Teaching Later British Literature: A Thematic Approach

By Albert D. Pionke

Designed for both first-time teachers of survey courses in later British literature and more experienced instructors seeking a new way to approach familiar material, ''Teaching Later British Literature' seeks to recapture the interconnectedness within and among Romantic, Victorian and Modern literature. Focusing on some of the defining historical, intellectual and artistic preoccupations that individual works explore in common with their literary peers, the book also invites teachers to help their students to rethink the criteria by which periods are defined and to reconceive the relationship between texts written within these periods. 'Teaching Later British Literature' is suitable for reading alongside any of the anthologies used in courses that survey the second half of British literature—from the advanced high school classroom to the lower-division university lecture hall—and seeks to complement their already robust content by offering teachers a synthetic and highly adaptable framework for guiding students through British literary history from the 1780s through the 1940s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783089369

Book preview

Teaching Later British Literature

Teaching Later British Literature

A Thematic Approach

Albert D. Pionke

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2019

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© Albert D. Pionke 2019

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-934-5 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-934-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part I English Romanticism

1.Introduction

I.Periodizing the Romantics

II.Historicizing the Romantics

III.Canonizing the Romantics

IV.William Hazlitt’s My First Acquaintance with Poets as an Introduction to English Romanticism

2.Theme One: Revolution

I.Thematic Introduction

II.Romantic Responses to the French Revolution

III.Romantic Poetry and Revolution

3.Theme Two: Individualism

I.Thematic Introduction

II.Individualism in Blake’s Works on Religion

III.Individualism and Gender

IV.The Romantic Outsider

4.Theme Three: Poetry and Poetics

I.Thematic Introduction

II.Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads

III.Shelley’s Defence of Poetry

IV.Romantic Poetry about Poetry

5.Theme Four: Nature

I.Thematic Introduction

II.Nature in First-Generation Romantic Poems

III.Nature in Second-Generation Romantic Poems

IV.Nature in Clare’s Pastoral Poesy

6.Theme Five: Orientalism

I.Thematic Introduction

II.Scots Orient in Burns’s Tam o’Shanter

III.Coleridge’s Supernatural Orientalism

IV.Orientalism and Old China

Schedule of Readings

Suggestions for Further Reading

Part II English Victorianism

7.Introduction

I.Periodizing the Victorians

II.Historicizing the Victorians

III.Canonizing the Victorians

IV.Thomas Carlyle’s Signs of the Times as an Introduction to English Victorianism

8.Theme One: Democracy

I.Thematic Introduction

II.Guardianship Democracy in Past and Present

III.Radical Democracy, the Dramatic Monologue and The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point

IV.Preventing the Tyranny of the Majority in On Liberty

9.Theme Two: Gender

I.Thematic Introduction

II.Literary Reflections on Womanliness

III.Extremes of Manliness in the Poetry of Robert Browning

IV.Gendered Complications in Jenny

10.Theme Three: Culture

I.Thematic Introduction

II.The Epic of the Present in Aurora Leigh

III.Arnoldian Criticism and the Culturing of Art

IV.Criticism as Art in The Renaissance

V.From Theory into Practice: Andrea del Sarto

11.Theme Four: The Condition of England

I.Thematic Introduction

II.Factory Reform through Poetry

III.The Condition of England as Melancholy Madness

IV.Medievalism as a Response to Industrialization

12.Theme Five: Empire

I.Thematic Introduction

II.To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

III.National Chauvinism in The Englishman

IV.Of Markets and Goblins

V.Mirrors of Empire in The Man Who Would Be King

Schedule of Readings

Suggestions for Further Reading

Part III English Modernism

13.Introduction

I.Periodizing the Moderns

II.Historicizing the Moderns

III.Canonizing the Moderns

IV.Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown as an Introduction to English Modernism

14.Theme One: Alienation/Disillusionment

I.Thematic Introduction

II.Alienation in Three Poems by Thomas Hardy

III.Alienation and Ireland in Yeats and Joyce

IV.Modern Hollow Men

15.Theme Two: Consciousness Formation

I.Thematic Introduction

II.The Reader as J. Alfred’s Analyst

III.The Psychology of Feminism in A Room of One’s Own

16.Theme Three: Art for Art’s Sake

I.Thematic Introduction

II.Imagism

III.Criticism, History and the Impersonality of Tradition

IV.Auden on Breughel on Icarus

V.Lawrence, the Novel and Decadence

17.Theme Four: Technology

I.Thematic Introduction

II.Futurism

III.The War to End All Poetry

IV.Auden’s Ironic Hindsight

18.Theme Five: Imperial Decline

I.Thematic Introduction

II.The Breakdown of Empire in Heart of Darkness

III.The Consequences of Empire in Heart of Darkness

IV.The Question of Racism in Heart of Darkness

Schedule of Readings

Suggestions for Further Reading

Index

PREFACE

Teaching Later British Literature: A Thematic Approach is designed primarily for the many thousands of teachers tasked each year with leading survey courses in later English literature (roughly 1789–1945). Both new teachers facing the intimidating task of distilling over 150 years of literary history into a single semester, and experienced teachers looking for new ways to approach familiar material will find ideas they can use in building their syllabuses and structuring their daily lectures and discussions. It may be that others seeking to refresh their memories or enhance their more casual readings will also find material of use to them. Certainly all readers are welcome.

In keeping with the format and contents of the relatively small number of widely available anthologies used in such survey courses, this book divides later English literature into three literary historical periods—Romantic, Victorian and Modern—and uses as textual examples works that are often included in these anthologies. The whole idea of literary periodicity has been the object of sustained critique by literary and cultural theorists since at least the 1990s, but the practical advantages of dividing literature into discrete times and movements has proven too convenient, and the textbook publishing market too well entrenched, to allow for much change on this front in such introductory courses. Since the aim of this book is, when they compete, to favor clarity over controversy, it preserves the traditional literary periods, even as it invites readers to rethink the criteria by which periods are defined, and reconceive the relationship between texts written within these periods.

Although it retains the convenient shorthand of literary historical periods, this book does depart substantially from the majority of anthologies by deemphasizing personalities. All anthologies worth their salt provide expansive biographical headnotes for individual authors and group all of the works written by those authors under their respective headnotes. Authors are typically arranged in chronological order by date of birth, and their works usually appear in the order of composition and/or first publication. Most survey courses then faithfully reproduce this format by leading students through a series of classes, each devoted to the works of a single author. This approach has many advantages, not least that of ensuring that courses enjoy a degree of uniformity that allows for the transfer of credits between institutions. One conspicuous disadvantage of proceeding in this fashion, however, is that the intellectual distinctiveness of the period can be lost in the details of particular writers, who tend to seem rather disconnected from one another and from the historical moment of which they are a part. Put another way, and allowing for the dynamism of individual instructors and the devotion of individual readers, the knowledge gained is often enumerative rather than synthetic.

This book seeks to recapture the interconnectedness within and among the three periods treated here by focusing on some of the defining historical, intellectual and artistic preoccupations that individual works classified as Romantic, Victorian or Modern explore in common with their literary peers. Each period is identified by its preoccupation with five major themes, and these themes, rather than the details of individual authors’ lives or collected works, structure the discussions that follow. Individual texts are then used to illustrate the range of opinions and the variety of approaches adopted in shaping and responding to these themes.

In many ways, these textual choices are arbitrary, although, hopefully, not nonsensical. Since literature is, at bottom, that subset of texts characterized by excess—of syntax, symbol and ultimately meaning—the interpretive possibilities of an individual work always exceed the limitations of a single thematic concern, no matter how broad. Similarly, for every text selected to illustrate a given theme, tens, even hundreds remain unmentioned that might have served just as effectively. No book can cover everything, however, and so, to maximize its relevance to the greatest number of teachers, this book hews closely to the common content of extant surveys of later English literature. In fact, those at a loss for what to include in their first survey courses can use the texts discussed in the following chapters to build a highly credible survey of English literary history from the 1780s through the 1940s.

If limited only to the texts discussed in this book, however, such a decision will inevitably privilege long-established canonical texts. Since literary canons, however much they have been expanded since the 1970s, tend to be disproportionately populated by works from male authors, this means that the resulting course might seem somewhat limited in its ability to represent the embarrassment of riches that make up later English literature.

Fortunately, the possibility of textual substitution remains and is one of the strengths of a thematic approach: by providing teachers and other readers with a flexible underlying architecture for each period, this book allows them to assimilate alternative readings into the existing thematic framework. English Romanticism, for instance, need not be exhausted by an enumeration of the big six, of whom more later. Instead, other authors and their works can be brought into dialog with familiar texts on the basis of their shared interest in one or more Romantic themes. Thus, more experienced teachers who already have courses in the can need not wholly replace their text selections to take advantage of the historical and cultural information provided and the intertextual connections suggested.

Supplementary readings provide an alternative or perhaps additional solution to the problem of gender parity. Works too long to be included in those days devoted to exploring an individual theme might be assigned at the end of each literary-historical unit, whose constituent five themes would then offer a framework for discussing the complex interplays of meaning that make novels, full books of poetry or short stories, or plays such a pleasure to read. Assigning longer works written by women would help to rebalance students’ perceptions of the contributions made by a diversity of later British authors. More substantial texts especially suitable for inclusion in survey courses might include, for the Romantic period, Felicia Hemans’s Poems (1808), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); for the Victorian period, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë’s Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (2nd ed., 1850), George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) or Augusta Webster’s Dramatic Studies (1866); and for the Modern period, the three opening plays performed at the Abbey Theatre on December 27, 1904 (Augusta, Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News, William Butler Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand and Gregory and Yeats’s collaborative Cathleen Ni Houlihan), Mina Loy’s Feminist Manifesto (1914) and Songs to Joannes (1917) or Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922).

Ultimately, this book advances a number of proximate, intermediate and more distant goals. Most immediately, it seeks to make individual texts of later English literature easier to understand by placing them in conversation and in context. In so doing, the book will model repeatedly the process of constructing a comparative, topic-based, historically grounded argument about multiple texts, something that many teachers will require their students to demonstrate in formal papers for such courses. Through its use of synthetic themes, the book also seeks to make the literary periods of Romanticism, Victorianism and Modernism more recognizable and distinct, from one another, certainly, but also from other periods of Anglo-American literature. At the same time, by revealing how the themes of one period grow out of the themes of earlier periods, the book also offers a synthetic reading of later English literature as a continuously developing whole. Finally, this book is intended to help teachers guide their own students into becoming critical readers for the rest of their lives, by providing a framework of topics and ideas that can be used to understand literary works as yet unread, perhaps even those as yet unwritten.

Teaching Later British Literature: A Thematic Approach is organized into three sections, one for each of the literary historical periods of Romanticism, Victorianism and Modernism. Each section features the same overall structure. First, a preliminary chapter discusses what it means to delimit, historicize and establish a literary canon for the period in question, concluding with the discussion of a single relatively brief text that offers a suggestive and at times provoking introduction to the period as a whole. Second, five discrete chapters, one on each of the period’s major themes, follow, featuring specific engagements with representative texts both large and small that would fit well within the syllabuses of many survey courses. Using the texts discussed in the preceding chapters, a hypothetical schedule of readings is then provided for instructors seeking suggestions for how to construct their own syllabuses. A concluding list of suggested secondary literature guides readers to further discussions of each period by professional scholars and critics.

A Note about Citations

Throughout Teaching Later British Literature and to the extent allowed by international copyright law, I have used quotations from primary texts as evidence for my assertions about the period or theme under discussion. All poetry has been cited by line number(s), which should remain consistent regardless of edition. When quoting from prose works, however, I have not provided corresponding page numbers, because these vary from one edition to the next and I have sought to avoid both privileging particular editions and generating bibliographical lists that would compete with the recommended readings for each period. All of the texts discussed in this book are featured in numerous literary anthologies, and in almost all cases are also available online. Readers are invited to use whatever version of each primary text is convenient to them. Each primary textual citation is acknowledged in the index by the title from which it has been taken.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Lee Person provided me with one of my first opportunities to teach English Literature II, along with other still deeply felt expressions of collegial confidence and professional mentorship. Since then, I have surveyed the chronologically svelte but textually stout second half of English literary history many times, in ten-week quarters and fifteen-week semesters, using both discussion-based and large lecture formats. In this effort I have been fortunate to draw upon the specialized knowledge and classroom practices of numerous colleagues, including David Deutsch, James McNaughton, Steve Tedeschi, Bill Ulmer, Deborah Weiss and Emily Wittman. When lecturing, I have been ably seconded, productively interrogated and enthusiastically rearticulated by a cohort of exceptional graduate teaching assistants, among them Nic Barilar, Peter Berge, Wendy Dinwiddie, Amanda Fowler, Clay Greene, Jess Hamlet, Erin Hildebrand, Savanna Lauderdale, Grant Miller, Jessica Pacitto, Mary Payne, Alex Pieschel and Nicole Titler. To all of these fellow teachers I give my thanks. It is to my students, however, the many hundreds of them, that I dedicate this volume: if it were not for you, I never would have learned even this much.

Part I

ENGLISH ROMANTICISM

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

I. Periodizing the Romantics

Since its creation by literary anthologists of the last third of the nineteenth century, Romanticism as a literary period has manifested a certain fuzziness about dates. Prominent anthologies and scholars have detected the beginning of English Romanticism in 1785, 1789 and 1798, whereas the period’s proposed ending has ranged from 1830 to 1832 to 1837. Valuable most immediately for its potential as an exam question, this problem of dates more meaningfully reflects the fact that the root word of the period itself, romance, has never been entirely stable.

Originally, romance was a descriptive term applied to the verse epics of sixteenth-century Italian poets Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto. According to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), such tales of wild adventures in war and love were improbable; false, and, in common speech, associated with a lie. Later in the eighteenth century, English critics like Thomas Warton used it to talk about developments in fiction, usually European. By 1798, the year that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the seminal poetic manifesto of what we now know as English Romanticism, namely, Lyrical Ballads, the word romantic meant light, fanciful, even inconsequential, and as a result Wordsworth and Coleridge most likely would have objected very much to being labeled with it.

Romanticism received its first critical definition from the German August Wilhelm Schlegel, who, during a series of lecture held in Berlin between 1801 and 1804, distinguished between the romantic literature of the Middle Ages, represented by Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio, and the prevailing contemporary spirit of neo-classicism. Schlegel refined his terms further while lecturing in Vienna between 1808 and 1809, when he contrasted Romanticism’s organic and plastic character with the mechanical tendencies of Classicism, reflected, for example, in neo-classicists’ prescriptive adherence to the three unities of time, space and action derived from Aristotle’s Poetics.

Schlegel’s ideas were absorbed and expanded upon by French writer/critic Madame de Stäel in De L’Allemagne, first published in England in 1813, almost 25 years after the period is generally understood to have begun in that country. As a further sign of confusion, Coleridge assembled the first English list of Romantic writers in 1820, including among the poets only Robert Southey, Walter Scott and George Gordon, Lord Byron. The next year Byron himself reiterated the terms of the debate as it had been framed by Schlegel in his dedication of Marino Faliero, which he dedicated to the German über-romantic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

In fact, until the period of anthologization, those writers normally grouped under the collective term English Romanticism were instead seen either as independent individuals or, at most, as small groups, or schools, largely defined by location and temperament rather than more aesthetic criteria. Thus, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey constituted the lake school; whereas William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt and John Keats were pejoratively labeled by contemporary critics as the cockney school; and Byron and Percy Shelley were the lightning rods of the so-called satanic school of English verse.

The collective point is that, from the beginning, English Romanticism has been a contested term, a site of productive disagreement, not an eternal monolith of value. This book, like other introductory surveys, will attempt to impose some order on the period, of course, but such ordering methods always say as much about us as about the Romantics.

II. Historicizing the Romantics

English Romantic writers lived in turbulent times, and much of the literature they produced both reacts to and attempts to shape the meaning of two monumental historical changes to the traditional order of European society. From across the English Channel, the French Revolution promised to end aristocratic control of politics and replace relationships built upon social deference with those grounded in liberty, fraternity, and equality, ultimately plunging Europe into two decades of war. From within England itself, the industrial revolution, starting in mining and textile production, heralded similar alterations to social relations by changing how and where the laboring classes worked, who benefitted the most from the fruits of their labor and what the appropriate government response should be to growing civil unrest.

From the perspective of reform-minded English writers and intellectuals, the French Revolution got off to a very promising start. First, a middle-class legislative assembly, the States-General, mounted an effective political challenge to the exclusive governing authority of the French monarchy in May 1789. Two months later, on July 14, revolutionists stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, liberating numerous political prisoners of the regime. These would be gradually replaced by aristocrats deemed enemies of the people.

In 1792, the September Massacres of these imprisoned members of the nobility caused a precipitous dampening of enthusiasm for the Revolution among many in England, which declared war on France after the execution of Louis XVI in January of 1793. The following two years saw moderate voices within the postrevolutionary nation purged during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror even as France sought to spread revolutionary ideals through war with most of its neighbors.

In order to guard against revolution at home, in 1795 the English Parliament passed the Treason and Seditious Meetings Acts, which together sought to limit unlicensed public discussions of policies and ideals inspired by events in France. In 1799 and 1800 the Combination Acts even more broadly restricted the right to public assembly by prohibiting workers from forming trade unions or engaging in collective bargaining. Recognizing that Roman Catholic Ireland was the most likely path of French invasion, Parliament then passed the Act of Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. The coronation of Napoleon I as emperor of France in 1804 ratcheted up the intensity of war on the continent for the next decade. Not until Napoleon’s final defeat at the battle of Waterloo in 1815 was the English government’s central preoccupation with wars abroad replaced by the problem of disaffection at home.

The economic depression brought on by the demobilization