454
Baker, George Pierce 375 223, 262, 273, 362 Bell, Madison Smartt 465
Baldwin, James 399, 449, Bartlett, Neil 228 Bellamy, Edward 325
466 Bartram, John 300 Belloc, Hilaire 193, 278
Novels 449 Bartram, William 300 Bellow, Saul 380, 445-446,
Plays 399 Bateman, Meg 147 465
Stories 466 Bates, H(erbert) E(rnest) 247 Henderson the Rain King
Ballard, J(ames) G(raham) Baudelaire, Charles 93-94, 445
249, 258-259, 475 272 Ravelstein 446
Super-Cannes 258-259 Baudrillard, Jean 217 The Adventures of Augie
Balzac, Honor de 100, 190, Baum, Frank 469-470 March 445
264, 407, 473 The Wonderful Wizard of The Dean's December
Bancroft, George 328 Oz 469-470 446
Banks, Iain (Iain M. Banks) Bausch, Richard 465 Other Novels 445-446
231, 259 Baxter, Richard 39 Stories 465
Banville, John 233-234, 244 Bay Psalm Book, The 286, Belton, Don 466
Baraka, Imamu Amiri (Le Roi 467 Benedikt, Michael 364
Jones) 366-367, 399 Baylor, Frances 470 Bent, Stephen Vincent 346
Plays 399 Bear, Greg 480 Bennett, Alan 172, 186, 187
Poetry 366-367 Darwin's Radio 480 Bennett, Arnold 190, 246
Barbour, John 10 Beardsley, Aubrey 81, 82, Bennett, John 470
Barker, Howard 170, 171, 94, 95, 98 Bentham, Jeremy 42, 79, 113
172, 188 Beat Movement 354-357, Benton, Thomas Hart 338
Barker, James Nelson 314 358, 362, 365, 367, 389, Beowulf 4
The Indian Princess 314 412, 420, 425, 428, 455 Bercovitch, Sacvan 494
Barker, Nicola 213 Fiction 425 Berger, Thomas 430-431
Barker, Pat 211, 242 Poetry 354-357 Little Big Man 430
Barlow, Joel 293, 294 Beatles, The 118, 137 Regiment of Women 430
Barnes, Djuna 411, 412, 428, Beattie, Ann 439, 464 The Return of Little Big
444 Beaumont, Sir Francis 29, Man 431
Nightwood 412 34, 35 Other Novels 430-431
Barnes, Jim 371 Beaumont, Matthew 262 Bergson, Henri 409
Barnes, Julian 220-221, 239, Beauvoir, Simone de 498 Bernard, Kenneth 393
249, 252 Becket, Thomas 10, 163 Bernhard, Thomas 433
Flaubert's Parrot 220 Beckett, Samuel 162, 166, Bernire, Louis de 226
Other Novels 221 173-174, 183, 186, 189, Bernstein, Charles 362, 364
Stories 249 199, 200, 201, 204, 217, Berry, Jean, duc de 10, 25
558 INDEX
Berryman, John 288, 358, Slaughterhouse 486 Branson, Clive 163

359 Bernie Rhodenbarr novels Braque, Georges 343, 409
Dream Songs 359 486 Bratby, John 119
Homage to Mistress Other Novels 486 Brautigan, Richard 426, 428
Bradstreet 288, 359 Bloom, Harold 495-496 Brecht, Bertolt 54, 165, 166,
Berssenbrugge, Mei-mei 372 Blunden, Edmund 122 167, 169, 180, 389, 393,
Bethke, Bruce 478 Bly, Robert 357 394
Betjeman, Sir John 133 Blyton, Enid 253-254 Brenton, Howard 170, 171,
Poetry 133 Boccaccio, Giovanni 8, 9, 12, 172, 182, 188
Beverley, Robert 291 28, 34, 243, 474 The Romans in Britain
Bhatt, Sujata 153 Bodkin, Maud 273 170-171
Bible, Authorized Version Bodmer, Karl 304, 313 Breslin, Jimmy 493
21, 38, 292, 309, 353, 417, Bogart, Humphrey 484 Breuer, Lee 403
495 Boker, George Henry 314 Brewer, John 274, 275
Bidart, Frank 361 Boland, Eavan 146, 150 Bridges, Robert 95
Bidisha 227 Boleyn, Anne 13 Bridie, James 158-159
Bierce, Ambrose 327, 398, Bolt, Robert 172 Britart 120
461 Bomberg, David 118 Broadway (commercial)
Bierstadt, Albert 303 Bond, Edward 157, 168-169, drama 336, 377, 378, 380,
Biggers, Earl D. 489 170, 171, 172, 182, 183 381, 384, 386, 388, 391,
Charlie Chan series 489 Saved 168, 182, 183 396, 397, 399, 400, 401,
Billy the Kid 302 Bontemps, Arna 466 406
Bingham, George Caleb 303, Boone, Daniel 302, 316 Brodkey, Harold 448, 465-
320 Boots Riley 368 466
Bingham, John 265 Borges, Jorge Luis 217, 426, The Runaway Soul 448
Binnington, David 120 434, 492 Other Novels 448
Bird, Isabella Lucy 113 Borofsky, Jonathan 339 Stories 465-466
Bird, Robert Montgomery Boswell, James 76 Brodsky, Joseph 337
314 Botton, Alain de 272 Bronson, Po 442
Bishop, Elizabeth 364 The Art of Travel 272 Bront, Anne 105
Black Mountain School Boucicault, Dion 314 Bront, Charlotte 105
353-354, 358 The Octoroon 314 Jane Eyre 105, 207
Blackmur, R(ichard) P(almer) Bourgeois, Louise 339 Bront, Emily 105
495 Bowdler, Thomas 80 Wuthering Heights 105
Blair, Tony 114, 117, 139, Bowen, Elizabeth 207, 247 Bront sisters 105, 207
189 Boxer, Mark 114 Brook, Peter 171
Blake, Jeremy 339 Boyd, William 224, 250 Brooke, Henry 73
Blake, Nicolas 265 Boyle, T. Coraghessan Brooke, Rupert 122
Blake, Peter 119 442 Brooke-Rose, Christine 219
Blake, William 7, 44, 49-52, Brackenridge, Henry Hugh Brookmyre, Christopher 267
80, 81, 137, 229, 255, 276, 295, 297 Brookner, Anita 209
426, 495 Bradbury, Malcolm 206 Brooks, Cleanth 495
The Marriage of Heaven Bradbury, Ray 471, 477 Brooks, Gwendolyn 366
and Hell 51 Fahrenheit 451 477 Brooks, Noah 471
The Four Zoas 51 Bradford, William 284, 290 Brossard, Chandler 425
Songs of Experience 44, Bradley, A(ndrew) C(ecil) Broughton, James 355
50, 51 272 Brown, Charles Brockden
Songs of Innocence 51 Bradley, F(rancis) H(erbert) 297-298
Visions of the Daughters of 129 Wieland 298
Albion 51 Bradstreet, Anne 287-288, Brown, George Mackay
Blatty, William P. 473 359 231
The Exorcist 473 Bradstreet, Simon 288 Brown, Rita Mae 443
Bleasdale, Alan 186, 187 Brahmins 307-308, 322 Brown, Sterling A. 365
Blincoe, Nicholas 227 Braine, John 165, 204, 205, Brown, William H. 297
Block, Lawrence 486 213 Browne, Sir Thomas 39, 111,
A Dance at the Brand, Max 476 394
INDEX 559
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 335 Capone, Al 332

90 Butler, Judith 498 Capote, Truman 413, 419,
Browning, Robert 89-91, 96, Bodies That Matter 498 448, 462
111, 123, 156, 210, 341, Gender Trouble 498 Breakfast at Tiffany's
342 Other Works 498 419
Dramatis Personae 91 Butler, Octavia E. 480 In Cold Blood 419
Bruce, Lenny 371, 437 Xenogenesis trilogy 480 Stories 462
Bruchac, Joseph 454 Other Novels 480 Carew, Thomas 22, 24
Brunner, John 257 Butler, Samuel 27, 158, 190, Carlyle, Thomas 79-80, 112,
Bryant, William Cullen 304, 288 328
307 Hudibras 27, 288 Sartor Resartus 112
Bryson, Bill 271, 491-492 Butler, Samuel (1835-1902) Carnegie, Andrew 302
Buchan, John 268 59, 108 Carr, J(ames Joseph) L(loyd)
Buck, Pearl S. 471, 473 The Way of All Flesh 108 206
Buffalo Bill (William F. Butterfield, Sir Herbert 274 Carr, John Dickson 484
Cody) 331, 386 Butterworth, Jez 184, 189 Carr, Marina 186
Bullins, Ed 399-400 Byatt, A(ntonia) S(usan) Carroll, Lewis 110, 221, 229,
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 101 188, 210, 242, 249-250 259, 458
Bunbury, Henry William 71 Babel Tower 210 Alice's Adventures
Bunyan, John 37-38, 137, Possession 210, 242 in Wonderland 110
229 Still Life 210 Through the Looking Glass
The Pilgrim's Progress Other Novels 210 110
37, 38 Byrd, William II Carson, Ciaran 141
Burgess, Anthony 117, 168, (of Westover) 288, 289, Carson, Kit 302
213, 215, 216, 256, 443 290, 291 Carter, Angela 219-220, 249,
A Clockwork Orange 117, Byron, George Gordon, Lord 250
168, 215, 256 15, 85-87, 89, 90, 96, 276, Carter, Jimmy 333
Earthly Powers 216 364 Carter, Stephen L. 453
Burgess, Gelett F. 469 Childe Harold's The Emperor of Ocean
Burgess, Thornton W. 469 Pilgrimage 85-86 Park 453
Burgin, Victor 119 Don Juan 86 Cartir, Xam Wilson 451-
Burke, Edmund 76, 77 Plays 96 452
Burke, James Lee 487, 490 Cartland, Barbara 193
Burke, Kenneth 494 Cabell, James Branch 413 Carver, Caroline 154
Burke, Peter 274 Jurgen 413 Carver, Raymond 439, 460,
Burne-Jones, Edward 81 Cable, George Washington 464
Burnett, Frances Hodgson 320 What We Talk About []
470 Cabot, John 283 464
Little Lord Fauntleroy Caedmon 3-5 Cary, Joyce 201, 231
470 Cage, John 369 Cassat, Mary 304
Burney, Fanny 72-73 Empty Words 369 Castillo, Ana 455
Burns, Robert 49, 50, 80, Cain, James M. 388, 485 Cather, Willa 413
147, 307 The Postman Always Rings Catlin, George 304, 329-330,
Burra, Edward 132, 489 Twice 388, 485 331
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 471, Caldwell, Erskine 413, 460 Caxton, William 7, 10
477 Callenbach, Ernest 479-480 Censorship 157-159, 196
Tarzan and the Apes 471 Ecotopia 479-480 in drama 35, 53-55,
Burroughs, William 403, 425 Calvino, Italo 426 157-159
Cities of the Red Night Campbell, Bebe Moore 453 in fiction 196
425 Campbell, John W. 477 Cervantes, Lorna Dee 372
Junkie 425 Astounding 477 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel
The Naked Lunch 425 Campbell, Steven 120 de 27, 65, 70, 101, 214,
Other Novels 425 Campbell, Thomas 82, 89, 245
Burton, Robert 38, 39, 111 296 Don Quixote 65, 297, 438
Bush, George 333 Camus, Albert 337, 434 Czanne, Paul 118, 192
Bush, George W. 117, 334, Candelaria, Nash 454 Chambers, E(dmund)
560 INDEX
K(erchever) 272 Churchill, Caryl 180, 189 494

Chamisso, Adalbert von 434 Top Girls 180 Commonwealth writers 133,
Chandler, Raymond 438, Other Plays 180 245
459, 484, 488, 490 Churchill, Sir Winston 274 Compton-Burnett, Ivy 207
The Big Sleep 484 Churchill, Winston Conceptual art 119
Other Novels 484 (American) 320 Concrete Poetry 137
Chang, Diana 373 Cibber, Colley 55 Confessional Poetry/School
Channing, W(illiam) E(llery) Cisneros, Sandra 466-467 357
328 Civil War (USA) 301, 302, Congreve, William 35-36,
Chapman, George 34 304, 307, 309, 310, 315, 52, 53
Chapman, Jake and Dinos 320, 321, 327, 346, 358, The Old Bachelor 36
121, 182 365, 379, 448, 471, 473 Connecticut Wits 293
Charlemagne 7 Cixous, Hlne 498 Connelly, Michael 487
Charles I 19, 21-22, 362 Clanchy, Kate 147 Conrad, Joseph 191-192,
Charles II 19-21, 28, 35 Clancy, Tom 476 194, 246, 268, 377, 417
Charles, Prince of Wales Clare, John 89, 168 Lord Jim 191
114, 115 Clarke, Arthur C. 257 Heart of Darkness 191,
Charteris, Leslie 265 Clayton, Richard Henry 417
Chase, William Merrit 304 Michael 270 Other Novels 191-192,
Chatterton, Thomas 49 Cleaver, Eldridge 449 268
Chatwin, Bruce 271 Cleland, John 43, 74-75, 444 Stories 246
Chaucer, Geoffrey 6, 7, 8-10, Fanny Hill 43, 74-75, 444 Constable, John 81
28, 93, 240, 245 Cleveland, John 24 Cook, Ebenezer 288-289
The Canterbury Tales Clifton, Lucille 366, 451 The Sot-Weed Factor 288
9-10, 93, 245 Clinton, Bill 333, 334, 447 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth 454
Chavez, Denise 455 Clinton, Hillary 397 Coolidge, Calvin 332
Chayefsky, Paddy 403 Clough, Arthur Hugh 91-92 Cooney, Ray 178
Cheever, John 421, 462 Cobbett, William 79, 113 Cooper, Dennis 441
Falconer 421 Cochise 330 Cooper, J. California 452,
Other Novels 421 Cocteau, Jean 409 466
Stories 462 Cofer, Judith Ortiz 372 Novels 452
Chekhov, Anton 181, 247, Coffin, C(harles) C(arleton) Stories 466
439 471 Cooper, James Fenimore
Chemical Generation 117, Cold War 116 316, 468
120, 182, 217, 225, 228, Cole, Thomas 303, 304, 316 Leather-Stocking novels
229, 230, 231, 243, 250 Coleman, Wanda 466 316
Cherry-Gerrard, Apsley 272 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Cooper, William 204
Chesterfield, Lord 76 50, 52, 80, 82-85, 88, 89, Coover, Robert 431, 463
Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith) 111, 112, 328, 329, 379 Gerald's Party 431
193, 264 The Ancient Mariner 84, Pinocchio in Venice 431
Chicano Drama 402 379 The Public Burning 431
Chicano Fiction 454 Biographia Literaria 112 Other Novels 431
Chicano Poetry 372 Collier, Jeremy 53 Stories 463
Chick Lit 227 Collins, William Wilkie Copley, John Singleton 293
Childers, Erskine 253 48-49, 80, 103, 110, 264 Cornwell, Patricia 488
Children's literature viii, 253- Collodi, Carlo 431 Corpi, Lucha 372
255, 403, 426, 467-472 Colman, George the Elder Corso, Gregory 355, 356,
Childress, Alice 394, 399 55 357
Chin, Frank 401, 467 Colum, Padraic 162 Coryat, Thomas 40
Chin, Marilyn 372 Columbus, Christopher 283, Cotton, Charles 52
Chirico, Giorgio de 194 344, 392 Cotton, John 291, 467
Chopin, Kate 320 Combe, William 77 Coupland, Douglas 442
Christie, Agatha 110, 264, Comedy of manners 53, 98, Coward, Nol 159
265, 490 294 Cowley, Abraham 24
Chu, Luis 455 Comics viii, 255, 336, 338 Cowper, William 48, 49, 304
Church, Frederick 303 Commager, Henry Steele Cox, Anthony Berkeley 265
INDEX 561
Cox, Christopher 444 479, 480, 481, 482 Deighton, Len 268
Cox, Palmer 469 Cynewulf 3-5 Deism 43, 51
Cozzens, James Gould 420 Dabydeen, David 238 Dekker, Thomas 34, 314
Crabbe, George 47, 82 Dada see note p. 350; De Kooning, Willem 338
Crace, Jim 226 114, 137, 338, 362, 410 de la Mare, Walter 122
Cranch, Christopher Pearse D'Aguiar, Fred 153, 238 Delaney, Shelagh 165
309 Dahl, Roald 247, 254 Delany, Samuel R. 480-481
Crane, Hart 341, 344 Dal, Salvador 193 Dhalgren 481
Crane, R(onald) S(almon) Daly, Lew 364 Deleuze, Gilles 273
495 Dana, Richard Henry Jr 468 Delgado, Abelardo 372
Crane, Stephen 303, 323, Two Years Before the Mast DeLillo, Don 217, 434, 436-
324, 327, 328, 359 468 437, 439, 457, 460, 487
Maggie 323, 324 Danielewski, Mark Z. Underworld 437
The Red Badge of Courage 475-476 White Noise 436-437
324 House of Leaves 475-476 Other Novels 436-437,
Stories 327 Daniels, Sarah 179, 181, 182 457
Crase, Douglas 364 Dante 126, 144, 309, 342, Stories 460
Crashaw, Richard 22, 23, 362 Deloney, Thomas 18, 38
287 D'Arcy, Margaretta 167 de Man, Paul 495
Crawford, Francis Marion Darwin, Charles 79, 108, de Maria, Walter 339
320 113, 277, 323, 362 Demuth, Charles 338
Crawford, Robert 149, 152 The Origin of Species De Palma, Brian 474
Craxton, John 119 79, 113 de Quincey, Thomas 111,
Crazy Horse 302 Darwin, Erasmus 82 225
Creeley, Robert 354 Dashwood, Sir Francis 43 Derby, Joseph Wright of 44
Crvecoeur, Michel- Davenant, Sir William 35, 36 Derleth, August 447
Guillaume de 300 David, Jacques Louis 319 Derrida, Jacques 262, 263,
Crichton, Michael 476 Davie, Donald 134 273, 474, 495, 496
Jurassic Park 476 Davies, William H. 122 Descartes, Ren 20
Crime fiction viii, 118, 219, Da Vinci, Leonardo 12 Devlin, Anne 251
220, 263-270 Davis, Angela 367, 449 Dewey, John 332
in America 416, 431, 438, Davis, Jefferson 302 Dexter, Colin 267
449, 454, 473, 484-491 Dawkins, Richard 277 Dhomhnaill, Nuala N 145
Crimp, Martin 188 Day, Clarence 380 Dick, Philip K. 478
Crompton, Richmal 254 Dean, James 371, 409 A Scanner Darkly 478
Cromwell, Oliver 20, 21, 24, Dean, Philip Hayes 400 Do Androids Dream of
28, 363 Deane, Seamus 233 Electric Sheep? 478
Crowley, Mart 393 Decadence (fin-de-sicle) The Man in the High
Cruikshank, George 99, 102 80, 94-95, 114, 117, 183, Castle 478
Cruz, Victor Hernndez 372 184, 217, 226, 246, 267 Time Out of Joint 478
Cubism 114, 118, 338, 341, Declaration of Independence Stories 478
343, 409 42-43, 292, 294, 299, 329, Dickens, Charles 62, 81, 82,
Cullen, Countee 365 385 101-103, 104, 106, 110,
Culler, Jonathan 273 Deconstruction 170, 200, 172, 191, 203, 221, 224,
Cultural Studies 495-497 222, 262, 273 240, 254, 276, 315, 436,
Cummings, Edward Estlin in America 339, 386, 442, 474, 490
346, 350-351, 352, 408 402, 431, 437, 494, 495, Great Expectations 103,
The Enormous Room 350 496, 497, 499 474
Poetry 350 Deep Imagists 357 Oliver Twist 102
Cunningham, Paula 156 Defoe, Daniel 38, 56-59, 62, The Pickwick Papers 101,
Curtis, George W. Parker 70, 73, 74, 76, 77, 101, 102
314 221, 241, 264, 300, 431, Other Novels 102-103
Curtis, George William 329 492 Dickey, James 357, 421
Custer, General 302, 330, Moll Flanders 57-58, 264 Deliverance 421
431 Robinson Crusoe 57, 62, Poetry 357
Cyberpunk 420, 425, 478, 297, 431
562 INDEX
Dickinson, Emily 309, 310- The Gates of Ivory 209 Middlemarch 106
313, 340, 345, 352, 364 The Needle's Eye 209 Eliot, John 286
Dickinson, John 298 The Peppered Moth 210 Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) 9,
Dickson, Carter Other Novels 209 39, 122, 123-129, 131, 133,
see John Dickson Carr Dreiser, Theodore 324, 407, 146, 162, 163-164, 165,
Didion, Joan 441, 444, 493 408, 460, 493 193, 273, 276, 307, 324,
Play It as It Lays 444 An American Tragedy 341, 345, 346, 348, 351,
DiMassa, Diane 472 407 352, 353, 403, 412, 415
Din, Ayub Khan 179 Sister Carrie 407 Prufrock 126
Diski, Jenny 212 Other novels 407 The Waste Land 9, 127,
Disraeli, Benjamin 103 Stories 460 346
Doctorow, Cory 481 Drinkwater, John 122 Other Poetry 128-129
Doctorow, E(dgar) Dryden, John 22, 24, 28, 36, Plays 163-164
L(awrence) 447 39, 46, 48 Elizabeth I 12, 13, 14, 15, 17,
Ragtime 447 Literary Criticism 39 19, 210, 284
Other Novels 447 Poetry 28 Elizabeth II 115, 210
Doge, Mary Mapes 470 Duberman, Martin 393 Elkin, Stanley 448
Donaldson, Stephen 260 Dubus III, Andre 473 Elliott, Emory 494
Donatello 12 Duchamp, Marcel 337 Ellis, Bret Easton 336, 339,
Donleavy, J(ames) P(atrick) Dudley, Thomas 288 440, 457, 465
424 Due, Tananarive 451, 475 American Psycho 440-441
A Fairy Tale of New York My Soul to Keep 475 Other Novels 440-441,
424 The Between 475 457
The Ginger Man 424 Duffy, Carol Ann 147, 156 Ellis, Henry Havelock 278
The Onion Eaters 424 Duffy, Maureen 211 Ellison, Ralph 449, 466
Other Novels 424 Dunbar, William 10 Invisible Man 449
Donne, John 4, 22-24, 28, 39, Duncan, Robert 354 Stories 466
126, 212, 241, 287 Dunlap, William 314 Ellmann, Richard 276
Poetry 23, 287 Dunmore, Helen 152, 211, Ellroy, James 487, 490
Donoghue, Emma 245 250 L.A. Confidential 487
Doody, Margaret A. 494 Dunn, Douglas 147 L.A. Noir 487
Doolittle, Hilda 123, 340 Dunn, Nell 181 The Cold Six Thousand
Dor, Gustave 84 Durand, Asher 303, 304 487
Dorris, Michael 453, 454 Durang, Christopher 391 Other Novels 487
Dorset, Charles Sackville, Durcan, Paul 145 Emecheta, Buchi 236
earl of 27 Durrell, Lawrence 218 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 305,
Dos Passos, John 408, 410, Dwight, Timothy 294 307, 309, 310, 317, 328-
411, 419 329
Manhattan Transfer 410 Eagleton, Terry 274 Emin, Tracey 120
U.S.A. 410 Eakins, Thomas 303 Eminem (Marshall Bruce
Other Novels 410 Eddings, David 260 Mathers III) 367
Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. 445 Edgar, David 170, 171, 172, Empson, William 131, 134,
Doughty, Thomas 303 188 272
Douglass, Frederick 313, 330 Edward III 8 English Stage Company 165
Dove, Rita 337, 367, 400 Edward VI 13 Enlightenment 21, 37, 42, 43,
Plays 400 Edward VIII 115 44, 51, 73, 74, 76, 275,
Poetry 367 Edwards, Jonathan 285, 291 285, 292, 300, 302, 426
Dowell, Coleman 443 Egg, Augustus 97 Ennis, John 145
Dowson, Ernest 94 Eggleston, Edward 320, 471 Enright, Anne 244, 251, 252
Doyle, Arthur Conan 110, Eggleston, George 320 Enright, D(ennis) J(oseph)
264, 484, 485 Egolf, Tristan 443 134
A Study in Scarlet 110 Ehrenreich, Barbara 500 Epstein, Jacob 118
Doyle, Roddy vii, 213, 233, Eisenhower, Dwight D. 332 Erasmus 17
234, 235 Elfyn, Menna 150 Erdrich, Louise 370, 453,
Dr. Seuss 471 Eliot, George (Mary Ann 454
Drabble, Margaret 209, 492 Evans) 105-106, 221, 324 Love Medicine 453
INDEX 563
Other Novels 453 Feiffer, Jules 386 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 383, 408,
Poetry 370 Feminism 116, 119, 179-181, 410, 461
Ernst, Max 131, 194, 351 182, 188, 189, 205, 207, The Great Gatsby 410
Ervine, St John 157 209, 211, 212, 219, 226, Tender is the Night 410
Escher, M(aurits) C(ornelis) 235, 245, 248, 250, 255, Stories 461
217, 218 256, 266, 273, 278 Flanagan, Barry 220
Essex, Robert Devereux, in America 336, 339, 352, Flaubert, Gustave 220, 323,
2nd earl of 13, 30 360, 361, 364, 366, 372, 324, 422
Estes, Richard 339 388, 389, 392, 394, 395, Fleming, Ian 270
Etherege, George 35-36 396, 397, 399, 400, 419, Fletcher, John 29, 33, 34, 35
Eurydice 382 420, 424, 425, 440, 443, Fletcher, John Gould 340
Evans, Mari 366 444, 445, 449, 450, 451, Flint, F. S. 340
Evans, Mary Ann 454, 455, 456, 464, 465, Follett, Ken 269
see George Eliot 466, 472, 474, 475, 478, Forbes, Stanhope 81
Evans, Walker 338, 340, 376, 480, 488, 493, 494, 497, Ford, Ford Madox 193
382, 398, 409 498, 499 Ford, Gerald 333
Evelyn, John 40 Feminist Drama 179-181 Ford, Jesse Hill 419
Everyman 11 in America 394-399 Ford, John 34
Eworth, Hans 13 Feminist Fiction 207-213, Ford, John (film director)
Exeter Book, The 5 235 408
Existentialism 131, 172, 201, in America 443-445, Ford, Paul Leicester 320
217, 218, 219, 242, 379, 449-451 Ford, Richard 439, 464
417, 433, 434, 437, 445, Fenton, James 139 Independence Day 439
457, 485 Ferber, Edna 433 Stories 464
Expressionism 119, 120, 162, Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 337, The Sportswriter 439
338, 400 354-356 Wildlife 439
Poetry 354-356 Foreman, Richard 403
Falck, Colin 137 Fernandez, Roberto G. 455 Forester, C(ecil) S(cott) 193
Fallowell, Duncan 270 Ferro, Robert 444 Forns, Mara Irene 395
Fallwell, Jerry 292, 336 Fiedler, Leslie 499 Forrest, Katherine V. 488
Fantasy viii, 100, 158, 159, Fielding, Helen 227 Forrest, Leon 453
221, 226, 250, 254, 255, Bridget Jones's Diary 227 Forster, E. M. 193, 228, 247
256, 259, 260, 261, 336, Fielding, Henry 54, 55, 56, A Passage to India 193
423, 431, 434, 472, 474, 63-66, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, Forsyth, Frederick 269
475, 477 76, 101, 204, 240, 264 Foster, Hannah 297
Farley, Walter 471 Joseph Andrews 63-66, Foster, Jodie 476
Farquhar, George 36, 53 240 Foucault, Michel 223, 273,
The Beaux' Stratagem 53 Tom Jones 63-66, 69 496
The Recruiting Officer 53 Other Novels 63-66, 69 Fowles, John 175, 218-219,
Farrell, J(ames) G(ordon) Plays 55 248
194, 224 Fierstein, Harvey 393 The French Lieutenant's
Farrell, James T. 409 Figes, Eva 211 Woman 219
Faulkner, William 413, 414, Fin-de-sicle Fox, Charles James 42
415-416, 417, 418, 428, see decadence Frame, Ronald 249
448, 452, 461, 462 Finlay, Ian Hamilton 137, Francisco, Nia 371
Absalom, Absalom! 416 250 Franklin, Aretha 367
As I Lay Dying 416 Fischer, Tibor 226 Franklin, Benjamin 285,
Light in August 416 Fischl, Eric 339 299, 378
Sartoris 415 Fish, Stanley 497 Autobiography 300
The Sound and the Fury Doing What Comes Poor Richard's Almanac
415-416 Naturally 497 300
Other Novels 415-416 Is There a Text in This Franzen, Jonathan 442
Stories 461 Class? 497 The Corrections 442
Faulks, Sebastian 224, 225 Other Works 497 Frayn, Michael 178
Federman, Raymond 426, Fitch, Clyde 315 Frazer, James 274
431 Fitzgerald, Edward 92 Freeman, Dr R. Austin 264
564 INDEX
French, Marilyn 444 Jane Pitman 452-453 George V 115

French Revolution 42, 44, Other Novels 452-453 George VI 115
45, 73, 75, 76, 80, 101, Stories 466 George, Elizabeth 266-267
102, 275, 298 Gainsborough, Thomas 44 George, Henry 330
Freneau, Philip 295-296 Gaitskill, Mary 465 Gernsback, Hugo 477
Freud, Esther 213 Galloway, Janice 231, 250 Amazing Stories 477
Freud, Lucian 116, 117, 119, Galsworthy, John 157, 190- Geronimo 302, 330-331
238 191, 195 Gershwin, George 380
Freud, Sigmund 129, 132, The Forsyte Saga 190- Gheeraerts, Marcus 14
133, 183, 195, 199, 207, 191 Ghostface Killah 368
216, 221, 256, 273, 340, Plays 157 Gibbon, Edward 76, 77, 113
347, 378, 379, 381, 384, Gamelyn 8 Gibson, William 259,
394, 398, 408, 434, 474, Gardner, Earle Stanley 484 478-479
493, 496 Gardner, John 460, 463 All Tomorrow's Parties
Fried, Michael 137 Garfield, Leon 254 479
Friedan, Betty 498 Garioch, Robert 147 Idoru 479
Friedman, Bruce Jay 448 Garland, Hamlin 323 Neuromancer 478-479
Friedman, Kinky 488 Garner, Alan 254 Pattern Recognition 479
Friedrich, Caspar David 173 Gascoyne, David 119, The Difference Engine
Friel, Brian 162, 185, 251 131-132 479
Dancing at Lughnasa 186 Poetry 131-132 Virtual Light 479
Translations 185 Gaskell, Elizabeth C. 103 Other Novels 478-479
Other Plays 185 Gass, William H. 426, 428- Gilbert and George 117, 120
Stories 251 429, 431, 434, 437, 463 Gilbert, Sandra M. 498
Fromm, Erich 493 The Tunnel 429 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey 283
Frontier 301, 302, 303, 313, Willi Masters' Lonesome Gilbert, Sir William 98
314, 316, 317, 320, 321, Wife 428 Gillray, James 41, 44
325, 326, 327, 329, 331, Other Novels 428-429 Gilman, Harold 118
375, 390, 417, 418, 468, Stories 463 Gilpin, William 78
470, 473 Gates, Henry Louis 497 Gilroy, Frank 403
Frost, Robert Lee 344-345, The Signifying Monkey Ginner, Charles 118
352 497 Ginsberg, Allen 354, 369
Fry, Christopher 163, 164 Other Works 497 Howl 354
Frye, Northrop 495 Gauguin, Paul 118 Gioia, Dan 361
Fssli, Johann Heinrich Gay drama Giovanni, Nikki 366, 367
see Henry Fuseli in America 393-394 Gissing, George 107, 193,
Fuller, Charles 400 Gay fiction 195, 221
Fuller, John 139 in America 443-444 Gittings, Robert 276
Fuller, Margaret 309, 328 Gay, John 47, 54 Glaister, Lesley 212
Furutani, Dale 489 Gay, Joseph 52 Glasgow, Ellen 413
Fuseli, Henry (Johann Hein- Gay Studies 498 Glendinning, Victoria 276
rich Fssli) 32, 44, 73 Gearhart, Sally Miller 480 Glck, Louise 361
The Nightmare 44, 73 Geertz, Clifford 496 Godfrey, Thomas 289
Geiogamah, Hanay 402 Godwin, William 74, 76, 99,
Gable, Clark 473 Geisel, Theodore 264, 298
Gabriel, Peter 483 see Dr. Seuss Gogol, Nikolai V. 427
Gaddis, William 426, 432- Gelber, Jack 384, 385-386 Golding, William 214-215
433, 434, 441, 465 Gems, Pam 180, 181 Lord of the Flies 214
Agap Agape 433 The Love of the Goldsmith, Oliver 47, 55, 56,
A Frolic of His Own Nightingale 181 72, 76, 101
432-433 Other Plays 181 The Vicar of Wakefield
Carpenter's Gothic 432 Gender Studies 72, 297
JR 432 see Women's Studies Goodrich, Samuel Griswold
The Recognitions 432 George I 41 468
Gaines, Ernest J. 452, 466 George II 41 Gordon, Caroline 416, 461
The Autobiography of Miss George III 326 Gore, Al 333
INDEX 565
Gorky, Arshile 338 Guare, John 391 476

Gorky, Maxim 379 Gubar, Susan 498 Harrison, Tony 117, 139
Gotanda, Philip Kan 401 Gunn, Thom 133, 134-136, Hart, Moss 380
Gothic fiction 45, 72-74, 99, 364 Harte, Bret 320, 326-327
208, 212, 221, 223, 224, Poetry 134-136 Hartley, L(esley) P(oles) 201
240, 249, 255, 267 Guston, Philip 338 Hartman, Geoffrey 495-496
in America 306, 326, 327, Hassam, Childe 338
413, 416, 417, 424, 428, Hagedorn, Jessica Tarahato Hatton, Sir Christopher 13
453, 461, 474, 478 372 Hawkes, John 337, 420, 426,
Gottlieb, Adolph 338 Haggard, Sir Henry Rider 428, 463-464
Gould, Stephen Jay 500 109 Adventures in the Alaskan
Gower, George 14 Haggard, William 270 Skin Trade 428
Gower, John 8 Hakluyt, Richard 40 Sweet William 428
Goya, Francisco de 356 Hale, Janet Campbell 454 The Cannibal 420, 428
Graff, Gerald 493 Haley, Alex 449 Virginie 428
Grafton, Sue 473, 488 Roots 449 Other Novels 428
Graham, Billy 292, 336 Hall, Stuart 273 Stories 463-464
Grahame, Kenneth 253 Halley, Peter 339 Hawking, Stephen 277
Grandma Moses 338 Hamilton, Alexander 298 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 298,
Grant, Duncan 118 Hamilton, Richard 119, 197 316, 317, 326, 328, 329,
Grant, Ulysses S. 302 Hammett, Dashiell 459, 484 412, 423, 468, 474
Granville-Barker, Harley 157 The Maltese Falcon 484 The Blithedale Romance
Grass, Gnter 436 Other Novels 484 317, 329
Grau, Shirley Ann 419 Hampton, Christopher 172 The Scarlet Letter 316,
Graves, Robert 122, 123, 201 Hamsun, Knut 357 317, 318, 423
Gray, Alasdair vii, 228-229, Hankin, St John 157 Stories 326, 468
243, 250 Hanley, William 384 Hayden, Palmer 332
Gray, Simon 172 Hannah, Barry 462 Hayden, Robert 366, 367
Gray, Thomas 48, 49, 80, 82, Hannah, Sophie 155 Hayman, Francis 44
304 Hansberry, Lorraine 394, 399 Hayne, Paul Hamilton 309
Grayson, William John 309 Hanson, Duane 339, 390, Hazlitt, William 111
Greaves, Derrick 119 422 H.D.
Green, Henry 203 Harding, Warren G. 332 see Hilda Doolittle
Green, Paul 377 Hardy, Thomas 81, 106, 107- Heaney, Seamus 139, 140,
Greenblatt, Stephen 496-497 108, 110, 114, 134, 190, 141-145, 153, 154, 156
Hamlet in Purgatory 496 246, 276 Death of a Naturalist 141
Marvellous Possessions Tess of the D'Urbervilles Field Work 144
497 107-108 North 143
Renaissance Self- Other Novels 107-108 Wintering Out 142
Fashioning 496 Hare, David 170, 171, 172, Other Poetry 144-145
Shakespearean 186, 188 Hecht, Anthony 352-353
Negotiations 496 Haring, Keith 339, 475 Poetry 353
Other Works 496-497 Harjo, Joy 370 Heidegger, Martin 218, 417
Greene, Graham 213-214, Harlem Renaissance 365, Heinlein, Robert 477
247, 268, 271 448 Stranger in a Strange Land
Brighton Rock 213 Harold, King 3, 6 477
The Third Man 213 Harris, Benjamin 286 Hejinian, Lyn 445
Greene, Robert 17, 18, 30, 38 Harris, Bertha 443 Heller, Joseph 420, 426, 429,
Greer, Germaine 498 Harris, Joel Chandler 320, 445
Gregory, Lady Isabella 328, 469 Catch-22 420, 429
Augusta 160 Uncle Remus Stories Closing Time 429
Greig, Noel 179 469 God Knows 429
Grey, Zane 325, 431, 476 Harris, Thomas 476 Other Novels 429
Griffiths, Trevor 170 Hannibal 476 Hellman, Lillian 377, 394
Grisham, John 476 Red Dragon 476 Helprin, Marc 466
Grumley, Michael 444 The Silence of the Lambs Helvtius, Claude Adrien 43
566 INDEX
Hemingway, Ernest 338, 489 323, 328

341, 408, 410-411, 437, Cotton Comes to Harlem Hood, Robin 8, 469
439, 461, 462 489 Hooker, Thomas 284, 291
A Farewell to Arms 411 If He Hollers Let Him Go Hoover, J. Edgar 437
For Whom the Bell Tolls 489 Hope, Laura Lee
411 The Real Cool Killers see Edward Stratemeyer
The Old Man and the Sea 489 Hopkins, Anthony 476
411 Other Novels 489 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 4,
Other Novels 411 Hinojosa-Smith, Rolando 95-96, 129, 133, 273, 310
Stories 461 454 Hopkins, Lemuel 293
Hemphill, Essex 367 Hirst, Damien 117, 120, 145 Hopkinson, Francis 294
Henley, Beth 396 Historical Novel 194, 195, Hopper, Edward 338, 348,
The Miss Firecracker 201, 209, 210, 219, 224- 378, 414, 422
Contest 396 226, 316, 319-321, 413, Horace 15, 45, 49, 123
Henley, Patricia 465 417, 423, 431, 444, 447, Hornby, Nick 227
Henri, Adrian 137 454, 469, 472 High Fidelity 227
Henry VII 7, 12, 13, 283 Hitchcock, Alfred 371 Horton, Percy 130
Henry VIII 12, 13, 14 Hoban, Russell 443 Houghton, William Stanley
Henry, Gordon Jr 454 Riddley Walker 443 157
Henry, O. (W. S. Porter) Other Novels 443 Housman, A(lfred) E(dward)
460, 477 Hobbes, Thomas 20, 21, 39 95, 178
Hensher, Philip 226 Leviathan 20-21 Houston, Pam 464
Hepworth, Barbara 119 Hobsbawm, Eric J. 275 Howard, Bronson 315
Herbert, Frank 447 Hoccleve, Thomas 10 Howe, Susan 362-363
Herbert, George 22, 23, 24, Hockney, David 119, 120, Howe, Tina 395
287 334, 354 Painting Churches 395
Herne, James A. 315 Hoffa, Jimmy 371 Howells, William Dean
Herrick, Robert 24 Hoffman, Daniel 352 303, 321, 322, 323, 407
Herrick, Robert (American Hoffman, Dustin 430 Hua, Chuang 455
writer) 407 Hoffman, William 393 Hudson River School 303,
Hersey, John 4020 Hofmann, Michael 151 304
Hewlett, Maurice Henry 109 Hofstadter, Richard 499 Hughes, Howard 389
Heyer, Georgette 193 Hogan, Desmond 251 Hughes, Langston 365, 399,
Heyward, DuBose 380 Hogan, Linda 454 448, 466
Porgy and Bess 380 Hogarth, William 27, 42, 44, Plays 399
Heywood, John 16 55, 59, 60-61, 63, 64, 67- Poetry 365
Heywood, Thomas 34 69, 74, 75, 221, 229, 238, Stories 466
Hibbert, Eleanor 193 264, 356 Hughes, Ted 138-13, 360
Hicks, Edward 303 A Harlot's Progress 44, Crow 138
Highmore, Joseph 44 60-61, 75 Other Poetry 138
Highsmith, Patricia 265-266 A Rake's Progress 44, Hulme, T(homas) E(rnest)
Hightower, Lynn S. 489 67-69 123, 272, 340
Highway, Tomson 402 The Analysis of Beauty 44 Hulse, Michael 150-152
Hijuelos, Oscar 455 Hoggart, Richard 273 Propaganda 151
Hill, Geoffrey 136-137 Holbach, Baron von 43 Other Poetry 152
Poetry 136-137 Holbein, Hans 12, 13 Hume, David 42, 76, 113
Hill, Justin 227 Holdstock, Robert 260 Humphrey, William 419
Hill, Reginald 267 Holiday, Billie 400 Hunt, Chris 228
Hill, Selima 150 Holleran, Andrew 443 Hunt, Leigh 111
Hill, Susan 210 Hollinghurst, Alan 228 Hunt, William Holman 81,
Hilliard, John 216 Holmes, John Clellon 425 92, 93, 107
Hilliard, Nicholas 13 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 307, Hunter, Alexis 119
Hillier, Tristram 119 329 Huntington, Samuel P. 499
Hilton, Roger 119 Holroyd, Michael 276 Hurd, Richard 77
Himes, Chester 449, 489, 490 Homer 144, 197, 342, 429 Hurston, Zora Neale 449-
Blind Man With a Pistol Homer, Winslow 152, 303, 450, 451
INDEX 567
Their Eyes Were Watching 231 Johnson, James Weldon 448

God 450 Irving, John 436 Johnson, Linton Kwesi 153
Huxley, Aldous 165, 201- The World According to Johnson, Lionel 94-95
202, 203, 247, 430 Garp 436 Johnson, Lyndon 371
Brave New World 202, Other Novels 436 Johnson, Samuel 22, 39, 73,
257 Irving, Washington 245, 315, 76-77
Other Novels 201 325-326, 329, 468 Lives of the English Poets
Huxley, T(homas) H(enry) Rip Van Winkle 315, 326 76
101, 113, 124 The Sketch Book 325-326 The Rambler 77
Hwang, David Henry 401- Isherwood, Christopher 129, Johnston, Jennifer 235
402 162, 228 Johnstone, Charles 74
M. Butterfly 401-402 Ishiguro, Kazuo 237 Chrysal 74
Hypertext viii, 255, 262-263, Islas, Arturo 455 Jones, Gayl 451
340, 433, 474, 477, 481, Jones, Henry Arthur 97, 156
482-483 Jackson, Andrew 301 Jones, Inigo 21, 169
Jackson, George 449 Jones, James 420
Ibsen, Henrik 97, 156, 157, Jackson, Shelley 482-483 Jones, Le Roi
315, 377, 378, 379, 383 Patchwork Girl 482 see Imamu Amiri Baraka
Ice Cube 367 Jacob, Giles 52 Jones, Marie 186
Ice-T 367 Jacobson, Howard 206 Jong, Erica 444-445, 472
Iles, Francis James I 19, 21, 38 Jonson, Ben 15, 24, 34, 35,
see A. B. Cox James II 20-21, 28, 113 361
Imagism 114, 123, 124, 137, James VI 19 Bartholomew Fair 34
272, 340, 341, 344, 348, James, Henry 66, 106, 123, Plays 34
351 190, 191, 192, 207, 324- Jordan, Neil 251
Imlah, Mick 148 325, 327, 412, 460, 461 Joseph, Chief 330
Impressionism 81-82, 94, The Golden Bowl 325 Joseph, Peter 119
118, 191, 192, 194, 195 The Portrait of a Lady Josipovici, Gabriel 248, 252
in America 304, 338 325 Josselyn, John 290
Inada, Lawson Fusao 372 Other Novels 324-325 Joyce, James vii, 62, 123,
Industrial Revolution 42 Stories 327 133, 137, 144, 173, 176,
Ingall, Rachel 445 James, P(hyllis) D(orothy) 180, 193, 195, 197, 198,
Inge, William 377 265 199, 200, 203, 204, 215,
Inge, William Ralph 278 James, William 324, 359, 217, 229, 231, 232, 246,
Innes, George 303 409, 413 247, 251, 341, 342, 377,
Innes, Michael 268 Jameson, Fredric 427, 494 413, 415, 416, 417, 418,
Interludes 11 The Political Unconscious 419, 426, 433, 448, 458,
Intermediality 181, 210, 218, 494 461, 462, 463
222, 234, 262, 346, 368, Other Works 494 A Portrait of the Artist as a
403, 429, 438, 440, 476 Jamie, Kathleen 147, 149 Young Man 197
Intertextuality 127, 156, 177, Janowitz, Tama 441 Dubliners 197, 246-247,
181, 186, 208, 210, 218, Jarrell, Randall 352 461
220, 221, 222, 227, 231, Jarry, Alfred 426 Finnegans Wake 198-199,
232, 241, 242, 255, 257, Jay-Z 369 200, 342, 377, 426
259, 271, 337, 361, 364, Jeffers, Robinson 347-348 Ulysses 197-198, 200,
398, 403, 417, 423, 424, Jefferson, Thomas 298, 232, 435, 458, 463
433, 438, 440, 441, 453, 299, 301, 341, 346 Joyce, Michael 262, 482
456, 463, 476, 485 Jennings, Elizabeth 134, 150 Afternoon 482
In-yer-face theatre 117, 182, Jeremiad 284, 287, 291 Twilight 482
184, 187, 188, 189 Jesurun, John 402 Jung, Carl Gustav 207, 273,
Ionesco, Eugne 173 Jewett, Sarah Orne 320 347, 357, 378, 381
IRA 115, 233, 235, 251 Johns, Jasper 339 Jung, Felix 483
Irigaray, Luce 498 Johnson, B(ryan) S(tanley
Irish Free State 115 William) 248 Kafka, Franz 229, 412, 438,
Irish Literary Renaissance Johnson, Charles 452 445
124, 159, 160, 161, 190, Johnson, Edward 290 Kaminsky, Stuart 485, 486-
568 INDEX
487 401, 449 Lad Lit 227

Hard Currency 486 King, Stephen 473, 474-475 Lamb, Charles 111
Other Novels 486-487 Black House 475 Lambert, George 44
Kandinsky, Wassily 193 Pet Sematary 474 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de
Kane, Sarah 117, 120, 182, The Shining 475 43
183 The Talisman 475 L'Amour, Louis 476
Blasted 183 Other Novels 474-475 Lanchester, John 225
Other Plays 183 King, Thomas 454 Landor, Walter Savage 111
Kanin, Garson 380 Kingslake, Alexander William Landseer, Edwin 81
Kanowitz, Howard 339 113 Langewiesche, William 493
Kant, Immanuel 84, 328 Kingsley, Charles 103 Langland, William 8
Kaplan, Joy 482 Kingsley, Mary 113 Language Poetry 361
Katz, Steve 426, 431 Kingston, Maxine Hong 455 Lanier, Sidney 309, 320
Kauffmann, Angelica 44 Novels 455 Lardner, Ring 460
Kaufman, George 380 Kinloch, David 149 Larkin, Philip 134-135
Kavanagh, Patrick 141 Kinnell, Galway 364 Poetry 134-135
Kay, Jackie 149, 231, 250 Kinsella, Thomas 145 Lasdun, James 249
Keane, Molly 235 Kinsey, Alfred 493 Lauber, Patricia 471
Keating, H(enry) R(eymond) Kipling, Rudyard 109, 110, Laurens, Joanna 181-182
F(itzwalter) 267-268 114, 194, 246 Lautramont, Comte de 426
Keats, John 15, 85, 88, 89, The Jungle Books 109 Law, Bob 119
90, 111, 112, 191, 276 Kim 109 Lawrence, D. H. 114, 122,
Keillor, Garrison 473 Plain Tales from the Hills 137, 193, 195, 196, 204,
Kelly, Dennis 189 109 205, 210, 211, 247
Kelly, Mary 119 Kirby, Michael 303 Lady Chatterley's Lover
Kelly, Robert 357 Kitaj, R. B. 119 196, 210
Kelly, William Melvin 452, Kleinzahler, August 364 Sons and Lovers 196
466 Kline, Franz 338 Stories 247
A Different Drummer 452 Kneller, Gottfried 44 Lawrence, T(homas) E(dward)
Other Novels 452 Knight, G(eorge) Wilson 193
Stories 466 272 Lawson, John Howard
Kelman, James 228, 229, Knight, Stephen 150 376-377
243, 250 Knights, L(ionel) C(harles) Layamon 7
Kennedy, Adrienne 394, 399, 272 Leapman, Edwina 119
400 Koch, Kenneth 357 Lear, Edward 96
Kennedy, A(lison) L(ouise) Koons, Jeff 339, 439 Leavis, F. R. 272, 279
231, 244, 250 Koontz, Dean 473 Leavitt, David 465
Kennedy, John F. 333, 334, Kopit, Arthur 384, 386 Le Carr, John (David
423, 437, 448, 487 Kosinski, Jerzy 435-436 Cornwell) 269, 270
Kennedy, William 442-443 Being There 436 The Constant Gardener
Kennelly, Brendan 145 The Painted Bird 436 269
Kenny, Maurice 371 Other Novels 436 LeCompte, Elizabeth 386,
Kensett, John F. 303 Kotzebue, August von 314 403
Kerouac, Jack 425 Krakauer, Jon 493 Lee, Chang-Rae 455
On the Road 425 Kramer, Larry 393, 443 Lee, Don L.
Kerr, Philip 267 Krim, Seymour 493 see Haki R. Mahubuti
Kesey, Ken 425-426 Kristeva, Julia 273, 474, 498 Lee, Harper 417
One Flew Over the Ku Klux Klan 397 To Kill a Mockingbird
Cuckoo's Nest 425 Kumin, Maxine 352, 353 417
Sailor Song 426 Kureishi, Hanif 236, 252 Lee, Hermione 276
Sometime a Great Notion Kushner, Tony 393-394 Lee, Nathaniel 37
425 Angels in America 393 Lee, Robert E. 302
Key, Francis Scott 301 Hydriotaphia 394 Le Fanu, J(oseph) S(heridan)
Keyes, Marian 245 Kyd, Thomas 16, 31 264
King, Daren 227 Legge, Gordon 250
King, Martin Luther 333, Lacan, Jacques 273, 474, 495 Le Guin, Ursula 465, 471,
INDEX 569
480 Lodge, David 9, 206 Macpherson, James 49

The Dispossessed 480 Lodge, Thomas 18 Madison, James 298, 301
The Left Hand of Darkness Loewen, James 500 Magic Realism 219, 226,
480 London, Jack 324, 377, 460 236, 241, 244, 250, 270,
Leicester, Robert Dudley, Longfellow, Henry 271, 354, 395, 402, 423,
earl of 13 Wadsworth 307-308 426, 442, 451, 453, 454,
Leigh, Vivien 473 Evangeline 308 455
Leighton, Frederic 81 The Song of Hiawatha Magna Carta 6
Leithauser, Brad 364 308 Magritte, Ren 131, 132,
Lely, Peter 21 Longley, Michael 140, 145 176, 195, 248
Lem, Stanislaw 256 Lorca, Federico Garca 357 Maguire, Sarah 150-151
Leonard, Elmore 485-486, Lorde, Audre 366 Mahon, Derek 140, 145
490 Lorrain, Claude 80, 81 Mahubuti, Haki R.
Tishomingo Blues Lorris, Guillaume de 8 (Don L. Lee) 366
486 Roman de la Rose 8 Mailer, Norman 420, 445,
Other Novels 486 Lost Generation 338, 355, 448, 460, 472, 473
Leonard, Tom 147 408, 409, 410, 411, 415, Armies of the Night 448
Le Sage, Alain-Ren 65, 460 The Executioner's Song
70, 101 Lothrop, Harriet 470 448
Lesbian Studies 336, 498 Lovecraft, H(oward) P(hillips) The Naked and the Dead
Lessing, Doris 209, 256 261, 477 420, 448
Leutze, Emanuel 303 Lovelace, Richard 24 Other Novels 448
Levertov, Denise 354 Lowell, Amy 123, 340 Stories 460
Levis, Larry 364 Lowell, James Russell Major, Clarence 453
Lewis, Cecil Day 129, 265 308, 329 Malamud, Bernard 446, 465
Lewis, C(live) S(taples) 254, Lowell, Robert 358-359, 376 God's Grace 446
256 For the Union Dead 358 Other Novels 446
Lewis, Gwyneth 150, 155 Life Studies 358 Stories 465
Lewis, John Frederick 81, Lowry, Malcolm 203 Malcolm X 333, 401
113 Lucas, Sarah 117, 120 Mallarm, Stphane 94, 305,
Lewis, Matthew Gregory 74, Ludlam, Charles 393 306
264 Lurie, Alison 425 Malory, Sir Thomas 10, 81,
The Monk 74 Lydgate, John 10 212
Lewis, Norman 271 Lyly, John 17-18 Mamet, David 386, 387-389,
Lewis, Sinclair 343, 407, Lyotard, Jean-Franois 217 391, 398, 403, 406
408, 424 Lytle, Andrew 417 American Buffalo 388
Babbit 408, 424 Glengarry Glen Ross
Main Street 408 Macauley, Thomas 388
Lewis, Wyndham 115, 118, Babbington 113 Oleanna 388-389
194, 201 MacDiarmid, Hugh 146 Other Plays 387-389
Lichtenstein, Roy 338 Macdonald, Ross 484 Mandeville, Bernard de 76
Lillo, George 54 Machado, Eduardo 402 Mandeville, Sir John 8, 270
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin 372 MacIntyre, Martin 149 Mann, Emily 396-397
Lincoln, Abraham 302 Mackenzie, Compton 193, Greensboro 397
Lindsay, Vachel 343, 350 268 Manning, Olivia 207
Linklater, Eric 250 Mackenzie, Henry 72 Mansfield, Katherine
Littell, Jonathan 443 Mackintosh, Elizabeth 265 246-247, 276
Lively, Penelope 249 MacLean, Sorley (Somhairle Marber, Patrick 184
Liverpool Poets 137 MacGill-Eain) 146 Marcuse, Herbert 493
Livingstone, David 113 MacLeish, Archibald 346, Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de
Local colour 320, 321, 351, 375-376, 452 72
326, 408 Plays 375-376 Markfield, Wallace 448
Lochhead, Liz 147-148, 149, Poetry 351 Marlowe, Christopher 15-17,
181, 184 MacLochlainn, Gerid 156 30
Locke, John 21, 39, 42, MacNeacail, Aonghas 149 Dr. Faustus 17
71-72 MacNeice, Louis 129 Marquand, John P. 421
570 INDEX
Mrquez, Gabriel Garca Fairyland 259 McQuillan, Karin 489

220, 226, 426 McBain, Ed 484-485 McSeveney, Angela 149
Marsh, Ngaio 264 Dead Man's Song 485 McSpaundy group 129
Marston, John 34 Money, Money, Money Medina, Rafael 452
Marston, William 472 485 Meehan, Paula 146
Wonder Woman 472 McCabe, Patrick 233, 244 Melville, Herman 317-319,
Martin, John 81, 82 McCarthy, Cormac 417-419, 326, 363, 380, 402, 429,
Martin, Valerie 456 457-458 432, 442, 458
Marvell, Andrew 22, 24, 151 All the Pretty Horses Moby-Dick 317, 318-319,
Marx, Groucho 458, 488 417, 418 402, 422, 433, 442
Marx, Karl and Marxism 79, Blood Meridian 417-418 The Confidence-Man 319
117, 119, 129, 158, 167, Border Trilogy 417-419 The Piazza Tales 319, 326
172, 180, 256, 273, 274, Cities of the Plain 417, Other Novels 318-319
275 418 Stories 319, 326
in America 332, 326, 363, The Crossing 417, 418 Memmot, Talan 483
377, 399, 410, 434, 458, Other Novels 417, 457- Mencken, H(enry) L(ouis)
494, 496, 497, 498 458 493
Mary I 13 McCarthy, Joseph 332, 335 Mercer, David 170
Mary Queen of Scots 13 McCarthy, Mary 444 Meredith, George 101, 106,
Masefield, John 122, 157 McCluskey, John 466 108, 110
Mason, Alfred Edward McCrory, Moy 251 The Ordeal of Richard
Woodly 264 McCullers, Carson 417, 461 Feverel 106
Mason, Bobbie Ann 419, 464 McDermid, Val 267 Merrill, James 352-353
Massie, Allan 231 McDonagh, Martin 184, 186 The Changing Light at
Massinger, Philip 34 McElroy, Joseph 439 Sandover 353
Masters, Edgar Lee 343-344, McEwan, Ian 223-224, 241- Merwin, William S. 364
408 242, 249 Metafiction 199, 218, 219,
Spoon River Anthology Atonement 223-224 222, 234, 239, 240, 241,
343, 408 Other Novels 223 248, 249, 252, 258, 260,
Mather, Cotton 290, 291, 468 Stories 248 420, 425, 426, 427, 432,
Magnalia Christi McGahern, John 231 436, 438, 439, 441, 442,
Americana 290 McGough, Roger 137 445, 457, 458, 460, 464,
Memorable Providences McGrath, John 184 468
468 McGrath, Patrick 249 Metaphysical Poets 22-23,
The Wonders of the McGuane, Thomas 435 126, 136, 309, 311, 313,
Invisible World 468 McGuckian, Medbh 146 346, 352
Mather, Increase 291, 468 The Flowermaster and Meun, Jean de 8
Remarkable Providences Other Poems 146 Michelangelo 12
468 Other Poetry 146 Michener, James 473
Mather, Richard 289, 291, McGuinness, Frank 185 Middleditch, Edward 119
467 McInerney, Jay 440 Middleton, Thomas 34
Matisse, Henri 118, 250, 346, McKendrick, Jamie 152 Miville, China 261
409 McKeon, Michael 494 Mill, John Stuart 113
Matthews, Brander 328, 375 McLaverty, Bernard 233, Millais, John Everett 81, 92
Matthiessen, F. O. 316, 494 251 Millar, Kenneth
Matura, Mustapha 179 McMillan, Terry 451 see Ross Macdonald
Maturin, Charles Robert 74 How Stella Got Her Millay, Edna St. Vincent
Maugham, Robin 228 Groove Back 451 352, 377
Maugham, W. Somerset 158- McMurtrey, Larry 476 Plays 375
159, 193, 228, 246, 268 Buffalo Girls 476 Poetry 352
Novels 193 The Last Picture Show Miller, Arthur 157, 335, 380,
Plays 158 476 381, 383-384, 388, 403
Stories 246 Other Novels 476 All My Sons 383
Maupin, Armistead 443 McNally, Terence 386 Death of a Salesman 383-
Maxwell, Glyn 152, 272 McNeice, Louis 272 384
McAuley, Paul J. 259 McPherson, Conor 186, 190 Mr Peters' Connections
INDEX 571
384 Moran, Thomas 203 252, 272, 492

The Crucible 384 More, Thomas 17, 261, 346 Nash, Paul 119, 195
Other Plays 384 Morgan, Charles Langbridge Nashe, Thomas 18, 38
Miller, Henry 411, 412, 425 193 The Unfortunate Traveller
Tropic of Cancer 412 Morgan, Edwin G. 137 18
Tropic of Capricorn 412 Morgan, J. Pierpont 302 Naturalism 162, 190
The Rosy Crucifixion 412 Morison, Samuel Eliot 499 in America 303, 315, 323,
Miller, J. Hillis 495-496 Morran, Thomas 491 324, 378, 422, 442
Miller, Perry 494 Morris, Jan 270 Naumann, Bruce 339
Millet, Kate 443, 498 Morris, William 92, 93, 109, Nava, Michael 489
Millhauser, Steven 466 112 Naylor, Gloria 451
Mills, C. Wright 493 Morrison, Toni 449, 450, Neate, Patrick 227
Milne, A(lan) A(lexander) 452, 456, 473 Neely, Barbara 490
253 Beloved 450 Neilson, Anthony 182, 183
Milton, John 24-26, 28, 39, Jazz 450 Nelson, Richard 392
164, 211, 221, 255, 363, Paradise 450 Nemerov, Howard 337
497 Sula 450 Neoclassicism 41, 45, 47, 48,
Il Penseroso 25 The Bluest Eye 450 49
L'Allegro 25 Other Novels 450 New Criticism 346, 494, 495
Paradise Lost 26 Morrissey, Sinad 156 New England Primer, The
Paradise Regained 26 Mortimer, Penelope 209 286, 467
Miracle Plays 11 Morton, Thomas 291 New Formalism 361, 362
Mitchell, Gary 186, 190 Mosley, Walter 489-490, 491 New Generation Poets
Mitchell, Margaret 473 Black Betty 489-490, 491 145, 149, 150, 152, 155
Gone With the Wind 473 Motherwell, Robert 338 New Historicism 496
Mitchell, Silas Weir 320 Motion, Andrew 139 New Journalism 444, 473,
Mitchinson, Naomi 250 Motley, John L. 3128 493
Mo, Timothy 237 Moulthrop, Stuart 262, 482 New Left 169, 170, 273
Modernism 82, 114, 119, Hegirascope 482 New Literatures in English
193, 194, 198, 201, 204, Victory Garden 482 236
216, 217, 218, 246, 249, Movement, The 134, 137, New Puritans 226, 227
258, 310, 338, 427 150 New Realism 117, 182
Molire 33, 36, 37, 65, 86 Muckrakers 407 Newby, Eric 271
Molloy, Dorothy 156 Mller, Heiner 403 Newland, Courttia 227
Momaday, N. Scott 370, 453 Muir, Edwin 146 Newman, Barnett 338
Fiction 453 Mukherjee, Bharati 455-456, Newton, Isaac 21, 277
Poetry 370 467 Newton, Richard 44
Monet, Claude 191, 192, 304 Muldoon, Paul 141, 145, 146 New York Poets 357, 364
Monmouth, Geoffrey of 7 Muller, Marcia 488 Nichols, Anne 380
Monroe Doctrine 301 Mulready, William 81 Nichols, Grace 153, 239
Monroe, Harriet 340 Mumford, Lewis 499 Nichols, John 477
Monroe, Marilyn 338, 383, Mura, David 372, 455 Nichols, Peter 172
384, 427, 448 Fiction 455 Nicholson, Ben 119
Montrose, Louis 496 Murdoch, Iris 207-208, 231 Nicholson, Jack 423, 425
Moody, William Vaughn 375 Murdoch, Rupert 118 Nicholson, William 79, 118
Mooney, Ted 443 Musicals 380, 381, 391, 441 Nicolson, Nigel 276
Moorcock, Michael 257 Myers, Walter Dean 471 Nietzsche, Friedrich 158,
Moore, Brian 232 Mystery Plays 11 347, 377, 417, 419, 496
Moore, George 107, 190, 251 Nin, Anas 444
Moore, Henry 119 Nabokov, Vladimir 398, 426, Nixon, Richard M. 333
Moore, Marianne 136, 351 427, 428, 434 Norfolk, Lawrence 224, 225
Poetry 351 Ada or Ardor 427 Norman, Marsha 396
Moore, Susanna 491 Lolita 398, 427 Norris, Frank 323, 324, 407
Moore, Thomas 85, 89 Other Novels 427-428 Norton, Thomas 16
Morales, Alejandro 455 Naipaul, Sir V(idiadhar) N.W.A. 368
Morality Plays 11 S(urajprasad) 237-238,
572 INDEX
Oates, Joyce Carol 421, 424, Other Plays 377-380 Parley, Peter
444 Oppenheim, Edward Phillips see Samuel G. Goodrich
A Bloodsmoore Romance 268 Parmigianino, Francesco 357
424 O'Rielly, Caitrona 156 Parrington, Vernon Louis
Foxfire 424 Orientalism 81 494
Other Novels 424 Orlean, Susan 493 Pascal, Julia 179, 189
Obama, Barack Hussein 335 O'Rourke, Meghan 373 Passmore, George 120
Obie Award O'Rowe, Mark 186 Passmore, Victor 119
see note p. 400 Orpheus 382, 443 Pater, Walter 81, 94, 109,
Oberndorf, Charles 260 Ortiz, Simon J. 370, 467 112, 124, 190
Occleve, Thomas Poetry 370 Marius the Epicurean
see Hoccleve Stories 467 109, 113
O'Brien, Edna 235, 251 Orton, Joe 178 Paterson, Don 147, 149
O'Brien, Flann 232 Orwell, George 59, 159, 170, Patrick, Robert 393
At Swim-Two-Birds 232 201, 202, 203, 430 Patten, Brian 137
O'Brien, Sean 152 Animal Farm 59, 202 Paulin, Tom 141, 145
O'Brien, Tim 443 1984 202 Payne, John Howard 315
O'Casey, Sean 161 Other Novels 202 Peacock, Thomas Love 101,
Juno and the Paycock 161 Osborne, John 157, 165 201
O'Connor, Flannery 413, Look Back in Anger Peake, Mervyn 203-204
416, 462 165 Peale, Charles Wilson 293
O'Connor, Frank (Michael O'Sullivan, Leanne 156 Pearlstein, Philip 339
Donovan) 251 Oswald, Alice 155 Pears, Tim 225
O'Donoghue, Bernard 145 Otway, Thomas 37 Peele, George 17, 30
Odets, Clifford 376, 377, 389 Ovid 16, 45, 46, 139 Peltier, Leonard 334
Oedipus 362, 496 Owen, Agnes 250 Penn, William 284, 291
O'Faolain, Sean 232, 251 Owen, Wilfred 116, 122 Penrose, Roger 277-278
Off-Broadway drama 380, Owens, Louis 454 Penrose, Roland 119
381, 384, 386, 391, 392, Dark River 454 Pepys, Samuel 40
400 Other Novels 454 Percy, Thomas 49
Off-off Broadway drama Owens, Rochelle 395 Percy, Walker 417
380, 386, 389, 391, 392, Ozick, Cynthia 446, 465 Performance Drama 386,
393 Novels 446 402, 403
O'Flaherty, Liam 251 Stories 465 Performance Poetry 369
O'Hara, Frank 357 Peters, H. G. 472
O'Hara, John 409 P. Diddy 367 Wonder Woman 472
Okada, John 455 Page, Kathy 250 Petrarca, Francesco 8, 12, 14
O'Keeffe, Georgia 3338 Page, Louise 181 Petry, Ann 449-450
Okri, Ben 236, 252 Page, Thomas Nelson 320 Phelps, William Lyon 375
Oldenburg, Claes 339 Paglia, Camille 498-499 Philip II of Spain 13
Olson, Charles 353-354, Paine, Thomas 298 Phillips, Caryl 238, 245
355, 362, 367 Common Sense 298 Phillips, David Graham 87
O'Neill, Eugene 375, 377- Palliser, Charles 224 Phillips, Jane Anne 420, 464
380, 383, 389, 403, 433 Palmer, Samuel 81 Machine Dreams 420
Desire under the Elms Paretsky, Sara 488, 490 Other Novels 420
378 Warshawski novels 490 Stories 464
Long Day's Journey into Parker, Robert B. 485-486 Picano, Felice 444
Night 379-380 Family Honor 486 Picasso, Pablo 118, 194, 212,
Mourning Becomes Electra Night Passage 486 338, 343, 347, 409
379 Small Vices 486 Piercy, Marge 480
The Emperor Jones 378 The Godwulf Manuscript Pilgrims 21, 293, 290, 291,
The Hairy Ape 378 486 336
The Iceman Cometh Parker, Thomas 328 Pindar 15
379 Parkman, Francis 328 Pineda, Cecile 455
The Moon of the Caribbees Parks, Rosa 333 Pinero, Sir Arthur Wing 97,
378 Parks, Suzan-Lori 400 156
INDEX 573
Pinsky, Robert 361 The Singing Detective The Godfather 473

Pinter, Harold 167, 173, 174- 118, 187 Pyle, Howard 469
176, 186, 188, 189, 219, Other Plays 187 Pym, Barbara 207
387, 390 Pound, Ezra 4, 114, 123, 124, Pynchon, Thomas ix, 337,
The Caretaker 174-175 160, 193, 276, 340, 341, 426, 427, 429, 431, 432,
Other Plays 174-176 342, 344, 346, 348, 349, 433, 434-435, 436, 437,
Pitt, William the elder 41 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 438, 441, 458-459, 463,
Pitt, William the younger 41 361, 367, 410 475
Plantagenets 6 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley Entropy 434
Plath, Sylvia 358, 360 341 Gravity's Rainbow 435
Poetry 360 The Cantos 341-343 Mason & Dixon 435
Plumb, Sir J(ohn) H(arold) Poussin, Nicolas 80, 177 The Crying of Lot 49
"Jack" 274 Powell, Anthony 197, 203 435
Pocahontas 290, 314, 344 Powys brothers 193 V. 434-435
Poe, Edgar Allan 221, 245, Powys, John Cowper 193 Vineland 435
264, 305-307, 326, 413, Poynton, Edward John 81 Stories 463
474, 475, 477 Pratchett, Terry 260
Fiction 326 Pre-Raphaelites 7, 81, 92-94, Quakers 284, 291
Literary theory 305, 326 124 Queen Latifah 368
Poetry 305-307 Prescott, W(illiam) H(ickling)
Poetic Drama 328 Raban, Jonathan 271, 492
see Verse Drama Presley, Elvis 371, 427 Rabe, David 386-387, 406
Pollock, Jackson 338, 364 Price, Anthony 269 Hurlyburly 387
Polo, Marco 379 Price, Reynolds 417 Sticks and Bones 386
Pop art 119, 338 Priestley, J(ohn) B(oynton) The Basic Training of
Pope, Alexander 28, 45-47, 158-159, 193, 201 Pavlo Hummel 387
48, 49, 52, 77, 111, 294, Novels 201 Those the River Keeps
304 Plays 158-159 387
The Dunciad 46-47 Prior, Matthew 47 Rabelais, Franois 27, 65,
An Essay on Criticism 46 Pritchett, V(ictor) S(awdon) 198, 288
An Essay on Man 46, 52 247 Radcliffe, Ann 74, 264
The Rape of the Lock Proesch, Gilbert 117, 120 The Mysteries of Udolpho
46-47, 52 Proulx, E. Annie 440 74
Porter, Katherine Anne Accordion Crimes 440 Raine, Craig 139
416, 461-462 Postcards 440 Raine, Kathleen 150
Stories 461-462 The Shipping News 440 Rainey, Ma 400
Porter, Peter 151 Other Fiction 440 Ralegh, Sir Walter 13, 40,
Porter, Roy 274-275 Proust, Marcel 173, 190, 195, 210, 283
Post-colonial Studies 496- 203 Ramsay, Allan 44
497 Public Enemy 368 Rankin, Ian 267
Postmodernism 117, 119, Pulitzer Prize 344, 345, 346, Ransom, Arthur 254
120, 172, 181, 182, 183, 350, 352, 353, 357, 361, Ransom, John Crowe 346,
194, 201, 209, 210, 212, 367, 375, 378, 381, 385, 352, 358, 413, 495
216, 217, 218, 219, 221, 396, 397, 401, 408, 439, Rap songs and lyrics 338,
222, 223, 224, 226, 230, 458 365, 367, 368, 369
240, 248, 249, 258, 259 Pullman, Philip 254-255 Rattigan, Terence 159
in America 339, 362, 364, Purchas, Samuel 40 Rauschenberg, Robert 339
369, 388, 396, 417, 424, Purdy, James 436, 462 Ravenhill, Mark 117, 182,
426, 427, 429, 433, 436, Puritans 19, 21, 25, 27, 34, 183, 184, 188
448, 494 35, 39, 53, 126, 226 Rawls, John 499
Potok, Chaim 448 in America 283, 284, 285, Ray, Man 350
Potter, Beatrix 253 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, Raymond, Alex 472
Peter Rabbit 253 291, 292, 300, 302, 313, Flash Gordon 472
Potter, Dennis 118, 186, 187 317, 319, 336, 359, 375, Read, Herbert 123
Pennies from Heaven 118, 416, 467 Reade, Charles 103
187 Puzo, Mario 473 Reader-Response Theory
574 INDEX
495, 496, 497 Rivers, Larry 304, 338 Stories 466

Reading, Peter 139 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 217, Rothenberg, Jerome 364, 369
Reagan, Ronald 333, 334, 219 Rothko, Mark 338, 420
336, 388, 400 Robertson, Robin 149 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 73,
Realism 97, 106, 107, 117, Robertson, Thomas William 82, 168, 224, 298, 300,
119, 160, 162, 165, 194, 97 314, 322, 329, 456
196, 198, 218, 224, 244, Robinson, Edward Arlington Rowe, Nicholas 54
249, 268 344 Rowlandson, Mary 291
in America 303, 320, 322, Robinson, Lillian 498 Rowlandson, Thomas 44, 70,
323, 324, 325, 327, 358, Robinson, Marilynne 445 78
364, 375, 378, 383, 395, Robinson, Ralph 17 Rowling, J(oanne) K(athleen)
396, 400, 408, 410, 411, Robison, Mary 439, 464 254, 260
412, 413, 420, 421, 442, Roche, Billy 186 Rowson, Susanna 297
466, 484, 485, 489 Rochester Rucker, Rudy 479
Red Cloud 330 see John Wilmot Rudkin, David 151
Read, Herbert 123 Rochfort, Desmond 120 Rushdie, Salman 236, 252
Reed, Ishmael 452 Rockefeller, John D. 302 Ruskin, John 79-80, 94, 112,
Japanese by Spring 452 Rockwell, Norman 338 113
The Flight to Canada 452 Rodriguez, Abraham Jr 455 Criticism 112
Other Novels 452 Rodriguez, Richard 455 Russ, Joanna 443, 480
Rees-Jones, Deryn 155 Roethke, Theodore 352 Russell, Bertrand 277
Reich, Wilhelm 493 Rogers, Claude 119 Ryman, Geoff 482
Reid, Mayne 471 Rogers, Samuel 82
Renault, Mary 193 Rohan, Michael Scott 260 Sackville, Thomas 16
Rendell, Ruth 265-266 Rolfe, John 290 Sackville-West, Victoria 199,
Restoration 24, 26-28, 38, Rolling Stones, The 118 276
40, 45, 52, 53, 96 Romanticism 41, 45, 47, 48, Sade, Marquis de 426, 474
Rexroth, Kenneth 355 52, 80, 81, 85-89, 106, 123, Safavian, Zahra 483
Reynolds, Joshua 44, 293 194, 263, 272 Berceuse 483
Rhys, Jean 207 in America 303, 304 Said, Edward 497
Ribman, Ronald 386 Ronsard, Pierre de 342 Orientalism 497
Rice, Alice Hegan 470 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 332, Other Works 497
Rice, Anne 475 457 Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)
Interview With the Vampire Roosevelt, Theodore 332, 247
475 344, 407 Salinger, J. D. 230, 322, 421-
Other Novels 475 Rorty, Richard 493 422, 443, 445, 462
Rice, Ben 227 Rose, Dilys 149 The Catcher in the Rye
Rice, Elmer 376 Rosenquist, James 339 230, 421-422
Rich, Adrienne 352, 360-361 Rossetti, Christina Georgina Stories 462
Poetry 360-361 93 Salle, David 339
Richards, I(vor) A(rmstrong) Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 81, Snchez, Ricardo 372
272 90, 92-93, 124 Sanchez, Sonia 366, 400
Richardson, Dorothy 196, Rossetti, William Michael 92 Sanchez-Scott, Milcha 402
207 Roth, Philip 446-447, 456- Sandburg, Carl 340, 344
Richardson, Jack 384 457, 466 Sandby, Paul 44
Richardson, Samuel 44, American Pastoral 447 Santayana, George 413
62-63, 64, 65, 66, 70-72, Our Gang 446 Sapper (H. C. McNeile) 268
75, 297, 498 Portnoy's Complaint 446 Sargent, Epes 469
Clarissa 62-63, 297 Sabbath's Theatre Sargent, John Singer 82, 304
Pamela 62-63, 64, 66, 75 447 Saroyan, William 471
Ricketts, Charles 118 The Dying Animal 447 Sartre, Jean Paul 172, 218,
Riesman, David 493 The Human Stain 447 337, 434
Rilke, Rainer Maria 357 Zuckerman novels Sassoon, Siegfried 116, 122
Rimbaud, Arthur 305 446 Saunders, James 173, 176
Rivera, Jos 402 Other Novels 446-447, Sayers, Dorothy 264, 265
Rivera, Toms 454 456-457 Scarron, Paul 27
INDEX 575
Schama, Simon 274 37, 49, 84, 118, 144, 155, Sickert, Walter Richard
Schechner, Richard 386 156, 164, 165, 168, 176, 81-82
Schisgal, Murray 384 179, 182, 191, 198, 208, Sidney, Margaret
Schlndorff, Volker 480 210, 215, 216, 240, 272, see Harriet Lothrop
Schnabel, Julian 339 309, 319, 362, 381, 398, Sidney, Sir Philip 14, 17-18,
Schnackenberg, Gjertrud 406, 416, 456, 470, 496 288
361-362 Hamlet 31, 176, 456, 496 The Arcadia 17, 18
Schopenhauer, Arthur 158 King Lear 31-32, 182 Astrophel and Stella 14
Schwartz, Delmore 445 Macbeth 31-32, 416 Silko, Leslie M. 370, 453,
Science fiction viii, 99, 100, The Merchant of Venice 467
118, 216, 222, 240, 241, 30-31, 144, 168 Fiction 453
249, 252, 255, 256, 261 Othello 31 Poetry 370
in America 336, 389, 420, Romeo and Juliet 30 Stories 467
425, 430, 432, 445, 458, The Taming of the Shrew Silliman, Ron 362, 364
465, 472, 473, 474, 477, 29-30, 381 Sillitoe, Alan 165, 205, 249
478, 481 The Tempest 33, 208, 234, Saturday Night and Sunday
Scott, Paul 236 362 Morning 205
Scott, Ridley 478 The Winter's Tale 33 Simic, Charles 374
Blade Runner 478 Other Plays 29-35 Simon, Neil 380, 403
Scott, R(obert) F(alcon) 272 Poetry 15-16, 21-22 Simon, Seymour 471
Scott, Samuel 44, 80, 89 Shange, Ntozake 369, 400, Sinclair, Clive 249
Scott, Sir Walter 100, 101, 402 Sinclair, May 207
108, 112, 113, 229, 314, Shapiro, Karl 352 Sinclair, Upton 407
316 Sharpe, Tom 207 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 445,
Novels and Poetry 100 Shaw, George Bernard 97, 465
Scott, Tom 147 157-158, 159, 200, 278, Novels 445
Scott-Heron, Gil 369, 402 381 Stories 465
Scudry, Madame de 37 Shaw, Irvin 420, 445 Siskind, Aaron 338
Seafarer, The 4-5 Sheeler, Charles 338 Sitting Bull 302, 330
Seale, Bobby 449 Shelley, Mary 74, 87, 99, Sitwell, Edith 131
Searcaigh, Cathal O 145 147, 181, 257, 477 Sitwell, Osbert 131
Sedley, Sir Charles 27 Frankenstein 99-100, 147, Sitwell, Sacheverell 131
Segal, Erich 465, 473 257, 482 Skelton, John 10
Love Story 473 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 15, Skinner, B(urrhus) F(rederic)
Segal, George 339 80, 85, 86, 87-88, 89, 90, 493
Segal, Lore 465 96, 99, 352 Smith, Captain John 40, 283,
Selby, Hubert 421 Poetry 87-88 290
Last Exit to Brooklyn 421 Shepard, Sam 386, 389- Smith, Dave 361
Self, Will 226 391, 406 Smith, David 361
Sellers, Peter 436 Eyes for Consuela 390- Smith, Jack 119
Selvon, Sam 237 391 Smith, Joan 266
Sendak, Maurice 471 Fool For Love 390 Smith, Marc 375
Sewall, Samuel 291 Operation Sidewinder 389 Smith, Patricia 369
Sexton, Anne 358, 360 Simpatico 390 Smith, Sidney Goodsir 147
Poetry 360 True West 389-390 Smith, Stevie 150
Seymour, Jane 13 Other Plays 389-391 Smith, Zadie 237, 245, 252
Shadwell, Thomas 36 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley White Teeth 237
Shaffer, Peter 166, 169 55-56, 96, 98, 159, 297 Smithson, Robert 339
The Royal Hunt of the Sun The School for Scandal Smollett, Tobias 63, 69-70,
169 56, 297 72, 75, 76, 77, 101
Other Plays 169-170 Sherman, Cindy 339, 369, Humphrey Clinker 70
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley 395, 444 Roderick Random 69-70
Cooper, 3rd earl of 28, 42, Sherman, Martin 179 Snodgrass, W(illiam) D(ewitt)
43, 46, 76 Shirley, James 34, 35 358
Shakespeare, William 8, 13, Shockley, Ann Allen 466 Snoop Dogg 367
14-17, 21-22, 25, 29-35, Showalter, Elaine 498 Snow, C. P. 203, 279
576 INDEX
Snyder, Gary 355 Sterling, Bruce 479 196, 197, 198, 207, 249
Song, Cathy 373 Distraction 479 in America 325, 379, 412,
Songs from the Nursery 468 Holy Fire 479 415, 448, 461, 493
Sontag, Susan 499 Schismatrix 479 Stretser, Thomas 52
Sophocles 362 The Difference Engine Strickland, Stephanie 483
Sorrentino, Gilbert 435 479 Strindberg, Johann August
Soto, Gary 372 Sterne, Laurence 63, 70-72, 315, 377, 378, 385
Southampton, Henry 75, 77, 198, 203, 229, 248, Stuart, Gilbert 293
Wriothesley, earl of 22 426, 428, 476 Stuarts 19
Southey, Robert 83, 84, 85, Tristram Shandy 63, 70- Stubbs, George 44, 428
111, 300 72, 229, 248, 476 Sturgeon, Theodore 477
Spark, Muriel 208, 249 Stevens, Wallace 346-347, More Than Human 477
Spencer, Elizabeth 419 376 Sturrock, John 273
Spencer, Stanley 119, 202 Harmonium 346 Styron, William 419
Spender, Stephen 129 Plays 376 Suckling, Sir John 24
Spengler, Oswald 347 Stevenson, Anne 150 Sukenick, Ronald 426, 435,
Spenser, Edmund 14-15, 48, Stevenson, Robert Louis 463
210, 212, 288 108-109, 110, 111, 113, Sullivan, Sir Arthur S. 98
The Faerie Queene 14-15 192, 441 Superman ix, 472
Spewack, Samuel 380 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Surrealism 123, 133, 138,
Spiderman 472 108, 441 165, 187, 194, 195, 201,
Spielberg, Steven 450, 476 Other fiction 108-109 241, 249, 254, 261
Spillane, Mickey 484 Essays 111 in America 338, 355, 356,
Mike Hammer series Stewart, J(ohn) I(nnes) 359, 399, 411, 412, 424,
484 M(ackintosh) 268 425, 428, 431, 432, 438,
Spiller, Robert E. 494 Stieglitz, Alfred 337, 338, 452
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 341 Surrey, Henry Howard, earl of
497 Still, Clyfford 338 14
Stafford, William 364 St. Nicholas (magazine) Sutcliff, Rosemary 254
Stallings, Laurence 375 469 Sutherland, Luke 227
Stanford, Ann 364 Stockton, Frank R. 469 Swift, Graham 224, 225, 239
Stanley, H(enry) M(orton) Stoddard, Charles Warren Swift, Jonathan 28, 40, 45-
113 329 46, 54, 58-59, 71, 74, 76,
Stapledon, Olaf 256 Stoker, Bram 109, 110, 257 226, 257, 276, 294, 297
Stark, Freya 270 Stone, John Augustus 314 Gulliver's Travels 40,
Steel, Danielle 473 Stone, Lawrence 274 58-59, 62, 257
Steele, Richard 55, 76 Stone, Robert 420 A Modest Proposal 58
Steele, Timothy 361 Stoppard, Tom 173, 176-178, A Tale of a Tub 58
Steer, Wilson 82 188, 195 Poetry 45-46
Steffens, Lincoln 407 Arcadia 177 Swinburne, A(lgernon)
Stein, Gertrude 340, 341, Other Plays 176-178 C(harles) 92, 93-94, 96
350, 362, 408, 409-410, Storey, David 206 Sykes-Davies, Hugh 119
413, 426, 444 Stout, Rex 484 Symbolism 93, 94, 124, 126,
Steinbeck, John 338, 408, Stowe, Harriet Beecher 160, 162, 191, 196, 246,
411, 442, 460, 471 319-320 247, 315, 317, 318, 344,
The Grapes of Wrath 408 Uncle Tom's Cabin 315, 378, 383, 413, 415, 495
Other Novels 408 319-320 Symons, Arthur 95
Stories 460 Strachan, Zo 227 Symons, Julian 265
Steinem, Gloria 498 Strachey, Lytton 276 Synge, John Millington 161
Stephens, Simon 189 Strand, Mark 337
Stephenson, Neal 479-480, Strang, William 118, 125 Tahoma, Quincy 370
481, 482 Stratemeyer, Edward 470 Taine, Hippolyte 323
Snow Crash 479 Straub, Peter 475 Tan, Amy 455, 467
The Diamond Age 479 Black House 475 Tapahonso, Luci 371
Zodiac 479 The Talisman 475 Tarkington, Booth N.
Stephenson, Shelag 181 stream-of-consciousness 471
INDEX 577
Tartt, Donna 440 Thoreau, Henry David 309, horne Clemens) 320, 321,
Tarzan 472, 477 316, 317, 328-329, 425 322, 326, 438, 443, 471,
Tate, Allen 346, 358, 495 Walden 317, 329 477
Tavel, Ronald 393 Thorne, Matt 227 A Connecticut Yankee at
Taylor, Bayard 329 Thornhill, Sir James 44 King Arthur's Court 321,
Taylor, Edward 286-287 Thorpe, Adam 224, 225 477
Taylor, Elizabeth 207 Thubron, Colin 271 A Tramp Abroad 321
Taylor, Jeremy 39 Thurber, James 460, 471 Huckleberry Finn 321,
Taylor, Peter 461 T. I. 367 322, 422, 438, 471, 474
Taylor, Samuel 380 Tilson, Joe 119 Life on the Mississippi
Tecumseh 302 Timrod, Henry 309 321
Teller, Astro 481 Titian 16 The Gilded Age 321, 322
Exegesis 481 Tobey, Mark 338 The Prince and the Pauper
Tennyson, Alfred 15, 89-90, Tibn, Colm 233, 244 321
93, 96, 139, 163, 305 Tolkien, J(ohn) R(onald) The Innocents Abroad
Idylls of the King 90 R(euel) 255, 256, 260, 321
In Memoriam 90 261 Tom Sawyer 321, 471
Terry, Megan 395 Tolstoy, Count Lev Stories 326
Tey, Josephine 265 Nikolaevich 323 Tyler, Ann 419
Thackeray, William M. Tomalin, Claire 276 Tyler, Royall 297
62, 80, 82, 103-104, 110 Tomlinson, Charles 134
Barry Lyndon 103 Toole, John Kennedy 424 Udall, Nicholas 16
Vanity Fair 104 A Confederacy of Dunces Ungerer, Tomi 471
Thatcher, Margaret 114, 117, 424 University Wits 16-17, 30
169, 170, 171, 176, 178, Tories 41 Unsworth, Barry 194, 224
180, 184, 206, 209, 336 Torrington, Jeff 229 Updike, John 203, 337, 421,
Theatre of the absurd 172- Tourneur, Cyril 34 422-424, 444, 456, 462
174, 176, 178, 277 Townsend, Sue 181 Couples 423
in America 383, 385, 386, Toynbee, A(rnold) J(oseph) Rabbit tetralogy 423-424
390, 391 274, 277 S. 423
Theroux, Paul 421, 491-492 Transcendentalism 302, 309, The Centaur 422
The Mosquito Coast 421 317, 328, 329, 345 Toward the End of Time
Saint Jack 421 Tremain, Rose 210, 250 423
Other Novels 421 Trevelyan, G. M. 274 Other Novels 422-424,
Travel Writing 491-492 Trevor, William 232-233, 456
Thesiger, Sir Wilfred 270 251, 252 Stories 423, 462
Thomas, Augustus 315 Trillin, Calvin 493
Thomas, Dylan 133-134 Trilling, Lionel 499 Valdez, Luis 402
Poetry 133-134 Trollope, Anthony 103-104, Vanbrugh, John 35-36
Thomas, Piri 372 276 Vanderbilt, Cornelius 302
Thomas, R(onald) S(tuart) Trowbridge, John T. 471 Van Duyn, Mona 337
150 Trumbull, John 294 van Dyck, Anthony 21
Thomas, Sir Keith 274 Tudors 7, 12, 13, 14, 19 Van Dyke, Henry (African
Thomas, Scarlett 227 Turgenev, Ivan S. 178, 323, American writer) 452
Thompson, Daniel Pierce 324 Van Dyne, Edith
471 Turner, J. M. William 80-81, see Frank Baum
Thompson, E(dward) P(almer) 85, 111, 120, 319 Van Gieson, Judith 489
275 Turrell, James 339 van Gogh, Vincent 118, 272
Thompson, Ernest Seton 469 TV drama viii, 186, 206, 243 van Itallie, Jean Claude
Thompson, Hunter S. 444, in America 337, 403, 404, 386, 402
493 405, 406 van Vogt, A. E. 447
Thompson, Maurice 320 Dallas 337, 404 Vasari, Giorgio 357
Thomson, James 15, 47, 48, Dynasty 337, 404 Vaughan, Henry 22, 23
49, 80, 94, 304 Six Feet Under 405 Vedrenne, John E. 157
The Castle of Indolence The Sopranos 404-405 Verne, Jules 257
47 Twain, Mark (Samuel Lang- verse drama 129, 162, 164,
578 INDEX
165, 210, 351, 375, 376, Joy 451 Welty, Eudora 413, 416, 461
379, 380 The Color Purple Novels 416
Very, Jones 309 450, 472 Stories 461
Vespucci, Amerigo 283 Other Novels 450-451 Wenderoth, Joe 374
Victoria, Queen 52, 79, 80, Stories 466 Wertenbaker, Timberlake
114 Walker, Frederick 81 181
Vidal, Gore 420, 431-432, Wallace, David Foster 441- Wesker, Arnold 167-168,
460, 473 442, 465 170, 174, 179
Live from Golgotha 432 Brief Interviews With Wesley, Charles and John 42,
Myra Breckenridge 432 Hideous Men 465 285
Myron 432 Infinite Jest 441-442 Wesselman, Tom 339
The Smithsonian Institution Wallace, Edgar 265 West, Benjamin 44, 293
432 Wallace, Lewis 320, 321 West, Nathanael 411-412
Williwaw 420, 431 Ben-Hur 320, 321 A Cool Million 412
Other Novels 431-432 Walpole, Horace 73, 264 Miss Lonelyhearts 412
Stories 460 Walpole, Hugh 193, 201, 246 The Day of the Locust 412
Vidocq, Eugne Franois 264 Walters, Anna Lee 454 Western fiction and movies
Vietnam War 179, 189, 291, Walton, Izaak 39 viii, 36, 389, 390, 404, 417,
333, 334, 335, 336, 354, Ward, Douglas Turner 400 418, 428, 430, 431, 457,
357, 372, 386, 387, 390, Ward, Nathaniel 291 458, 471, 472, 473, 474,
392, 397, 420, 426, 430, Warhol, Andy 328, 427, 470 476, 477, 480, 499
437 Warner, Alan 230, 243 Wharton, Edith 412, 444,
Villanueva, Alma Luz 372 Morvern Callar 230 461
Villanueva, Tino 372 Warner, Charles D. 321 Wheatley, David 156
Vine, Barbara 266 Warren, Robert Penn 346, Wheatley, Phillis 296
Viramontes, Helena Mara 413, 416, 495 Whetstone, Diane McKinney
455, 466-467 Wars of the Roses 6-7 451
Novels 455 Washington, George 292, Whigs 41, 54
Stories 466-467 301 Whistler, James Abbott
Virgil 15, 52 Wasserstein, Wendy 396-397 McNeill 81, 94-95, 304
Vizenor, Gerald Robert 454 The Heidi Chronicles White, E. B. 460
Vogel, Paula 396-399 397 White, Edmund 443
How I Learned to Drive Waterhouse, Keith 206 White, T(erence) H(anbury)
397 Watt, Ian 273, 494 261
The Baltimore Waltz Watteau, Antoine 234 Whitefield, George 285
398 Waugh, Evelyn 201, 203, Whitehead, A(lfred) N(orth)
Voltaire 43, 298, 300, 412, 247 277
436 Webster, John 34 Whiteman, Roberta Hill 371
Candide 412, 436 Webster, Noah 331 Whitemore, George 444
Vonnegut, Kurt 426, 429- Weinstein, Arnold 384 Whiting, John 164
430, 431, 434, 436, 473 Welch, James 370, 453 Whitman, Walt(er) 309-310,
Player Piano 430 Fiction 453 313, 316, 340, 342, 344,
Slaughterhouse-Five 430 Poetry 370 348, 352, 355, 359
Science fiction 430 Weldon, Fay 211, 250 Leaves of Grass 309, 310,
Other Novels 430 Wells, H. G. 109, 192, 193, 317, 342
195, 246, 257, 278, 478 Whittier, John Greenleaf 307
Wace 7 The Time Machine 109, Wideman, John Edgar 453
Wain, John 134, 165, 203, 192, 257 Wiggin, Kate Douglas 470
204, 227 Tono-Bungay 192 Wigglesworth, Michael
Hurry on Down 204 Other Novels 109, 192, 286-287
Waits, Tom 403, 406 257 Wilbur, Richard 352
Walam Olum 313 Welsh, Irvine 117, 120, 182, Wild Bill Hickock 302
Walker, Alice 444, 449, 450- 229-230, 242, 243, 248, Wilde, Oscar 81, 94-95,
451, 456, 466, 472 250, 252 98-99, 159, 176, 177, 178,
Meridian 450 Trainspotting 182, 229- 199, 233, 276
Possessing the Secret of 230 Salom 81, 98
INDEX 579
The Importance of Being Winterson, Jeanette 212, 241, Wylie, Elinor 352
Earnest 98 252 Poetry 352
The Picture of Dorian Winthrop, John 284, 287,
Gray 109 290, 291 Xialong, Qiu 489
Wilder, Laura Ingalls 470 Wister, Owen 325
Wilder, Thornton 377, 413 Wiszniewski, Adrian 120 Yale Critics 495
Our Town 377 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 277, Yamamoto, Hisaye 455, 467
Novels 413 434 Yamauchi, Wakako 402
Wilkes, John 42, 43, 52 Wodehouse, P(elham) Yates, Richard 422, 462
Willeford, Charles 485 G(renville) 201 Ye Bear and ye Cub 289
William and Mary 20, 285 Wolfe, Thomas 375, 413, Yeats, William Butler
William of Orange 20 414 124-126, 129, 131, 134,
William the Conqueror 3, 6 Look Homeward, Angel 160, 161, 162, 193, 276,
Williams, C(arlos) K. 364 414 351, 457
Williams, Raymond 273, 496 Other Novels 414 Plays 160
Williams, Roger 284, 291 Wolfe, Tom 444, 473-474, Poetry 124-126
Williams, Tennessee 157, 493 Yen, Gish 455
380, 381-383, 385, 386, A Man in Full 474 Yorke, Margaret 266
393, 419 The Bonfire of the Vanities Young Bear, Ray A. 371
A Streetcar Named Desire 473-474 Young, Edward 48, 77, 295,
381-382, 383 New Journalism 444, 473 304
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Wolff, Tobias 439, 464 Young, Gavin 271
382 Wollstonecraft, Mary 78, 99, Young, Wayne 438
Outcry 383 273
The Glass Menagerie Women's Liberation Zeldin, Theodore 276
381 Movement 116, 393, 498 Zephaniah, Benjamin 153
Orpheus Descending 382- Women's Studies 336, 496, Zola, Emile 190, 322, 323,
383 497 407, 473, 490
Other Plays 382-383 Wonder Woman 472
Williams, William Carlos Wood, Charles 172
136, 337, 340-341, 346, Wood, Grant 338, 344
348-350, 353, 358, 361, Woolf, Virginia 62, 193, 195,
362 198, 199, 204, 207, 212,
Paterson 349, 358 224, 247, 273, 276, 448,
Pictures from Breughel 498
349 The Waves 198-199
Willingham, Calder 419 Other Novels 198-199
Willis, Nathaniel Parker 314 Woolman, John 291
Wilmot, John 27, 52 Wordsworth, William 49, 50,
Wilson, Angus 204, 247 51, 80, 82-85, 88, 89, 90,
Wilson, August 400-401, 406 111, 163, 165, 272, 304,
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom 329
401 Lyrical Ballads 52, 82-84
Wilson, Edmund 494 Other Poetry 83
Wilson, Harold 114 Wouk, Herman 420
Wilson, John Dover 272 Wright, Charles S. 452
Wilson, Lanford 392 Wren, Sir Christopher 21, 35,
Redwood Curtain 392 221, 285
Wilson, Rab 149 Wright, James 357
Wilson, Robert 337, 389, Wright, Lawrence 494
391, 403 Wright, Richard 448
Wilson, Sloan 425 Wulfstan 5
Wilson, Woodrow 332 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 14
Winfield, Arthur M. Wycherley, William 35-36
see Edward Stratemeyer Wyclif, John 8
Winters, Yvor 361, 495 Wyeth, Andrew 338

Hans-Peter Wagner-A History of British Irish and American Literature (2010)

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Hans-Peter Wagner-A History of British Irish and American Literature (2010)

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Preface

Preface to the second edition

Saarbrcken, January 2010 Peter Wagner

The Paul G. Allen Collection 410

A Page of Old English verse,

2. Latin and French Literature in England

to Italy in 1372-73. He also worked

And smale fowles maken melodye,

Some decisive developments also took

4. Prose and Prose Fiction

6 Desiderius Erasmus (Erasmus of Rotterdam, c. 1466-1536), an important humanist, scholar, and

peculiar style, "Euphuism", which is characterized by an excessive use of alliteration and

ested merely in self-preservation. Order, according to Hobbes, can only be established by

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Contmplate; what you will, approve,

Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

 John Wesley (1703-91) and his bro-

 most important contributions came from anti-

Close by those meads, forever crowned with flowers,

O'erhang his wavy bed:

Apart from his songs and short poems, Burns

 William Blake (1757-1827) has been called a

And when thy heart began to beat,

he shows the values of a shallow world. The elegant

15 Dissenter was another term for Nonconformist.

W. Hogarth, A Harlots Progress (I)

W. Hogarth, A Harlots Progress (II)

W. Hogarth, A Harlots Progress (III)

W. Hogarth, A Harlots Progress IV)

W. Hogarth, A Harlots Progress (V)

W. Hogarth, A Harlots Progress VI)

 of telling the story in the form of

Sterne's psychological approach in this novel marked an advance in sophistication like

17 Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688-1763), French writer and playwright. He is

W. Hogarth, Before and After. 1736

(1741-1823) and the caricaturist Thomas

William Gilpin, Landscape with Ruined Castle.

 ticular proclaimed the return to nature, both in sub-

She seemed by the distraction of her air.

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

Do not adultery commit;

 Persian poet Khayyam. The poem brought to

Johnson (1867-1902), Arthur Symons (1865-1945) and A(lfred) E(dward) Housman

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

First attempts to bring the drama to

Toward the end of the century, the comedy of

 in 1895 for homosexual practices, both he and the

manner of Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild.

 and naive daughter of a merchant, marries a

2 One of the self-governing territories of the British Commonwealth.

3 See Glossary of Literary Terms.

It is at the awarding of the Turner Prize and the Tate

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,

In a Station of the Metro (Ezra Pound)

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

And makes a welcome of indifference.

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

All the dark rooms are moving

And all these images

There's something laughable about this,

They strap in doubt by hiding it, robust

A Martian Sends A Postcard Home

1963-1983, 1985; Gorse Fires, 1991; and The Ghost

John Wesley (1703-91) and his bro-

most important contributions came from anti-

William Blake (1757-1827) has been called a

of telling the story in the form of

ticular proclaimed the return to nature, both in sub-

Persian poet Khayyam. The poem brought to

in 1895 for homosexual practices, both he and the

and naive daughter of a merchant, marries a