英美小说简史.doc

Part Two The 19th Century Novel

Historical Background: two opposing classes—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and the
contradiction between them;Chartist Movement; colonies set up, British Empire.

Schools of Literature and Famous Novelists:

1. Classicism ( literary creation following some laws and rules drawn from Greek and Roman works: the unities of time,place and action; prose being precise,direct and flexible;norm and decorum)

Jane Austen (1775-1817): A classical writer, she displays her realistic vision in classical style; she solved the problem of the relation of art to life, wrote of ordinary things and common characters; her themes are about love and marriage of the young people; her female exquisite touch has no match. Her novel is called “novel of manners”.
Pride and Prejudice: It shows her general view on love and marriage. Through several types of marriage, she explains her idea of being rational in love and marriage.
Sense and Sensibility: ladies and gentlemen,love and marriage.

2. Romanticism ( emphasis on emotion,individuality,subjectivity,freedom,imagination,exaggeration,
primitivism,celebration of natural beauty and simple life)

Walter Scott (1771-1832): A romantic, the founder and great master of the historical novel.His novels are 0ften collectively called "the Waverley Novels" In historical novel,principal character and event are historical and minor ones are fictitious; combination of historical facts and romantic imagination; the influence of his romantic historical novel has spread all over Europe and America, and has remained one of the most popular literary types right up to the present. Hollywood owes a great debt to Scott. So does the world literature.

Ivanhoe: A novel about the history of England. Its central conflict is the struggle of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry against their oppressors the Norman lords. The minor conflict is the contradiction between Richard I and his brother Prince John. There are vivid descriptions of various strata of people.

The Heart of Midlothian: A novel on the history of Scotland, is set in1736. Its central situation is the trial of Effie,where the story reaches its climax. It involves clashes of opposing cultures and differing values,and also involves the conflict between Scotland and England. Through the different roads the two sisters Jennie and Effie take and their fates, the author tries to show a truth that guilt, though it may attain temporal splendourur, can never give real happiness; and that the paths of virtue, though seldom those of worldly greatness, are always those of pleasantness and peace. The heroine Jennie is of honesty,courage, fortitude,and stern conscience. She is the representative of Scottish national disposition.

3.Critical Realism: (sympathy for the laboring people; exposure and criticism of the social evil; failure to see correct way out.)

1).Charles Dickens: the greatest novelist of the 19th century; the representative of English critical realism, his remark “civilization and barbarism walked this boastful Island forward”; good at depicting shabby genteel, the misery and sufferings of the common people
.
period one: naïve youthful optimism with humor and wishful thinking. Olive Twist: attack on the dehumanizing workhouse system and the dark, criminal underworld life; happy ending-his optimistic belief.
Period two: excitement and irritation. David Copperfield

Period three: intensifying pessimism. A Tale of Two Cities: with French Revolution as background; characters: Dr. Manette, Madame Defarge, St Evremonde; exposure of the cruel aristocracy, respect for those benevolent people, claim for social reform and humanity; where there is oppression there is resistance
Features of C. Dickens’s novels:
1. critical realism:
2. different thoughts shown at different periods:
3. writing technique: well-designed interesting plot; character—individuality; simplicity of language; humour style; dramatic exaggeration; detailed description; unique ability in writing poor children.

2).W.M.Thackeray: his satirical portrayal of the upper strata of society.

Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero: a classical example of social satire; snobbery and hypocrisy of the English bourgeois and aristocratic society.
Characters: Becky Sharp—an adventuress, her only aspiration in life is to gain wealth and position by any means.
Amelia Sedley—a tame, sentimental but useless woman.

A comparison between Thackeray and Dickens:
They are contemporaries, both belong to critical realism.
They are different in some aspects. Dickens: from an impoverished clerk family, good at describing shabby genteel, individuality(men),with humour, simplicity of language. Thackeray: from a rich family, good at describing upper classes, species (man), with satire, his language is somewhat hard to understand
"Dust lies thicker on Thackeray than on Dickens"

3).The Bronte Sisters: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne (Agnes Grey)
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre: Jane Eyre-- a new type of woman: rebellion, independence, individuality, pursuit of genuine love and equality with man.
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights: The story is one of oppression and rebellion, of stormy weather and stormy passion. Theme: love, revenge.

A comparison between Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights:
Similarities: critical realism; symbolic method; Gothic quality; romantic style; contrast; local color; both heroines’ rebellious spirit against oppression and injustice; their pursuit of true love and their being frankly violent in their love; both heroes—rough, proud, mysterious, discourteous.
Differences: Jane Eyre: autobiographical, out of life experiences; in structure—chronological order; a single narrator, story told in the first person; language—concise and full of simplicity; Jane is plain in looks, her struggle and sacrifice, and her happiness in the end.
Wuthering Heights: written out of imagination; in structure—flashbacks, two narrators in first person telling stories about others; poetic language; Catherine is a beauty, her momentary vanity of wishes for comfortable life, and her tragic ending--death.
Reasons for the similarities and differences: authoress’ life experience, reading experience, individuality.

4).Mrs. Gaskell: One of the first English writers to describe the class struggle between the workers and the capitalists.
Mary Barton: a realistic novel giving a picture of the class struggle in the period of Chartism.

5).George Eliot: realism with the tenets of naturalisml; her emphasis on morality and religion; her weakness: idealism that ”the religion of humanity” could solve all the contradictions of social life.

The Mill on the Floss: It traces the fate and tragedy of a young girl named Maggie, whose noble aspirations run counter to the philistine narrow mindedness of the people around her. The author's moral principle is shown.

6).Thomas Hardy: realism plus the tenets of naturalism; his Wessex Novels--Novels of Character and Environment;
his realistic picture of the destruction of peasantry under capitalist conditions. He brought to the English novel a sense of tragic pessimism. Chance, accident, coincidence determine the outcome of human effort. The traits and actions of an individual play only a small role in his tragedy. A man’s destiny depends on the fall of the dice, and the dice are loaded against him. His novels are in certain degree marred by his pessimism and fatalism. Works including The Return of the Native,…

Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a pure Woman Faithfully Portrayd
The tragical life story of a beautiful country girl. The story is the symbol of the disintegration of the English peasantry.
Characters: Tess-- the daughter of a poor villager, daughter of Nature.
Alec-- son of a rich merchant, a capitalist
Clare-- a hypocrite, a snob

Jude the Obscure, The tragical life of a young Wessex villager. A story of “ a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit” and “a contrast between the ideal life a man wished to lead and the squalid real life he was fated to lead”

Part Three The 20th Century Novel
Historical Background: monopoly capitalism; workers-class movements; two world wars; British colonies independence, the decline of the British Empire.

1. Realism
1).John Galsworthy: a humanist social novelist, Nobel prize winner.
The Forsyte Saga: a trilogy including The Man of property, In Chancery, To Let.
The Man of Property:
Plot—the triangular love relationship of Soames Forsyte, a capitalist, his wife Irene, and Bosinney, an architect. Soames regards his wife merely as a piece of his property….Irene and Bosinney are in love…

Theme—the conflict between the search for spiritual understanding and happiness and the search for material gains; the oppressive nature of the property instinct of the bourgeois, which stifles the natural and justifiable human desire for art and beauty.

A Modern Comedy: the second trilogy, it continues the Forsyte story.

All in all the Forsyte series is the early 20th century British answer to Balzac’s The Human Comedy. It is the chronicler of the British society from the 1880s to the 1930s through the history of one family over three generations.

2). Joseph Conrad:
Life: a sea novelist; a Pole by birth; longed to go to sea from an early age…a sailor, a mate…became a British citizen at the age of 29; a rare example of one who hardly knew any English until he was 21 but who later became a well-known novelist in English.

Style: (1) Realism clothed with romantic glamour and adventure, symbolism and impressionism. His melodramatic experiences at sea and his journeys in strange, out-of-the- way places. His greatest skill lies in his capacity to evoke an atmosphere, whether of a typhoon at sea or of the sultry mystery of the jungle. (2) The breaks with the conventional time-codes, generally he started his novel in the middle. Narration from the point of view of several persons. Story within story. (3) All his characters suffer from a sense of isolation, and their greatest need is for fellowship. Ironically, the understanding or opportunity comes too late. (4) language: florid, poignant and exotic-flavored

Lord Jim s greatest novel, a young man’s struggle against his own weakness.
Plot—Jim was the chief mate on board the Patna loaded with 800 Malayans pilgrims for Mecca. In a stormy night the white officers thought the ship was sinking. They –all save Jim started to launch a lifeboat. They begged him to help them. He stood still, not knowing what to do. Finally the little boat was lowered. At the last moment Jim jumped to safety. What happened to Jim next was related by an observer, Marlow. He hated his companions and himself, bitterly. The ship did not sink. A French gunboat noticed her drifting without direction and brought her into port. The inquiry resulted. The officers had conducted themselves “in utter disregard of their plain duty” and they were deprived of their certificates. Other officers had escaped, only Jim had the moral courage to face the Court of Inquiry. Jim also lost his certificate as mate. It is a great blow to his personal dignity. A sense of “fall” always haunted his mind. Jim was sent to a remote trading station in Patusan where he won respect and affection of the natives and became Lord Jim. Then the pirate Brown and his gang thieves came to plunder the village, but they were held off and finally beleaguered. After Jim had spoken to Brown, he decided to let them go and begged the chief Doramin to spare them, pledging his own life against their departure. But Brown betrayed Jim’s trust and killed the chief’s son and many villagers. Jim’s lover Jewel asked him to run away, but he refused to escape and was willing to be shot dead by the chief. He died with self-esteem and in personal triumph for his moral principle.

Theme—through Jim’s life-long search for his personal moral integrity and atonement for his disgraceful behavior, and through Marlow’s perspectives while seeking the essence among the multiplied meanings of Jim both as hero and coward, Conrad tried to show the complexity of human nature and many-sidedness of our moral existence.
Artistry—(1)impressionistic technique combined with symbolism; (2)experiment with the multi-point of view.

Heart of Darkness: one of the best novelettes of 20th century.
Plot—the narrator Marlow made a long journey to join the steamboat, which he would command on an ivory-collecting journey into the interior of Congo, Africa. On his way and at the inner station, he and his men met with all sorts of adventures and he heard a lot about a Mr. Kurtz who, as an educated and civilized white man, in charge of a trading post, had used his knowledge and his gun to reign over this and who was as savage as the natives now. When Marlow finally saw Mr. Kurtz, Kurtz was a dying man. The last word Kurtz said to Marlow was “The horror! The horror!”

Theme—It was a symbolic journey into the dark places of the soul. In Congo, Europeans were as savage and primitive as the natives, if not more so. It was also a story of spiritual breakdown. Marlow went to Congo armed with imperialist illusions. But gradually he discovered, like Kurtz, what he believed before was all shams. He saw not only the horrors of colonialism and imperialism, but also the horrors of the human heart.

Artistry—(1) the frame structure; (2) extensive use of symbolism; (3) a parody of the Holy Grail quest;(4) contrast: Kurtz’s earlier idealism and his later barbarism, the white and the cannibals, white and black, light and darkness, civilization and wilderness.

3). E.M.Forster: a novelist who tried to connect people of different backgrounds and different cultures.

A Passage to India: his last novel and his masterpiece.
Plot—The story was set in India under the British rule…Aziz, an Indian Muslim doctor; Mrs. Moore the elderly English lady; Adela Quested , an English girl…Mr. Fielding, Aziz’s former English friend…Caves of Marabar…withdrawal of the charge, yet antagonism arose between the two races…the clearing of misunderstanding, the relationship between English and Indians.