Robert Aylett

Robert Aylett (Aylet) (1583?-1655) was an English lawyer and religious poet (date of this entry can be funny but it is a coincidence). He was born in Rivenhall, Essex and was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1605, M.A. in 1608, and LL.D in 1614. Living at Feering, he acted for the archdeacon of Colchester and as justice of the peace. He also acted in Essex as commissary for the Bishop of London, and judge of the Commissary Court; he played a large part in enforcing the Laudian reforms in the county. He became Master of the Faculties in 1642.

As a poet his work is related to George Herbert’s, but he borrowed quite heavily from Edmund Spenser. Susanna, or the Arraignment of the Two Unjust Elders’ was published in 1622. Joseph, or Pharaoh’s Favorite, Peace with her Four Gardens (1622) and Thrift’s Equipage (1622) are other earlier works.

Divine and Moral Speculations (1654) was dedicated to Henry Pierrepont, 1st Marquess of Dorchester and his wife. A Wife not readymade but bespoke, by Dicus the Batchelor, and made up for him by his fellow shepheard Tityrus; in four pastoral eclogues (1653) is a secular piece.

W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) who signed his works W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.

Auden grew up in Birmingham in a professional middle class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, alternated between telegraphic modern styles and fluent traditional ones, were written in an intense and dramatic tone, and established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. He became uncomfortable in this role in the later 1930s, and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where he became an American citizen in 1946. His poems in the 1940s explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than his earlier works, but still combined traditional forms and styles with new forms devised by Auden himself. In the 1950s and 1960s many of his poems focused on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions, and he took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.

He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably “Funeral Blues” (“Stop all the clocks”) and “September 1, 1939″, became widely known through films, broadcasts and popular media.

Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-length). His poetry was encyclopedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a “Christmas Oratorio” and a baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters. The tone and content of his poems ranged from pop-song clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.

He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on documentary films in the 1930s and with the New York Pro Musica early music group in the 1950s and 1960s. About collaboration he wrote in 1964: “collaboration has brought me greater erotic joy . . . than any sexual relations I have had.”

Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later collected editions. He wrote that he rejected poems that he found “boring” or “dishonest” in the sense that they expressed views that he had never held but had used only because he felt they would be rhetorically effective. His rejected poems include “Spain” and “September 1, 1939.” His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, argues in his introduction to Auden’s Selected Poems that Auden’s practice reflected his sense of the persuasive power of poetry and his reluctance to misuse it. (Selected Poems includes some poems that Auden rejected and early texts of poems that he revised.)

Auden’s stature in modern literature has been disputed, with opinions ranging from that of Hugh MacDiarmid, who called him “a complete wash-out”, to the obituarist in The Times (London), who wrote: “W. H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry . . . emerges as its undisputed master.”

In his enfant terrible stage in the 1930s he was both praised and dismissed as a progressive and accessible voice, in contrast to the politically nostalgic and poetically obscure voice of T. S. Eliot. His departure for America in 1939 was hotly debated in Britain (once even in Parliament), with some critics treating it as a betrayal, and the role of influential young poet passed to Dylan Thomas, although defenders such as Geoffrey Grigson, in an introduction to a 1949 anthology of modern poetry, wrote that Auden “arches over all.” His stature was suggested by book titles such as Auden and After by Francis Scarfe (1942) and The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes (1972).

In the US, starting in the late 1930s, the detached, ironic tone of Auden’s regular stanzas set the style for a whole generation of poets; John Ashbery recalled that in the 1940s Auden “was the modern poet.” His manner was so pervasive in American poetry that the ecstatic style of the Beat Generation was partly a reaction against his influence. In the 1950s and 1960s, some writers (notably Philip Larkin and Randall Jarrell) lamented that Auden’s work had declined from its earlier promise.

By the time of Auden’s death in 1973 he had attained the status of a respected elder statesman. The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that “by the time of Eliot’s death in 1965 … a convincing case could be made for the assertion that Auden was indeed Eliot’s successor, as Eliot had inherited sole claim to supremacy when Yeats died in 1939.” With some exceptions, British critics tended to treat his early work as his best, while American critics tended to favor his middle and later work. Unlike other modern poets, his reputation did not decline after his death, and Joseph Brodsky wrote that his was “the greatest mind of the twentieth century.”

Auden’s popularity and familiarity suddenly increased after his “Funeral Blues” (“Stop all the clocks”) was read aloud in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994); subsequently, a pamphlet edition of ten of his poems, Tell Me the Truth About Love, sold more than 275,000 copies. After September 11, 2001, his poem “September 1, 1939″ was widely circulated and frequently broadcast. Public readings and broadcast tributes in the UK and US in 2007 marked his centenary year.

Francis Atterbury

Francis Atterbury (March 6, 1663 – February 22, 1732), was an English man of letters, politician and bishop.

He was born at Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, where his father was rector. He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he became a tutor. In 1682, he published a translation of Absalom and Achitophel into Latin verse with neither the style nor the versification typical of the Augustan age. In English composition he met greater success; in 1687 he published An Answer to some Considerations, the Spirit of Martin Luther and the Original of the Reformation, a reply to Obadiah Walker, who, when elected master of University College, Oxford in 1676, had printed in a press set up by him there an attack on the Reformation written by Abraham Woodhead. Atterbury’s treatise, though highly praised by Bishop Gilbert Burnet, was more distinguished for the vigour of his rhetoric than the soundness of his arguments, and the Papists accused him of treason, and of having, by implication, called King James “Judas”.

After the “Glorious Revolution”, Atterbury readily swore fealty to the new government. He had taken holy orders in 1687, preached occasionally in London with an eloquence which raised his reputation, and was soon appointed one of the royal chaplains. He ordinarily lived at Oxford, where he was the chief adviser and assistant of Henry Aldrich, under whom Christ Church was a stronghold of Toryism. He inspired a pupil, Charles Boyle, in the Examination of Dr. Bentley’s Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris, an attack (1698) on the Whig scholar Richard Bentley, arising out of Bentley’s impugnment of the genuineness of the Epistles of Phalaris. He was figured Swift in the Battle of the Books as the Apollo who directed the fight, and was, no doubt, largely the author of Boyle’s essay. Bentley spent two years in preparing his famous reply, which owned not only that the letters ascribed to Phalaris were spurious, but that all Atterbury’s wit and eloquence were a cloak for an audacious pretence at scholarship.

Atterbury was soon occupied in a dispute about matters still more important and exciting. High Church and Low Church divided the nation. The majority of the clergy were on the High Church side; the majority of King William’s bishops were inclined to latitudinarianism. In 1700 the Convocation, of which the lower house was overwhelmingly Tory, met after a gap of ten years. Atterbury threw himself with characteristic energy into the controversy, publishing a series of treatises. Many regarded him as the most intrepid champion that had ever defended the rights of the clergy against the oligarchy of Erastian prelates. In 1701 he was awarded with the archdeaconry of Totnes and a prebend in Exeter Cathedral. The lower house of Convocation voted him thanks for his services; the University of Oxford created him a rector of divinity; and in 1704, soon after the accession of Queen Anne, he was promoted to the deanery of Carlisle Cathedral (although the Tories still had the chief weight in the government).

In 1710, the prosecution of Henry Sacheverell produced a formidable explosion of High Church fanaticism. At such a moment Atterbury could not fail to be conspicuous. His inordinate zeal for the body to which he belonged and his rare talents for agitation and for controversy were again displayed. He took a chief part in framing that artful and eloquent speech which Sacheverell made at the bar of the Lords, and which presents a singular contrast to the absurd and scurrilous sermon which had very unwisely been honoured with impeachment. During the troubled and anxious months which followed the trial, Atterbury was among the most active of those pamphleteers who inflamed the nation against the Whig ministry and the Whig parliament. When the ministry changed and the parliament was dissolved, rewards were showered upon him. The lower house of Convocation elected him prolocutor, in which capacity he drew up, in 1711, the often-cited Representation of the State of Religion; and in August 1711, the queen, who had selected him as her chief adviser in ecclesiastical matters, appointed him dean of Christ Church on the death of his old friend and patron Aldrich.

At Oxford he was as conspicuous a failure as he had been at Carlisle, and it was said by his enemies that he was made a bishop because he was so bad a dean. Under his administration, Christ Church was in confusion, scandalous altercations took place, and there was reason to fear that the great Tory college would be ruined by the tyranny of the great Tory doctor. In 1713 he was removed to the bishopric of Rochester, which was then always united with the deanery of Westminster. Still higher dignities seemed to be before him, for though there were many able men on the episcopal bench, there was none who equalled or approached him in parliamentary talents. Had his party continued in power it is not improbable that he would have been raised to the archbishopric of Canterbury. The more splendid his prospects the more reason he had to dread the accession of a family which was well known to be partial to the Whigs, and there is every reason to believe that he was one of those politicians who hoped that they might be able, during the life of Anne, to prepare matters in such a way that at her death there might be little difficulty in setting aside the Act of Settlement and placing James Francis Edward Stuart on the throne.

Her sudden death confounded the projects of these conspirators, and, whatever Atterbury’s previous views may have been, he acquiesced in what he could not prevent, took the oaths to the House of Hanover, and did his best to ingratiate himself with the royal family. But his servility was requited with cold contempt; he became the most factious and pertinacious of all the opponents of the government. In the House of Lords his oratory, of old, pointed, lively and set off with every grace of pronunciation and of gesture, extorted the attention and admiration even of a hostile majority. Some of the most remarkable protests which appear in the journals of the peers were drawn up by him; and, some of the bitterest of those pamphlets which called on the English to stand up for their country against the aliens who had come from beyond the seas to oppress and plunder her, critics have detected his style. When the rebellion of 1715 broke out, he refused to sign the paper in which the bishops of the province of Canterbury declared their attachment to the Protestant accession, and in 1717, after having been long in indirect communication with the exiled family, he began to correspond directly with James Francis Edward Stuart.

In 1721, on the discovery of the plot for the capture of the royal family and the proclamation of King James, Atterbury was arrested with the other chief malcontents, and in 1722 committed to the Tower of London, where he remained in close confinement during some months. He had carried on his correspondence with the exiled family so cautiously that the circumstantial proofs of his guilt, though sufficient to produce entire moral conviction, were not sufficient to justify legal conviction. He could be reached only by a bill of pains and penalties. Such a bill was quite prepared to support, and in due course a bill passed the Commons depriving him of his spiritual dignities, banishing him for life, and forbidding any British subject to hold intercourse with him except by the royal permission. In the Lords the contest was sharp, but the bill finally passed by eighty-three votes to forty-three.

Atterbury took leave of those whom he loved with a dignity and tenderness worthy of a better man, to the last protesting his innocence with a singular disingenuousness. After a short stay at Brussels he went to Paris, and became the leading man among the Jacobite refugees there. He was invited to Rome by the Pretender, but Atterbury felt that a bishop of the Church of England would be out of place in Rome, and declined the invitation. During some months, however, he seemed to be high in the good graces of James. The correspondence between the master and the servant was constant. Atterbury’s merits were warmly acknowledged, his advice was respectfully received, and he was, as Bolingbroke had been before him, the prime minister of a king without a kingdom. He soon, however, perceived that his counsels were disregarded, if not distrusted. His proud spirit was deeply wounded. In 1728 he left Paris, occupied his residence at Montpellier, gave up politics, and devoted himself entirely to letters. In the sixth year of his exile he had so severe an illness that his daughter, Mrs Morice, herself very ill, determined to run all risks that she might see him once more. She met him at Toulouse, received the communion from his man, and died that night.

Atterbury survived the severe shock of his daughter’s death for years. He even returned to Paris and to the service of the Pretender, who had found out that he had not acted wisely in parting with one who, though a heretic, was the most able man in the Jacobite party. In the ninth year of his banishment he published a luminous, temperate and dignified vindication of himself against John Oldmixon, who had accused him of having, in concert with other Christ Church men, garbled the new edition of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion. The charge, as respected Atterbury, had not the slightest foundation; for he was not one of the editors of the History, and never saw it until it was printed. A copy of this little work he sent to the Pretender, with a letter singularly eloquent and graceful. It was impossible, the old man said, that he should write anything on such a subject without being reminded of the resemblance between his own fate and that of Clarendon. They were the only two English subjects who had ever been banished from their country and debarred from all communication with their friends by act of parliament. But here the resemblance ended. One of the exiles had been so happy as to bear a chief part in the restoration of the royal house. All that the other could now do was to die asserting the rights of that house to the last. A few weeks after this letter was written Atterbury died, on 22 February 1732. His body was brought to England, and laid in Westminster Abbey. In his papers now kept at the Library of Westminster, he desired to be buried “as far from kings and politicians as may be.” Thus he is buried next to this century’s tourist information booth kiosk. The black slab is simple, indicating his name, birth and death dates. Due to tourist traffic, the inscription is now considerably worn.

It is agreeable to turn from Atterbury’s public to his private life. His turbulent spirit, wearied with faction and treason, now and then required repose, and found it in domestic endearments, and in the society of the most illustrious literary men of his age. Of his wife, Katherine Osborn, whom he married while at Oxford, little is known; but between him and his daughter there was an affection singularly close and tender. The gentleness of his manners when he was in the company of a few friends as such as seemed hardly credible to those who knew him from only his writings and speeches. Though Atterbury’s classical attainments were not great, his taste in English literature was excellent; and his admiration of genius was so strong that it overpowered even his political and religious antipathies. His fondness for Milton, the mortal enemy of the Stuarts and of the Church, was such as to many Tories seemed a crime; and he was the close friend of Addison. His favourite companions, however, were, as might have been expected, men whose politics had at least a tinge of Toryism. He lived on friendly terms with Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot and John Gay. With Matthew Prior he had a close intimacy. Alexander Pope found in Atterbury not only a warm admirer, but a most faithful, fearless and judicious adviser, as well as an editor as requested.

Grace Aguilar

Grace Aguilar (June 1816 – September 16, 1847), an English novelist and writer on Jewish history and religion, was born in Hackney of Jewish parents of Portuguese descent. She was delicate from childhood, and early showed great interest in history, especially Jewish history. The death of her father threw her on her own resources.

After a few dramas and poems she published in the United States in 1842 Spirit of Judaism, in defence of her faith and its professors, and in 1845 The Jewish Faith and The Women of Israel. She is, however, best known by her novels, of which the chief are Home Influence (1847) and A Mother’s Recompense (1850). Her health gave way in 1847, and she died in that year at Frankfurt.

Her other works include Magic Wreath, and Vale of Cedars (1850).

She was the oldest child of parents descended from Portuguese Marranos who sought asylum in England in the eighteenth century. To strengthen her constitution, which from infancy had been feeble, she was taken to the sea-shore and to various rural localities in England. Her love of nature was cultivated by these experiences; and at the age of twelve she devoted herself of her own accord to the study of natural science, augmenting a collection of shells begun by her at Hastings, when only four years old, and supplementing it by mineralogical and botanical collections.

Grace Aguilar was educated mainly by her parents. Her mother, a cultivated woman of strong religious feeling, trained her to read the Scriptures systematically; and when she was fourteen her father read aloud to her regularly, chiefly history, while she was occupied with drawing and needlework. She was an assiduous musician till her health became impaired. Her reading, especially in history, was extensive; her knowledge of foreign literature was wide.

She evinced a literary tendency at the age of seven, when she began a diary, which she continued almost uninterruptedly until her death. Before she was twelve she had written a drama, “Gustavus Vasa.” Her first verses were evoked two years later by the scenery about Tavistock in Devonshire. The first products of her pen to be published (anonymously in 1835) were her collected poems, which she issued under the title “The Magic Wreath.” Her productions are chiefly stories and religious works dealing with Jewish subjects. The former embrace domestic tales, tales founded on Marano history, and a romance of Scottish history, “The Days of Bruce” (1852). The most popular of the Jewish tales is “The Vale of Cedars, or the Martyr: A Story of Spain in the Fifteenth Century,” written before 1835, published in 1850, and twice translated into German and twice into Hebrew. Her other stories founded on Jewish episodes are included in a collection of nineteen tales, “Home Scenes and Heart Studies”; “The Perez Family” (1843) and “The Edict,” together with “The Escape,” had appeared as two separate volumes; the others were reprinted from magazines. Her domestic tales are “Home Influence” (1847) and its sequel, “The Mother’s Recompense” (1850), both of them written early in 1836, and “Woman’s Friendship” (1851).

The first of Miss Aguilar’s religious works was a translation of the French version of “Israel Defended,” by the Marrano Orobio de Castro, printed for private circulation. It was closely followed by “The Spirit of Judaism,” the publication of which was for a time prevented by the loss of the original manuscript. Sermons by Rabbi Isaac Leeser, of Philadelphia, had fallen into her hands and, like all other accessible Jewish works, had been eagerly read. She requested him to revise the manuscript of the “Spirit of Judaism,” which was forwarded to him, but was lost. The authoress rewrote it; and in 1842 it was published in Philadelphia, with notes by Leeser. A second edition was issued in 1849 by the first American Jewish Publication Society; and a third (Cincinnati, 1864) has an appendix containing thirty-two poems (bearing date 1838-1847), all but two reprinted from “The Occident.” The editor’s notes serve mainly to mark dissent from Miss Aguilar’s depreciation of Jewish tradition — due probably to her Marrano ancestry and to her country life, cut off from association with Jews. In 1845 “The Women of Israel” appeared—a series of portraits delineated according to the Scriptures and Josephus. This was soon followed by “The Jewish Faith: Its Spiritual Consolation, Moral Guidance, and Immortal Hope,” in thirty-one letters, the last dated September, 1846. Of this work—addressed to a Jewess under the spell of Christian influence, to demonstrate to her the spirituality of Judaism—the larger part is devoted to immortality in the Old Testament. Miss Aguilar’s other religious writings —some of them written as early as 1836—were collected in a volume of “Essays and Miscellanies” (1851-52). The first part consists of “Sabbath Thoughts” on Scriptural passages and prophecies; the second, of “Communings” for the family circle.

In her religious writings Miss Aguilar’s attitude was defensive. Despite her almost exclusive intercourse with Christians and her utter lack of prejudice, her purpose, apparently, was to equip English Jewesses with arguments against conversionists. She inveighed against formalism, and laid stress upon knowledge of Jewish history and the Hebrew language. In view of the neglect of the latter by women (to whom she modestly confined her expostulations), she constantly pleaded for the reading of the Scriptures in the English version. Her interest in the reform movement was deep; yet, despite her attitude toward tradition, she observed ritual ordinances punctiliously. Her last work was a sketch of the “History of the Jews in England,” written for “Chambers’s Miscellany.” In point of style it is the most finished of her productions, free from the exuberances and redundancies that disfigure the tales—published, for the most part, posthumously by her mother. The defects of her style are mainly chargeable to youth. With her extraordinary industry—she rose early and employed the day systematically—and her growing ability of concentration she gave promise of noteworthy productions.

Miss Aguilar’s later years were full of family trials. In 1835 she had an attack of illness, from the effect of which she never recovered. Finally her increasing weakness and suffering necessitated change of air, and in 1847 a Continental trip was arranged. Before her departure some Jewish ladies of London presented her with a gift and a touching address recounting her achievements in behalf of Judaism and Jewish women. She visited her elder brother at Frankfurt, and at first seemed to benefit by the change; but after a few weeks she had to resort to the baths of Schwalbach. Alarming symptoms necessitated her return to Frankfurt, and there she died on September 16, 1847: her remains were buried in the Jewish cemetery. Her last words, spelled on her fingers, were, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him,” and her epitaph is the verse Prov. xxxi. 31.

Renaissance humanism

Renaissance humanism was a European intellectual movement that was a crucial component of the Renaissance, beginning in Florence in the last years of the 14th century. The humanist movement developed from the rediscovery by European scholars of classical Latin and later Greek texts. Initially, a humanist was simply a scholar or teacher of Latin literature. By the mid-15th century humanism described a curriculum — the studia humanitatis — comprising grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy, poetry and history as studied via classical authors. Humanists mostly believed that, although God created the universe, it was humans that had developed and industrialized it. Beauty, a popular topic, was held to represent a deep inner virtue and value, and an essential element in the path towards God.

The humanists were often opposed to philosophers of the preceding movement of Scholasticism, the “schoolmen” of the universities of Italy, Paris, Oxford and elsewhere. The scholastics’ methodology was also derived from the classics, especially Thomas Aquinas’ synthesis of the thought of Aristotle, and a classical debate which referred back to Plato and the Platonic dialogues was revived.

In the 1480s, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote a preface to the nine hundred page thesis that he submitted for public debate entitled An Oration on the Dignity of Man. The debate never took place, but the work became a seminal text in the development of humanism. In it, he talked about how God created man and that man’s greatness comes from God. He said that man was like a chameleon; which meant that he could become whatever he wanted to be.

Humanists placed a heavy emphasis on the study of primary sources rather than the study of the interpretations of others. This is reflected in their motto of ad fontes, or “to the sources” which informed the search for texts in the monastic libraries of Europe. Humanist education, called the studia humanista or studia humanitatis (study of humanity), concentrated on the study of the liberal arts: Latin and Greek grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy or ethics, and history.

Early 15th-century humanists were interested in classical Latin and not in medieval Latin, which was a different and more developed language with many neologisms. Petrarch, sometimes called the father of Renaissance humanism in Italy, called the Latin of the Middle Ages “barbarous;” when he collected his “Familiar Letters” his model was Cicero and his model for Latin was that used by Virgil, who was emerging from the persona as a magus that had accrued in the Middle Ages. This new interest in the classical literature led to the scouring of monastic libraries across Europe for lost texts. One such hunt by Poggio Bracciolini, who was credited with the discovery of the complete works of fifteen different authors, turned up Vitruvius’ work on art and architecture, allowing for the completion of the Duomo of Florence by Filippo Brunelleschi.

Social or civic humanism rose out of the republican ideology of Florence at the beginning of the fifteenth century. It sought to create citizens capable of participating in the civic life of their community by placing central emphasis on human autonomy. Leonardo Bruni’s Panegyric is one expression of this philosophy. The emancipated and literate upper bourgeoisie of the independent Italian communes adapted 14th-century Burgundian aristocratic culture and manners to an intensely patriotic civic life. Humanism was a pervasive cultural mode, not merely the product of a handful of geniuses, like Giotto or Leon Battista Alberti.

Literary theory – Differences among schools

The intellectual traditions and priorities of the various kinds of literary theory are often radically different. Even finding a set of common terms to compare them by can be difficult.

For instance, the work of the New Critics often contained an implicit moral dimension, and sometimes even a religious one: a New Critic might read a poem by T. S. Eliot or Gerard Manley Hopkins for its degree of honesty in expressing the torment and contradiction of a serious search for belief in the modern world. Meanwhile a Marxist critic might find such judgments merely ideological rather than critical; the Marxist would say that the New Critical reading did not keep enough critical distance from the poem’s religious stance to be able to understand it. Or a post-structuralist critic might simply avoid the issue by understanding the religious meaning of a poem as an allegory of meaning, treating the poem’s references to “God” by discussing their referential nature rather than what they refer to.

Such a disagreement cannot be easily resolved, because it is inherent in the radically different terms and goals (that is, the theories) of the critics. Their theories of reading derive from vastly different intellectual traditions: the New Critic bases his work on an East-Coast American scholarly and religious tradition, while the Marxist derives his thought from a body of critical social and economic thought, and the post-structuralist’s work emerges from twentieth-century Continental philosophy of language. To expect such different approaches to have much in common would be naïve; so calling them all “theories of literature” without acknowledging their heterogeneity is itself a reduction of their differences.

In the late 1950s, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye attempted to establish an approach for reconciling historical criticism and New Criticism while addressing concerns of early reader-response and numerous psychological and social approaches. His approach, laid out in his Anatomy of Criticism, was explicitly structuralist, relying on the assumption of an intertextual “order of words” and universality of certain structural types. His approach held sway in English literature programs for several decades but lost favor during the ascendance of post-structuralism.

For some theories of literature (especially certain kinds of formalism), the distinction between “literary” and other sorts of texts is of paramount importance. Other schools (particularly post-structuralism in its various forms: new historicism, deconstruction, some strains of Marxism and feminism) have sought to break down distinctions between the two and have applied the tools of textual interpretation to a wide range of “texts”, including film, non-fiction, historical writing, and even cultural events.

Bakhtin argued that the “utter inadequacy” of literary theory is evident when it is forced to deal with the novel; while other genres are fairly stabilized, the novel is still developing.

Another crucial distinction among the various theories of literary interpretation is intentionality, the amount of weight given to the author’s own opinions about and intentions for a work. For most pre-20th century approaches, the author’s intentions are a guiding factor and an important determiner of the “correct” interpretation of texts. The New Criticism was the first school to disavow the role of the author in interpreting texts, preferring to focus on “the text itself” in a close reading. In fact, as much contention as there is between formalism and later schools, they share the tenet that the author’s interpretation of a work is no more inherently meaningful than any other.

Literary theory

Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes. In the humanities, the latter style of scholarship is often called simply “theory.” As a consequence, the word “theory” has become an umbrella term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts. Most of these approaches are informed by various strands of Continental philosophy.

Literature

Literature is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means “acquaintance with letters” (from Latin littera letter), and therefore the academic study of literature is known as Letters (as in the phrase “Arts and Letters”). In Western culture the most basic written literary types include fiction and nonfiction.

The word “literature” has different meanings depending on who is using it. It could be applied broadly to mean any symbolic record, encompassing everything from images and sculptures to letters. In a more narrow sense the term could mean only text composed of letters, or other examples of symbolic written language (Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example). An even more narrow interpretation is that text have a physical form, such as on paper or some other portable form, to the exclusion of inscriptions or digital media. The Muslim scholar and philosopher Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq (702-765 AD) defined “literature” as follows: “Literature is the garment which one puts on what he says or writes so that it may appear more attractive.” added that literature is a slice of life that has been given direction and meaning, an artistic interpretation of the world according to the percipient’s point of views. Frequently, the texts that make up literature crossed over these boundaries. Russian Formalist Roman Jakobson defines literature as “organized violence committed on ordinary speech”, highlighting literature’s deviation from the day-to-day and conversational structure of words. Illustrated stories, hypertexts, cave paintings and inscribed monuments have all at one time or another pushed the boundaries of “literature.”

People may perceive a difference between “literature” and some popular forms of written work. The terms “literary fiction” and “literary merit” often serve to distinguish between individual works. For example, almost all literate people perceive the works of Charles Dickens as “literature,” whereas some critics look down on the works of Jeffrey Archer as unworthy of inclusion under the general heading of “English literature.” Critics may exclude works from the classification “literature,” for example, on the grounds of a poor standard of grammar and syntax, of an unbelievable or disjointed story-line, or of inconsistent or unconvincing characters. Genre fiction (for example: romance, crime, or science fiction) may also become excluded from consideration as “literature.”

One of the earliest known literary works is the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem dated around 2700 B.C., which deals with themes of heroism, friendship, loss, and the quest for eternal life. Different historical periods have emphasized various characteristics of literature. Early works often had an overt or covert religious or didactic purpose. Moralizing or prescriptive literature stems from such sources. The exotic nature of romance flourished from the Middle Ages onwards, whereas the Age of Reason manufactured nationalistic epics and philosophical tracts. Romanticism emphasized the popular folk literature and emotive involvement, but gave way in the 19th-century West to a phase of realism and naturalism, investigations into what is real. The 20th century brought demands for symbolism or psychological insight in the delineation and development of character. literature comes from the word “littera which means letter.

A poem is a composition written in verse (although verse has been equally used for epic and dramatic fiction). Poems rely heavily on imagery, precise word choice, and metaphor; they may take the form of measures consisting of patterns of stresses (metric feet) or of patterns of different-length syllables (as in classical prosody); and they may or may not utilize rhyme. One cannot readily characterize poetry precisely. Typically though, poetry as a form of literature makes some significant use of the formal properties of the words it uses – the properties of the written or spoken form of the words, independent of their meaning. Meter depends on syllables and on rhythms of speech; rhyme and alliteration depend on the sounds of words.

Poetry perhaps pre-dates other forms of literature: early known examples include the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (dated from around 2700 B.C.), parts of the Bible, the surviving works of Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey), and the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. In cultures based primarily on oral traditions the formal characteristics of poetry often have a mnemonic function, and important texts: legal, genealogical or moral, for example, may appear first in verse form.