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9.2 Literature

Realism

The dates for Realism as a movement vary, from as early as 1820 to as late as 1920. Although Realism is, in many ways, a rejection of Romanticism, it does address some of the same concerns about the industrial revolution that Wordsworth had expressed earlier. The passage of years increased the number of authors who noted the failures of industrialization, especially where pollution and quality of life were concerned. The British period of Victorianism (1837-1901) saw a gradual shifting from Romanticism to Realism. Poets such as Tennyson and Robert Browning are more properly transitional poets: products of Romanticism, but who express themselves in more realistic terms. It is important to remember not only that literary movements are not set in stone, but also that they are not always identified the same way by their own time period. When Charles Baudelaire wrote his seminal work, The Flowers of Evil (1857), he was praised as a poet of Romanticism by Gustave Flaubert, even though most modern scholars locate Baudelaire in Realism, and later poets of Modernism cite him as an early example of their own movement.

Romanticism was slowly but surely replaced with an attempt to see the world as it is. As later generations would note, it is difficult to represent reality in its entirety in one poem, play, short story, or novel. Early Realists tended to include more portrayals of middle class and/or lower class characters, who previously were not the main subjects of literature. In Europe, writers such as Ibsen wrote about the middle class specifically, using ordinary occurrences (at least, ordinary for the middle class experience) as the stuff of drama. Authors such as Henry James occasionally were criticized for novels in which very little seems to happen, since ordinary events are rarely as dramatic as the situations regularly found in Romanticism. In some cases, the attempt to be more realistic led to many works that focused on the negative aspects of humans, leaving out the positive aspects to avoid Romantic overtones.

As a general guideline, Realism tended to point out society’s problems (and the problems with the Romantic view), but offered observations, rather than suggested changes. Naturalism, a subset of Realism often treated as a separate movement, was regularly motivated by a desire to improve the world. Naturalism concerned itself with the poorest members of society in particular, and social change was the goal. Naturalism was criticized for being even more focused on the negative aspects of life than regular Realism. Emile Zola’s novel Germinal (1885) is perhaps the most famous example of Naturalism. In it, Zola depicts the lead-up to and aftermath of a coal miners’ strike with a stark realism that shocked readers. His unsentimental portrayal (in almost journalistic fashion) of events angered both conservatives (reluctant to admit the brutal working and living conditions of the poor) and socialists (unhappy that the workers were not Romantic heroes). Eventually, Modernism began in literature as Realism and Naturalism were ending, overlapping for a brief period of time. Perhaps not surprisingly, Modernism would claim to be more real than Realism—or, as the artist Georgia O’Keeffe said, “Nothing is less real than realism” (Haber), preferring abstract art as a way to arrive at a more complete image of (one type of) truth.

 

Written by Laura Getty World Literature Copyright © by Anita Turlington; Rhonda Kelley; Matthew Horton; Laura Ng; Kyounghye Kwon; Laura Getty; Karen Dodson; and Douglas Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Baudelaire

Like the work of so many transitional authors, Charles Baudelaire’s poetry cannot be classified easily. In 1861, Gustave Flaubert wrote a letter to Baudelaire complimenting him on his poetic style: “You have found a way to inject new life into Romanticism. You are unlike anyone else” (Flaubert). Baudelaire is believed to have coined the term “modernity” (modernité), which does not necessarily carry the same connotations as being a modern poet or a product of Modernism, focusing as it does on the urban experience. Nonetheless, Baudelaire was an early inspiration for later Modernist (and Symbolist) poets, even though his poetry is now most often classified as Realism. Baudelaire saw himself as a poet of the urban life in Paris, claiming that beauty can be found in the ugliest images and most depraved situations. His most famous book of poetry, provocatively titled The Flowers of Evil, was published in 1857. Audiences were shocked by Baudelaire’s directness in his poems about sex, death, and depression, to name a few of the topics. Baudelaire, his publisher, and his printer were charged with and found guilty of public indecency, and six of the poems were banned from subsequent editions (the ban on the six poems, which discuss lesbians and vampires, was not lifted in France until 1949). Baudelaire’s life was provocative as well; he cultivated the image of a “cursed poet” (poéte maudit) with a life of drugs, prostitutes, mistresses, and wasteful spending. He squandered roughly half of his inheritance in the first two years, so his family convinced a judge to remove control of his finances and give him an allowance. Despite the many setbacks in his life, Baudelaire’s literary fame grew as time passed. He continued to innovate in his writing, experimenting with prose poetry in his later years. Those poems were published posthumously in Paris Spleen (1869), adding to Baudelaire’s influence on Modernist writers.

Correspondences
License: Public Domain

In Nature’s temple living pillars rise,

And words are murmured none have understood.

And man must wander through a tangled wood

Of symbols watching him with friendly eyes.

As long-drawn echoes heard far-off and dim

Mingle to one deep sound and fade away;

Vast as the night and brilliant as the day,

Colour and sound and perfume speak to him.

Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child,

Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green;

Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild,

Have all the expansion of things infinite:

As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin,

Which sing the sense’s and the soul’s delight.

The Corpse
License: Public Domain

Remember, my Beloved, what thing we met

By the roadside on that sweet summer day;

There on a grassy couch with pebbles set,

A loathsome body lay.

The wanton limbs stiff-stretched into the air,

Steaming with exhalations vile and dank,

In ruthless cynic fashion had laid bare

The swollen side and flank.

On this decay the sun shone hot from heaven

As though with chemic heat to broil and burn,

And unto Nature all that she had given

A hundredfold return.

The sky smiled down upon the horror there

As on a flower that opens to the day;

So awful an infection smote the air,

Almost you swooned away.

The swarming flies hummed on the putrid side,

Whence poured the maggots in a darkling stream,

That ran along these tatters of life’s pride

With a liquescent gleam.

And like a wave the maggots rose and fell,

The murmuring flies swirled round in busy strife:

It seemed as though a vague breath came to swell

And multiply with life

The hideous corpse. From all this living world

A music as of wind and water ran,

Or as of grain in rhythmic motion swirled

By the swift winnower’s fan.

And then the vague forms like a dream died out,

Or like some distant scene that slowly falls

Upon the artist’s canvas, that with doubt

He only half recalls.

A homeless dog behind the boulders lay

And watched us both with angry eyes forlorn,

Waiting a chance to come and take away

The morsel she had torn.

And you, even you, will be like this drear thing,

A vile infection man may not endure;

Star that I yearn to! Sun that lights my spring!

O passionate and pure!

Yes, such will you be, Queen of every grace!

When the last sacramental words are said;

And beneath grass and flowers that lovely face

Moulders among the dead.

Then, O Beloved, whisper to the worm

That crawls up to devour you with a kiss,

That I still guard in memory the dear form

Of love that comes to this!

Spleen
License: Public Domain

The rainy moon of all the world is weary,

And from its urn a gloomy cold pours down,

Upon the pallid inmates of the mortuary,

And on the neighbouring outskirts of the town.

My wasted cat, in searching for a litter,

Bestirs its mangy paws from post to post;

(A poet’s soul that wanders in the gutter,

With the jaded voice of a shiv’ring ghost).

The smoking pine-log, while the drone laments,

Accompanies the wheezy pendulum,

The while amidst a haze of dirty scents,

—Those fatal remnants of a sick man’s room—

The gallant knave of hearts and queen of spades

Relate their ancient amorous escapades.

Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert was born on Dec. 12, 1821 in Rouen, France. He grew up in an affluent middle class family; his father was a respected surgeon. As a young man, Flaubert became friends in college with other students who despised the bourgeoisie, and began writing short stories and, eventually, novels that were critical of middle class values. Flaubert’s health problems (he suffered from epilepsy) forced him to give up plans to study the law, so he devoted his energies to writing literature. After his father died, he retired to a country house near Rouen, where he would spend the rest of his life. His masterpiece, Madame Bovary, is a psychological study of a woman desperate to escape a banal middle-class life. Flaubert is considered to be one of the greatest practitioners of literary realism in France. “A Simple Soul” is the study of the life of Felicite, a servant of Madame Aubain. Over the course of 50 years, she loses many people for whom she cares, and she ends her life caring for a rather difficult parrot named Loulou.
Consider while reading:

  1. What characteristics of realism do you see in this story?
  2. Analyze the character of Felicite. What kind of suffering and loss does she undergo in her life?
  3. What do you think Flaubert is saying about life through this character. How do you respond to her?
  4. What is the significance of the title of the short story?

Read an excerpt of “A Simple Soul” here: A Simple Soul – Gustave Flaubert – World Literature (nvcc.edu)

Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti was born the youngest child in a famous and accomplished family of artists, poets and scholars. Educated at home, she was by nature reserved and pious, like her mother. A devout evangelical Christian, she rejected suitors she considered not sufficiently serious in their faith. She suffered from neuralgia and angina for much of her life and lived very quietly, working for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and writing mostly devotional poetry. The long poem “Goblin Market” (1862) is Rossetti’s best known work and is markedly different in style and content from any of her other poems. Published in 1862 and illustrated by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the well-known Pre-Raphael poet, the poem was controversial from the first. While she informed her publisher that the poem was not intended for children, Rossetti often insisted in public that it was intended for children. The plot of the long narrative poem is very similar to a fairy tale: the brave and steadfast sister, Lizzie, saves her impulsive sister Laura from a deadly enchantment that has resulted from Laura succumbing to the temptation of eating goblin fruit. The poem’s dark undertones of sexuality, commodification, and religious ritual have fascinated readers since its publication.

After Death
License: Public Domain

The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept

And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may

Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,

Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.

He leaned above me, thinking that I slept

And could not hear him; but I heard him say:

“Poor child, poor child”: and as he turned away

Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.

He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold

That hid my face, or take my hand in his,

Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:

He did not love me living; but once dead

He pitied me; and very sweet it is

To know he still is warm though I am cold.

Up-Hill
License: Public Domain

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?

A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.

May not the darkness hide it from my face?

You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?

Those who have gone before.

Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?

They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?

Of labor you shall find the sum.

Will there be beds for me and all who seek?

Yea, beds for all who come.

Leo Tolstoy

This Russian writer was born in a privileged class and chose to abandon his privilege for a simple life. Beloved for the radical transformation in his work and in his life, he has become one of the most famous writers in literature. His writing reflects his life, in fact, in its simplicity and realism. As a young man in school, Tolstoy excelled in linguistics, and he master several languages. When he traveled through Europe, therefore, he was able to absorb the political and social climate through conversations with the common people he met. At home in Russia, Tolstoy sympathized with the serfs, who bore the brunt of fierce poverty brought about by war and famine. His experience in the Crimean War led to his great novel War and Peace (1869), a realistic and gruesome account of battle. Another of his great novels, Anna Karenina (1873-77), introduces the audience to the reality of relationship among corrupt human beings. Tolstoy continually treats realism as a means of admonishing others to moral righteousness.

In his mid-50’s, Tolstoy experienced a religious conversion that led to his abandoning the Russian Orthodox Church in favor of the simple faith and a purer form of Christianity. Instead of living in his estate house, he lived and worked alongside the peasants, worshipping with them instead of observing religious ritual. Of course, he was consequently excommunicated from the Orthodox Church. His change of lifestyle, however, endeared him to a wide audience in both Russia and Europe. He professed a religious system in which human beings are born pure, but are eventually and inevitably corrupted by society. His characters search for happiness in social success, but they only find peace in an objective and realistic acceptance of life. Tolstoy also became interested in educational theory; subsequently, he opened a school in his family manor house for the children of the country peasants who worked the land. He taught a method of inspiration that influenced educators in Europe and America, who modeled Tolstoy’s approach to learning in the early stages of public educational.

Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) demonstrates the self-centeredness and shallowness of people in high society. Ilyich makes all the right moves to gain wealth and social acceptance: he marries a well-connected woman he does not really love; he neglects his wife and children in favor of his career; and, as a judge, he treats the prisoners in his court with disdain and indifference. When Ilyich must come to terms with the reality of death, he learns that the only comfort he receives is from a servant who represents the naturalness of the common people.

Consider while reading:

  1. Describe Ivan Ilyich’s wife’s reaction to his illness and death.
  2. Describe his associates’ reactions to his death.
  3. What is the significance of the black bag?
  4. How does Ilyich finally let go of life and embrace death?

Read The Death of Ivan Ilyich here: The Death of Ivan Ilych – Leo Tolstoy – World Literature (nvcc.edu)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s life was every bit as eventful as the stories that he wrote. As a young man, he was sentenced to be executed by a firing squad for being part of a group that was considered subversive. He received a last-minute reprieve from the tsar, and Dostoyevsky instead spent four years doing hard labor in a Siberian prison camp. Those experiences informed his works; in addition to characters who face imminent death or time in Siberia, there are characters with epilepsy, gambling problems, bad luck in love, and ongoing poverty—all conditions that he faced. His fame began with his first novella, Poor Folk (1845), but he never made enough money from his writings to support his family in comfort. Despite all of these hardships, Dostoyevsky managed to become one of Russia’s greatest writers. Leo Tolstoy praised Dostoyevsky as the better writer, and his works influenced writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean-Paul Sartre, and William Faulkner, among many others (including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud). Dostoyevsky is considered the first existentialist novelist; for him, the psychology of the characters is the basis for realism (their experience of the world is the world). In novels such as Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), characters range from murderers to devout followers of the Russian Orthodox Church (Dostoyevsky’s own religious preference), all portrayed with psychological clarity. In Notes from Underground (1864), Dostoyevsky satirizes (among other things) the idea that scientific progress will create a utopian society. In Part One, the unnamed narrator, or Underground Man, may seem crazy at first, with what appear to be random and contradictory thoughts. In fact, the argument is constructed very carefully to demonstrate that human beings demand free will—and that they will give up everything to get it. In Part Two, which is an extended flashback, the Underground Man offers a practical demonstration of his theories in his own past. Of particular interest is his love-hate relationship with Romanticism; the narrator ultimately argues that all of us prefer Romanticism to real life (or Realism), simply because real life is not as satisfying as escapism.

Read “Notes From Underground” here: Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – World Literature (nvcc.edu)

Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen is called both “the father of Realism” and “the father of modern theater” in Europe, which is to say that he was the first playwright to use Realism on stage. Ibsen’s impact on theater makes him the most influential European playwright since Shakespeare. For Ibsen, art should be both challenging and a force for social change; his plays often expose what he saw as the moral hypocrisy of society. In particular, Ibsen’s plays peel back the veneer of respectability of the Norwegian middle class, revealing what happens when people only pretend to be moral. No group or ideology was safe from his criticism, and often there are no characters in a play who are completely without blame. For example, in An Enemy of the People (1882), the outright villains may be the businessmen who are poisoning the local water source, but the locals are equally at fault for refusing to believe the truth for selfish reasons, and the supposed hero of the story makes matters worse with his stubborn temper. In Ghosts (1881), Ibsen broke several taboos in his depiction of how a husband’s repeated infidelities lead to passing on syphilis to his unborn son. As guilty as the husband was, everyone from the pastor to the wife bear some responsibility for looking the other way, even after the husband’s death. Ibsen’s goals for A Doll’s House (1879) are every bit as broad as his other works. Nora and Torvald try to live up to their society’s ideals for how men and women should behave, but both of them become victims to society’s unrealistic expectations. The truth in this case is a lit match that leads to a metaphorical explosion. The fact that Nora and Torvald do not agree on the definition of what is right appears to be a product of which gender holds the power in society, rather than an actual gender issue. A Doll’s House does not offer a conventional happy ending, which so shocked audiences that some theaters actually rewrote the ending when staging it. The ending is also complicated by the fact that Nora’s rebellion against expectations has no guarantee of success in a society where women could not even borrow money without a man’s signature. A common theme in Ibsen’s plays, therefore, is that truth does not always set you free; in fact, sometimes the very best intentions are doomed to failure if society refuses to listen or change. It is a problem that Ibsen faced himself, since his efforts to influence change were invariably seen as shocking and controversial. It is a testament to his persistence and talent that audiences now expect the theater to address social issues.

Read A Doll’s House here: #10 – A doll’s house : Ghosts / With an introd. by William Archer – Full View | HathiTrust Digital Library

H.G. Wells

Herbert George Wells, generally referred to as H.G. Wells, was a prolific 19th-century British writer best known for his science fiction novels. He is often referred to, in fact, as the father of science fiction. Born into a lower middle class family, after his father’s shop failed and the family went bankrupt, Wells held a variety of jobs as an adolescent, including working as a teaching assistant, apprentice draper, and pharmacy clerk. He would later use these experiences in his novels as the basis for social satire. After eventually winning a scholarship to Imperial College, Wells trained as a scientist; he was particularly interested in Darwinian theory. Wells was also an avid Socialist and an active member of the Fabian Society, an organization that advocated a long-term approach to the eventual Socialist revolution. Throughout his life, Wells suffered from various physical ailments, including diabetes, and his life was further complicated by a series of romantic affairs and two failed marriages. Wells, who published 51 novels as well as dozens of stories, story collections, works of non-fiction, and essays, is also best known for his novels The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and When the Sleeper Awakes. An early science fiction novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) dramatizes the practice of vivisection, the practice of performing operations on live animals for the purpose of scientific research. Vivisection was a controversial topic in fin de siècle England, with a number of organizations formed to fight the practice as cruel and unethical. As the novel examines the ethics of vivisection, it also illustrates the possibility that civilization was spiraling downward into an increasingly degenerate state. Although Wells was an educated man and a scientist, he appears to be warning of the dangers that unregulated science can pose to the larger community.

Read The Island of Dr. Moreau here: The Island of Doctor Moreau – H.G. Wells – World Literature (nvcc.edu)

W.B. Yeats

The poetry of William Butler Yeats does not fit easily into any literary movement. He admired the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites, who embraced a combination of realistic techniques and symbolic meanings. Yeats’ poetry is full of myths and symbols, and his belief in a type of mysticism or spiritualism underlies much of his work (for Yeats, mysticism and the occult were real, not metaphorical). His earlier poems, such as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1890), could be straight out of Victorianism, but over time, Yeats began to incorporate more realistic elements into his poetry. In “Easter, 1916″—written right after the failed Easter Uprising for Irish independence—Yeats offers a critical (and mostly unflattering) view of the individuals who were executed, but recognizes how their deaths for the cause have transformed them into something greater than themselves (a new mythology). Despite that transformation, the narrator worries about whether it was a worthwhile sacrifice (in fact, by 1922, Yeats would be elected a senator in the new Republic of Ireland). Even though his poetry in later years would contain elements of Modernism, such as in the poem “The Second Coming” (1921), Yeats never abandoned the mystical and symbolic in his poetry, becoming a modern poet who disliked Modernism and refused to give up traditional elements (Albrecht; Longley). In his life, Yeats had the same tendency to be caught between (or among) movements. Although he was an Anglo-Irish Protestant born in Dublin, who was expected to support the English presence in Ireland, Yeats became an Irish Nationalist: partly out of patriotism, and partly because he fell in love with the actress Maud Gonne, a beautiful Nationalist. Yeats proposed to Gonne at least four times, and his (bitter) reaction to her rejection of him can be found in many poems, including some of those written after he married Georgiana Hyde-Lees, with whom he had two children. The poem “When You Are Old” (1895) is an early example of his obsession with Gonne. Besides writing poetry, Yeats was one of the founders of the Irish (now Abbey) Theater, for which he wrote many plays. When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, it was mostly for his plays, which the Nobel organization noted in 1969 is doubly ironic: not only are his poems more famous now, but also “Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize” (Frenz).

Easter 1916
License: Public Domain

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

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.

That woman’s days were spent

In ignorant good-will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers

When, young and beautiful,

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school

And rode our winged horse;

This other his helper and friend

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,

So sensitive his nature seemed,

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute they change;

A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute;

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,

And a horse plashed within it;

The long-legged moor-hens dive,

And hens to moor-cocks call;

Minute by minute they live:

The stone’s in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven’s part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child

When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in a verse –

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

When You Are Old
License: Public Domain

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty will love false or true;

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars

Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
License: Public Domain

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Modernism

The philosophical movement in art and literature that we call “Modernism” was characterized by the artist’s response to two powerful forces: the effects of industrialization and the aftermath of wars, particularly the Russian Revolution and World War I. Modernist writers and artists rejected the certainties of Victorian culture, particularly conventional religious faith and respect for authority. Perhaps the most fundamental underlying tenet of Modernism is that traditional ways of thinking about art, music, literature, government, religion, sex, civil rights, architecture, fashion, and other aspects of daily life should be questioned and re-invented. We can trace the roots of Modernism to writers, artists, poets and philosophers of the late 19th century. For example, Sigmund Freud’s theories on the importance of the unconscious, published between 1899 and 1930, certainly influenced writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot to explore the interior lives of their protagonists. Thus, the use of internal monologues and stream-of-consciousness techniques became an important characteristic of Modernist poetry and fiction. Frederic Nietzsche’s theory of “the will to power,” his argument that the primary driving force in humans is toward achievement and success, also influenced novelists and short story writers like Dorothy Richardson and Katherine Mansfield. Critics generally point to such writers and playwrights as August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, W.B. Yeats, Henry James, and Charles Baudelaire as exhibiting experimental techniques and themes that would come to be associated with Modernism. The Impressionist, Expressionist and Cubist movements in visual arts, encompassing artists like Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Vassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso also typify the spirit of resistance and a desire to create art that spoke to the contemporary condition of men and women in a rapidly changing world.

Modernist writers and poets responded to war, financial collapse, and social change by experimenting with traditional forms and conventions. Given the dramatic events they witnessed, these writers challenged the traditional Enlightenment view of human beings as primarily rational in texts that explored the chaotic workings of the human unconscious. Poets and writers alike made use of images, symbols, and allusions to mythology and Jungian archetypes. In the theatre as well, playwrights like Luigi Pirandello challenged the comfortable assumptions of audiences by breaking down the “fourth wall” of the play and encouraging members of the audience to think more critically about the action onstage. Reflecting a tumultuous time, the texts that you will read in this unit will challenge you to read deeply and carefully, but their innovations and the ideas they present are exciting and complex.

 

Written by Anita Turlington World Literature Copyright © by Anita Turlington; Rhonda Kelley; Matthew Horton; Laura Ng; Kyounghye Kwon; Laura Getty; Karen Dodson; and Douglas Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was born into the affluent and intellectual family of Sir Leslie and Julia Stephen. She was one of eight children; both of her parents had been widowed. Julia Stephen brought three children to her second marriage, Sir Leslie brought one, and they had four children together. Sir Leslie Stephen was a writer, critic, philosopher, and scholar. Virginia and her siblings grew up in an intellectually vibrant atmosphere, with access to their father’s extensive library and frequent visits by many of the most important thinkers and writers of the late Victorian period. Woolf suffered a number of traumas as a child: her mother died when she was thirteen; one of her half-brothers sexually abused her; her half-sister died when she was fifteen. When Woolf was in her twenties, she lost both her father and a brother to illness. Woolf herself began in adolescence to suffer severe bouts of depression; in adulthood, these tended to regularly occur after she had completed a book. She attempted suicide more than once while depressed; sadly, she did finally kill herself in 1941, when she weighted her pockets with stones and drowned herself in a river near her home.

Woolf, her siblings, and her husband were extremely influential in the Modernist movement. Together with her sister, Vanessa, and her brother Adrian, Woolf began holding intellectual salons in their home after the death of her father. Their gatherings of writers, intellectuals, and avant garde artists became known as “The Bloomsbury Group.” The group included such notable figures as Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes. “A Room of One’s Own” (1929), a lengthy essay generally now published alone, is actually a compilation of two lectures on “Women and Fiction” that Woolf delivered to women undergraduates at Cambridge. In the essay, Woolf comments on the need for women who aspire to write to have an independent income and a private space in which to be alone. Additionally, Woolf includes a speculative section on “Shakespeare’s Sister” as she laments the absence of a canon of women writers. Woolf emphasizes the need for a truly androgynous voice as the way forward for twentieth century literature.

Read A Room of One’s Own here: A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf (1929) (wordpress.com)

James Joyce

James Joyce, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, was born in Dublin into an affluent Irish family. Over the course of his childhood, however, his father’s drinking and a series of job losses caused his family to lose both income and social status. The eldest of ten children, Joyce was singled out for his academic potential and attended Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College, both Jesuit schools. He later graduated from University College, Dublin, where he had already begun publishing essays. For most of his adult life, James lived as an expatriate, travelling in Europe but living mostly in Trieste, Zurich and Paris in the company of Nora Barnacle, a young woman with whom he eloped in 1904 and eventually married. Initially, he supported Nora and himself teaching English. Joyce and Nora had two children, Giorgio and Lucia. Lucia spent most of her adult life institutionalized for schizophrenia and estranged from her mother. Joyce, who struggled with health problems related to his drinking and to eye problems, died in 1941 of complications from surgery for a perforated ulcer. He was 59.

Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses (1922), is written as a modern version of Homer’s Odyssey and tells the story of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, making his way around Dublin. His other prominent works include the experimental and obscure Finnegans Wake (1939), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and the short story collection Dubliners (1914). Like T.S. Eliot, Joyce is known for his highly allusive style in Ulysses; the book requires a separate handbook to explain its complex structure, the texts it parallels, and its many, many literary references. As a modernist and avant garde writer, Joyce is credited, along with Virginia Woolf, with pioneering the use of stream of consciousness as a literary technique.

Like the rest of the short stories collected in Dubliners, “The Dead” was written when Joyce was in his twenties, but it was not published until later because of a long feud between Joyce and his publisher over concerns about libel. The collection presents a view of ordinary people in Dublin during a period characterized by intense nationalistic struggles and a renaissance of Irish culture. The thematic structure of the collection depicts an individual’s movement from childhood to maturity. “The Dead” is the longest story in the collection and is sometimes published separately as a novella. It is generally considered to be the most complex and haunting story in the collection. Thematically, the story addresses contemporary concerns about Irish national and cultural identity, memory, and loss. The story is set during a Christmas party at the home of Kate and Julia Morkin, the aunts of the story’s protagonist, Gabriel Conroy. As the narrative unfolds, Gabriel gives a dinnertime speech, confronts an Irish nationalist schoolteacher, and has a final emotional scene with his wife Gretta, who has been sentimentally reminded of the tragic death of her first love.

Read “The Dead” here: The Dead – James Joyce – World Literature (nvcc.edu)

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born in Prague, in what was the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now the Czech Republic. He was from a German-speaking Jewish family; he could speak Czech, but he wrote his literary works in German. After earning a law degree, Kafka worked in insurance, which paid the bills while he tried to find the time to write. Only a fraction of what Kafka wrote has survived, since he burned most of his works during his lifetime. Although he did publish a few stories, Kafka left instructions to burn the remaining works after his death. His executor, Max Brod, published the manuscripts instead, and Kafka became famous posthumously. Many readers have noticed similarities between the author and some of his characters—specifically, the ones who have tedious jobs, a profound distrust of bureaucracy, a fear of authority, a feeling of powerlessness, and an entire set of Freudian complexes, especially where fathers are concerned. The stories can be viewed through the lenses of Existentialism, Surrealism, religious parables, psychoanalysis, and social criticism, to name a few. The terrifying power of bureaucracy is perhaps the most famous theme in Kafka’s works, leading to the term “Kafkaesque” to describe being trapped in nightmarish and surreal situations (most famously in his work The Trial, in which the protagonist is never told what his crime was). While Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) shares that feeling of helplessness, it is also full of his unique brand of tragi-comic humor. As much pity as one might feel for Gregor, the novel’s protagonist, there is something inherently ridiculous about his calm acceptance of his transformation into a giant cockroach-like bug. The fact that Gregor’s biggest concern at that moment is being late to his job is both sad and funny: an indictment not only of bureaucracy’s dehumanizing effects, but also of the human tendency to rationalize the absurdities of life.

Read Metamorphosis here: The Project Gutenberg eBook of Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

T.S. Eliot

Academy in St. Louis, and went on to study at Harvard. After finishing his bachelor’s degree, he began his graduate studies. During this time, he focused on Symbolist poetry. He tried to study abroad in Germany in 1914, but left the country early due to the threat of war. Instead, he went to England, where he met Ezra Pound, who would have a profound influence on Eliot’s work. While Eliot did occasionally return to the United States, he settled in England and eventually became a citizen of the country. It was Pound who helped Eliot publish “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) in Poetry. The poem established Eliot’s reputation as an experimental, intellectual writer. Eliot possessed an amazing versatility. By the time he was 40, he had published over 20 books, which included volumes of poetry, criticism, and plays. His most notable work is The Waste Land (1922), which explores the disenfranchisement and ennui felt by the post-World War I, Lost Generation. The work is experimental in its fracture perspectives, play with tone and language, and disrupted narrative. His criticism, most specifically works from The Sacred Wood, such as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920), constructs a comprehensive literary theory, where the poet is not merely repeating popular ideas, but is interacting with an entire body of literary history, starting with Homer. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1948, he was considered one of the most influential writers in the English language.

Read The Waste Land here: The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot – World Literature (nvcc.edu)

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen is one of the most respected poets of World War I, which is an impressive feat for someone who wrote almost all of his poems between August 1917 and September 1918. Many previous British poets had focused on the glory of war. Owen’s experiences in the trenches, however, shaped his much grimmer view of war. Along with his friend and fellow British poet Siegfried Sassoon, Owen wrote about the realities of war in a way that was unfamiliar to audiences of the time. The title of his poem “Dulce et Decorum est” is a reference to a quotation by the Latin writer Horace: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (roughly translated, “It is sweet and proper to die for your country”). In the poem, Owen challenges that view with a description of a poisonous gas attack on soldiers in the trenches. In “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” Owen replaces heroic songs and music with the terrifying sounds of battle, and he explores the dread of waiting for something to happen in the poem “Exposure.” In “A Parable of the Old Men and the Young,” Owen rewrites the ending of the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac, implicitly questioning the motives of the older men who send young men to their deaths. Owen’s poetry is remarkable not only for its content, but also for its use of half rhyme and assonance instead of full rhyme: a style that he is credited with popularizing. His rejection of traditional poetic form and reaction to the horrors of World War I are textbook examples of Modernism in poetry. Despite both his feelings about the war and being wounded badly enough that he was sent home for recovery, Owen insisted that it was his duty to return to the fighting, in part to continue to record the experiences of the common soldier. One week before the signing of the Armistice that ended the war, Owen was killed on the battlefield.

Anthem for Doomed Youth
License: Public Domain

What passing-bells 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 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 glimmers 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.

Dulce et Decorum est
License: Public Domain

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. All went lame, all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Video URL: https://youtu.be/qB4cdRgIcB8?si=TDcXQtiM5FQXxSyJ

Seamus Heaney

Born in 1939, Heaney grew up in a large Roman Catholic family on a farm in County Derry, near Belfast, in Northern Ireland. His rural upbringing provided him with an appreciation for the small details of rural life and for the land; these qualities would come to mark his poetry vividly. While he lived in a largely Protestant area that experienced the violent “troubles” between Catholic and Protestant militants, Heaney never advocated strongly for the Catholic cause in his poetry, an omission for which he was sometimes criticized. Heaney began publishing poetry as a student at Queen’s University in Belfast, but his career as a poet really began with the 1966 publication of his first book of poems, Death of a Naturalist. Over the course of Heaney’s career, he taught English at a number of Irish colleges, was Poet in Residence at Harvard University, and was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. After moving to Dublin, in The Republic of Ireland, in 1972, Heaney wrote his two arguably most political volumes of poetry, North (1975) and Field Work (1979). One of his best known and loved volumes, The Haw Lantern, was published after his mother’s death in 1987. Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, cited by the committee for his “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” In 1999, he published a critically lauded translation of Beowulf. In 2006, he suffered a minor stroke; he documented this experience in his 2010 collection of poems Human Chain.

The Haw Lantern

Copyright Seamus Heaney

The wintry haw is burning out of season,
crab of the thorn, a small light for small people,
wanting no more from them but that they keep
the wick of self-respect from dying out,
not having to blind them with illumination.

But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost
it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes
with his lantern, seeking one just man;
so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw
he holds up at eye-level on its twig,
and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,
its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,
its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.

The Tollman Man

Copyright Seamus Heaney

I Someday I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eyelids,
His pointed skin cap.

In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,

Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,

She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body,

Trove of the turfcutters’
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.

II

I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate

The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,

Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.

III

Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.

Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Walt Whitman was born on Long Island, New York. His family moved to Brooklyn in 1823, when young Whitman was four. He attended public school, but left when he was 12 to learn the printing trade. At this time, he also worked as a reporter for the Long Island Patriot. Due to a fire in the printing district of New York, Whitman was forced to seek employment as a rural school teacher. While he was like by students, he often clashed with those in charge of educational system. He returned to New York in 1841. By 1846, he became the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, an important newspaper. However, Brooklyn Daily Eagle fired Whitman two years later, due to his growing political activism and support of abolishing slavery. Afterwards, he worked in New Orleans as the editor the Crescent City newspaper for a brief period of time. His trip there cemented his support for abolishing slavery. Upon his return to New York, Whitman attended lectures by prominent thinkers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s work was particularly inspirational for Whitman, who embraced Emerson’s idea of Transcendentalism in his work “Song of Myself” from Leaves of Grass (1855-1892). During the Civil War started, Whitman served as a nurse. After the war, Whitman enjoyed some success for his work on Abraham Lincoln and from his published poetry. However, his writing was experimental in nature, and often contained erotic elements that garnered him harsh criticism. His most influential collection is Leaves of Grass, which he continued to revise and republish until his death. From that work, “Song of Myself” is seen as the hallmark piece. In this poem, Whitman introduced his free verse style that would transform American poetry. He experiments with repetition and catalogues to communicate his ideas. “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking” appeared in the 1860 collection of Leaves of Grass. The poem uses nature imagery to document the speaker’s transformation into a poet. Whitman focuses on nature and brotherhood in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” which appeared in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. The poem expresses Whitman’s concept of his feeling of oneness with the world that transcends time. One of his more traditional works in terms of meter and form is “O Captain, My Captain,” which first appeared in the 1865 edition of Leaves of Grass. Easily Whitman’s most popular poem in his lifetime, this elegy conceptualizes President Abraham Lincoln as the captain of ship. Whitman’s continued process of refining and reinventing his poems cemented his reputation as an influential literary and cultural figure in America.

Read Whitman’s excepts here

Copyright: World Literature Copyright © by Anita Turlington; Rhonda Kelley; Matthew Horton; Laura Ng; Kyounghye Kwon; Laura Getty; Karen Dodson; and Douglas Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Considered by many scholars to be the most distinguished writer of the 20th century, Faulkner was born in Oxford, Mississippi in 1897. He is mostly known for his novels and short stories, set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. Both his novels and short stories confront the complexities of Southern culture, shaped by its heritage of slavery, the loss of the American Civil War, and continued struggles with racism through Jim Crow laws and the atrocities committed by the Ku Klux Klan. He is also keenly aware of the close ties of Southerners to the land and the ways that the old agrarian values continued to shape ideas about class in the South well into the 20th century. Faulkner draws on family histories as well as aspects of Southern gothic ghost stories in his novels, and most of his works explore the complex and troubled mix of race and sexuality in the South.
Most of his works were published in the 1920s and 30s, among which “A Rose for Emily” (1930) and “Barn Burning” (1939) are included here, but he was primarily known in America as a Southern writer until he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1942. His Nobel Prize acceptance speech is often reprinted for his optimistic declaration of the importance of art. After decrying the anxiety and pessimism that he felt characterized the literature of the period, Faulkner declared that humanity would prevail because of the strength of the human spirit: “The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by . . . reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
Consider while reading:

  1. In “A Rose for Emily,” the story of Emily’s life and death is told through the voice of the townspeople. How does this technique affect the story and what we know and don’t know about Emily? How does it affect the timeline of the story, which is not told in chronological order?
  2. What elements in the story can be considered “gothic”?
  3. What is the significance of the “rose” in the title of the story? What connotations of the word are meaningful in the context of Emily’s life?

A Rose for Emily

License: Copyright William Faulkner

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World Literature Copyright © by Anita Turlington; Rhonda Kelley; Matthew Horton; Laura Ng; Kyounghye Kwon; Laura Getty; Karen Dodson; and Douglas Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

A leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, Langston Hughes developed an international reputation for his poetry. Hughes spent his childhood in the Midwest; he was born in Joplin, Missouri, but he also lived in Lincoln, Illinois and Cleveland, Ohio. As a young man, he began a college education at Columbia University, but withdrew to travel as a merchant seaman. He eventually completed his education at Lincoln University.

Hughes is particularly known for his perceptive portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote prolifically and in a variety of genres–poems, plays, short stories, and novels. A significant feature of his work is the influence of jazz on his poetry, particularly in Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). Hughes also mentored other young poets and writers like Ralph Ellison. In 1926, he articulated the purpose of young black writers and poets in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”: “The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful . . . If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.”

Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice Hall, 1973) that Hughes “differed from most of his predecessors among black poets … in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people.” Hughes considered himself to be, indeed, a “people’s poet” who elevated the black aesthetic while confronting racism and stereotypes in his work.

Consider while reading:

  1. In the poem “The Weary Blues,” what connection does Hughes suggest about the relationship between blues music and the experience of African Americans?

The Weary Blues

By Langston Hughes
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway. . . .
He did a lazy sway. . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues” from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Copyright © 2002 by Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates, Inc.

Source: The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (University of Missouri Press (BkMk Press), 1987)

Langston Hughes

1901 –1967

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Knopf and Vintage Books. Copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

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INDS 2390: Humanities in the World Copyright © by Karina Stiles-Cox is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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