Literatura y crítica
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William Cowper
William Cowper
From the Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.
COWPER, William (1731-1800), elder son of the rector of Great Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, whose mother died when he was 6. He was educated at a private school (where he was bullied) and at Westminster, where he was a contemporary of Charles *Churchill and W. *Hastings. He was called to the bar in 1754. Sensitive and hypochondriac by nature as a child, he began to suffer from severe depression, and when called for examination for a disputed clerkship in the House of Lords he broke down completely and attempted suicide; his illness may have been aggravated by the failure of his hope of marrying his cousin Theodora Cowper. From this time he was subject to periods of acute melancholia which took a religious form; he felt himself cast out of God's mercy, and wrote later in his moving autobiographical Memoir (c. 1767, pub. 1816), 'conviction of sin and expectation of instant judgement never left me.' He spent some months in Dr Cotton's Collegium Insanorum at St Albans, and turned increasingly to evangelical Christianity for consolation. In 1765 he became a boarderr (in his own words, 'a sort of adopted son') in the home of the Revd Morley Unwin at Huntingdon, and on Morley's death moved with Mary, his widow, to Olney.
There he came under the influence of J. *Newton, the evangelical curate, with whom he wrote Olney Hymns (1669); his contributions include 'God moves in a mysterious way' and 'Oh, for a closer walk with God'. He became engaged to Mrs Unwin, but suffered another period of severe depression and made another suicide attempt; he spent a year with the Newtons before returning to Mrs Unwin's home. A calmer period followed, during which at her suggestion he wrote his satires ('Table Talk', 'The Progress of Error', 'Truth', 'Expostulation', 'Hope', 'Charity', 'Conversation', and 'Retirement') which were published in 1782 with several shorter poems 8including 'Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk; see SELKIRK); in the same year he wrote 'John Gilpin' and in 1783-4 his best-known long poem The Task (1785), both subject suggested by his new friend and neighbour Lady Austen. The volume in which these appeared also contained 'Tirocinium', a vigorous attack on public schools. In 1786 he moved with Mrs Unwin to Weston Underwood, where he wrote various poems published after his death, including the unfinished 'Yardley-Oak' (admired by *Wordsworth), the verses 'On the Loss of the Royal George' ('Toll for the brave . . . '), 'To Mary', and 'The Poplar-Field'. His translation of *Homer, published in 1791, was not successful. From 1791 Mrs Unwin suffered a series of paralytic strokes; she died in1796, leaving Cowper in severe depression from which he never fully recovered.
He wrote 'The Castaway' shortly before his death; like many of his poems it deals with man's isolation and helplessness. Storms and shipwrecks recur in his work as images of the mysterious ways of God, and Cowper's search for a retired and quiet life of simple domestic and rural pleasures gave him little sense of permanent security. Yet his poems and his much admired letters (published posthumously) have been highly valued for their intimate portrait of tranquillity and for their playful and delicate wit. His sympathetic feelings for nature (expressed in the lines from The Task admired by Jane *Austen's Fanny Price, 'Ye fallen avenues! Once more I mourn, / Your fate unmerited') presage *Romanticism, and his use of blank verse links that of James *Thomson with that of *Wordsworth. He was also, like his evangelical friends, a champion of the oppressed, and wrote verses on *Wilberforce and the slave trade. Whether religion was cause or cure of his depression has been much disputed; the sense of guilt and paranoia displayed in his Memoir has much in common with that of Bunyan's *Grace Aboundin. A life by his friend W. *Hayley was published 1803-4; see also The Stricken Deer (1929) by David *Cecil and a critical biography by M. Quinlan (1953). Cowper's *Letters and Prose Writings, ed. J. King and C. Ryskamp, appeared in 3 vols, 1979-82.
The Task, a poem in six books by Cowper, published 1785.
When Cowper's frien Lady Austen (whom he met in 1781) suggested to him the sofa in his room as the subject of a poem in blank verse, the poet set about 'the task'. Its six books are entitled 'The Sofa', 'The Time-Piece', 'The Garden', 'The Winter Evening', 'The Winter Morning Walk', and 'The Winter Walk at Noon'. Cowper opens with a mock-heroic account of the evolution of the sofa ('I sing the sofa') and thence digresses to description, reflection, and opinion. The poem stresses the delights of a retired life ('God made the country, and man made the town'), Bk I, 749); describes the poet's own search for peace ('I was a stricken deer, that left the herd', Bk III, 108), and evokes the pleasures of gardening, winter evenings by the fire, etc. The moral passages condemn blood sports, cards, and other diversions; the poet manifests tenderness not only for his pet harebut even for worms and snails.The poem was extremely popular: *Burns found it 'a glorious poem' that expressed 'the Religion of God and Nature', and it helped to create and supply the growing demand for natural description and tender emotion that found a fuller expression in Wordsworth's *Prelude, a poem which contains many echoes of Cowpar.
'The Castaway', a poem by Cowper, written 1799, published 1803. It is based on an incident from *Anson's Voyage Round the World. Cowper depicts with tragic power the suffering of a seaman swept overboard and awaiting death by drowning. Mr Ramsay in V. Woolf's *To the Lighthouse is given to declaiming its last lines: 'We perish'd, each alone: / But I beneath a rougher sea, / And whelm'd in deeper gulphs than he.'
Bruce Gore on Alfred the Great
Samuel Beckett's PLAY (Anthony Minghella, 2001)
'Cecilia', de Fanny Burney: La nece(si)dad de guardar las apariencias
viernes, 15 de enero de 2016
’Cecilia’, de Fanny Burney: La nece(si)dad de guardar las apariencias
Se ha dicho que el tema central de la novela de sociedad inglesa es la tensión entre las exigencias asfixiantes de la clase social, imponiendo la conformidad, y el impulso individual hacia la autenticidad personal y hacia la libertad de acción, expresando en la vida y en los actos de los protagonistas una personalidad propia y una respuesta creativa a su entorno, en el marco de una escena social cuyas reglas trascienden al individuo. La interacción creativa con esas reglas del escenario es el auténtico drama de este género dramático que es la vida social, en especial para personajes jóvenes que están buscando su papel en la escena. De lleno en esta tradición podemos colocar a Cecilia y a su autora.
Leemos la novela de Frances (’Fanny’) Burney Cecilia (1782) como una obra sintomática de la sofocante sumisión de la autora a la ideología patriarcal burguesa, y al control de la identidad sexual y de clase efectuados por ella mediante los rituales de la cortesía social. La novela también es una negociación simbólica de las tensiones creadas por el conflicto entre la necesidad de una expresión auténtica y los protocolos sociales.
Jose Angel Garcia Landa
Universidad de Zaragoza
August 28, 2015
Ibercampus (August 28, 2015)
English abstract:
Fanny Burney’s ’Cecilia’: The Foolish Compulsion to Keep Up Appearances
Frances (’Fanny’) Burney’s novel Cecilia (1782) is read as a work symptomatic of the author’s suffocating submission to patriarchal bourgeois ideology and its control of sexual and class identities through the rituals of social politeness. The novel is also a symbolic coming to terms with the conflicting demands of authentic self-expression and social proprieties.
Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.
Number of Pages in PDF File: 8
_____. "Compradores de deuda." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 6 August 2012.*
2012
_____. "Compradores de deuda." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 5 Sept. 2012.*
2013
_____. "La nece(si)dad de guardar las apariencias." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 27 August 2015.*
2015
Osborne
miércoles, 13 de enero de 2016
Osborne
From the Oxford Companion to English Literature:
OSBORNE, John James (1929-94), playwright, born in Fulham, London, the son of a commercial artist who died in 1940; the first volume of his autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981), describes his childhood in suburbia, his brief spell as a journalist, and his years as an actor in provincial repertory, during which he began to write plays, the first of which was performed in 1950. He made his name with Look Back in Anger (1956, pub. 1957), which was followed by Epitaph for George Dillon (1957, pub. 1958; written in the mid-1950s in collaboration with Anthony Creighton).; The Entertainer (1957, which starred Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, a faded survivor of the great years of music hall), Luther (1961, based on the life of Martin *Luther, with much emphasis on his physical as well as his spiritual problems); Inadmissible Evidence (1965, the tragedy of a down-at-heel solicitor, Bill Maitland, plunging rhetorically towards self-destruction); and A Patriot for Me (1965, a highly theatrical piece set in Vienna, based on the rise and fall of Redl, a homosexual officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, ruined by blackmail). Iconoclastic, energetic, and impassioned, Osborne's works at their most positive praise the qualities of loyalty, tolerance, and friendship, but his later works (which include West of Suez, 1971; A Sense of Detachment, 1972; Watch It Come Down, 1976), became increasingly vituperative in tone, and the objects of his invective apparently more arbitrary. His outbursts of rage against contemporary society are frequently exhilarating, for the anger that made him known as an 'Angry Young Man' remained one of his strongest theatrical weapons, but he also expressed from time to time an ambivalent nostalgia for the past that his own work did so mucho to alter. His last play, Déjàvu (1991), is a sequel to Look Back in Anger, presenting the same characters in their regrouped, bad-tempered, but occasionally companionable middle age. Almost a Gentleman (1991) was a second volume of autobiography; Damn You, England (1994) a miscellany of reviews and letters to the press. (See also KITCHEN SINK DRAMA).
Look Back in Anger, a play by J. *Osborne, first produced by the *English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre on 8 May 1956, published 1957. It proved a landmark in the history of the theatre, a focus for reaction against a previous generation (see KITCHEN SINK DRAMA), and a decisive contributionto the corporate image of the *Angry Young Man.
The action takes place in a Midlands town, in the one-room flat of Jimmy and Alison Porter, and centres on their marital conflicts, which appear to arise largely from Jimmy's sense of their social incompatibility: he is a jazz-playing ex-student from a 'white tile' university, working in a market sweet satall, she is a colonel's daughter. He is by turns violent, sentimental, maudlin, self-pitying, and sadistic, and has a fine line in rhetoric. The first act opens as Alison stands ironing the clothes of Jimmy and thir lodger Cliff, as Jimmy reads the Sunday papers and abuses her and the 'Edwardian brigade' which her parents represent. In the sencond act the battle intensifies, as Alison's friend Helena attempts to rescue her from her disastrous marriage; Alison departs with her father, and Helena falls into Jimmy's arms. The third act opens with Helena at the ironing board; Alison returns, having lost the baby she was expecting, and she an Jimmy finda a manner of reconciliation through humiliation and games-playing fantasy. In its use of social milieu, its iconoclastic social attitudes, and its exploration of sadomasochistic relationships, the play was highly influential.
Angry Young Men, a journalistic catchphrase loosely applied to a number of British playwrights and novelists from the mid 1950s, including Kingsley *Amis, John *Osborne, *Sillitoe, and C. *Wilson, whose political views were radical or anarchic, and who described various forms of social alienation. It is sometimes said to derive from the title of a work by the Irish writer Leslie Paul, Angry Young Man (1951).
kitchen sink drama, a term applied in the late 1950s to the palys of writers such as *Wesker, S. *Delaney, and J. *Osborne, which portrayed working class or lower-middle class life, with an emphasis on domestic realism. These plays were written in part as a reaction against the drawing-room comedies and middle-class dramas of *Coward and *Rattigan, and also undermined the popularity of the verse drama of T. S. Eliot and C. *Fry. *Tynan was a principal advocate of this new group of writers.
Motifs, Topics, Thematics
miércoles, 13 de enero de 2016
Motifs, Topics, Thematics
Motifs, Topics, Thematics (from A BIBLIOGRAPH OF LITERARY THEORY, CRITICISM AND PHILOLOGY) by JAGL . uploaded Turopicu