Literary Studies

A Practical Guide

Tison Pugh, Margaret E. Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317929413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literary Studies: A Practical Guide provides a comprehensive foundation for the study of English, American, and world literatures, giving students the critical skills they need to best develop and apply their knowledge. Designed for use in a range of literature courses, it begins by outlining the history of literary movements, enabling students to contextualize a given work within its cultural and historical moment. Specific focus is then given to the use of literary theory and the analysis of:

• Poetry
• Prose fiction and novels
• Plays
• Films.

A detailed unit provides clear and concise introductions to literary criticism and theory, encouraging students to nurture their unique insights into a range of texts with these critical tools. Finally, students are guided through the process of generating ideas for essays, considering the role of secondary criticism in their writing, and formulating literary arguments. This practical volume is an invaluable resource for students, providing them with the tools to succeed in any English course.

Unit 1

A Practical Guide to Linguistic and Literary History

1.1 A Brief Linguistic History of English and England

If, as the old axiom proclaims, history is written by the winners, so too is linguistic history affected by the conquests, migrations, and other cultural shifts among various cultures. In this light, it is critical to realize that, despite substantial overlap, a linguistic history of the English language differs from a linguistic history of England, for numerous languages have been spoken in the land known as Brittania to the Romans, and then as England after the Anglo-Saxon migrations, as Great Britain in recognition of the unions of England with Wales and Scotland, and also as the United Kingdom due to the union with Northern Ireland. The English language was born in England but not without various linguistic skirmishes and struggles along the way, with many tongues contributing to its present structure and content.

Prior to the Roman invasions of the first century BCE, Celtic languages were spoken across the British Isles. These tongues survive today in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh, as well as in Manx (spoken on the Isle of Man), Breton (Brittany, France), and Cornish (Cornwall). Perhaps surprisingly, given their proximity to English-speaking peoples, Celtic languages influenced the birth and development of English only tangentially. An excerpt from the medieval Welsh masterpiece Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet, the manuscript of which is dated circa 1230 CE (although the oral narrative dates significantly earlier), highlights the dissimilarities between Celtic languages and English:

Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet a oed yn arglywyd ar seith cantref Dyuet. A threigylgweith yd oed yn Arberth, prif lys idaw, a dyuot yn y uryt ac yn y uedwl uynet y hela.

(Thomson 1)

Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed was lord over the seven cantrefs of Dyfed. One time he was in Arberth, his principal court, and it came into his head and mind to go hunting.

(Ford 37)

Unless trained in Welsh or other Celtic languages, most English speakers can discern no linguistic connections between this passage and Modern English. Indeed, relatively few Celtic words have entered the English lexicon. Those that have often focus on landscapes or other culturally specific terms, a phenomenon evident in the Welsh-derived words crag, corgi, and flannel; the Scottish-derived words bog, glen, and loch; and the Irish-derived words whiskey, colleen, shamrock, and leprechaun.

With no rivals challenging their supremacy, Celtic languages flourished in the British Isles until 55 BCE, when Julius Caesar led a military invasion of Roman soldiers and a linguistic invasion of the Latin language. This initial excursion brought Britain to Rome’s attention, and in 43 CE, during the reign of Claudius, the Romans established a province in Britain, thereby cementing Latin’s role in the region. Furthermore, the Roman invaders pushed the island’s Celtic speakers to geographically remote areas such as Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria, and Scotland. With the Celtic peoples and their languages marginalized during this period of occupation, Latin served as the preferred language for the Romans ruling England for approximately 500 years; indeed, it continued its role as the preferred tongue for ecclesiastical and political administration well past the Middle Ages.

Latin is linguistically distinct from English, a language, like Danish and Dutch, with Germanic roots; nonetheless, its influence on Modern English shines through in the vast number of words with Latin roots. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731 CE), the Venerable Bede describes Britain’s geographical location, and even if one has never studied Latin, the similarities between many Latin words and their English descendants require little decoding:

Brittania oceani insula, cui quondam Albion nomen fuit, inter septentrionem et occidentem locata est, Germaniae, Galliae, Hispaniae, maximis Europae partibus multo intervallo adversa.

Britain, an island of the ocean, which formerly was called Albion, stands between the north and the west, right over against Germany, Gaul, and Spain, three of the greatest countries of Europe, although divided from them by a far gap.

(Bede 1.10–11, with modernizations of King’s translation)

Beyond the similarities of place names (Brittania for Britain; Germaniae for Germany; Galliae for France, which was known as Gaul; and Hispaniae for Spain), several other Latin words in this passage clearly reveal their kinship to their English cognates: oceani to ocean, insula to island and peninsula, locata to locate and location, maximis to maximum, and partibus to parts. The Latin word quondam, although archaic today, was widely used by such great English writers as William Shakespeare in its original Latin meaning as once or formerly.

The emergence of English in England began circa 450 CE when the northern European tribes of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes migrated to Britain, bringing with them Germanic languages previously alien to the islands. This segment of English linguistic history, which is roughly dated between 500 and 1100 CE, witnesses the rise of Old English. The masterpiece Beowulf, written circa 800 CE, proves the artistry of the language, as it also showcases its striking dissimilarity from Latin:

Hwaet, we Gar-Dena in geardagum,

theodcyninga, thrym gefrunon,

hu tha aethelingas ellen fremedon.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

weox under wolcnum, weorthmyndum thah,

othaet him aeghwylc thar ymbsittendra

ofer hronrade hyran scolde,

gomban gyldan. thaet waes god cyning.

(Klaeber, lines 1–3, 8–11)¹

Listen! We have heard of the glory in bygone days

of the folk-kings of the spear-Danes,

how those noble lords did lofty deeds.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

[The king Shield Sheafson] grew under heaven and prospered in honor

until every one of the encircling nations

over the whale’s riding had to obey him,

grant him tribute. That was a good king!

(Liuzza, lines 1–11)

Ironically, most contemporary English speakers find Old English, the earliest incarnation of Modern English, more difficult to decipher than Bede’s Latin. Nonetheless, when one examines this passage from Beowulf, certain linguistic elements common to Modern English are apparent. Primarily, the pronouns of Old English are recognizable in their modern descendants: we, he, him, and thaet (for that) denote the same meaning today as they did in Beowulf. One also sees overlap between various conjunctions (hu for how) and prepositions (in, under, ofer for over). Even the opening word of this excerpt, hwaet, is recognizable in its Modern English descendant what, when one realizes that h and w transposed their positions in various common pronouns, conjunctions, and adverbs: Old English hwa became Modern English who; hwaether became whether; and hwile became while. As challenging as reading Old English can be, an occasional passage readily reveals its Modern English translations. The Old English “thaet waes god cyning,” the final half-line of Beowulf quoted above, translates into Modern English simply as “That was [a] good king.”

After approximately 600 years during which Old English served as the land’s primary vernacular language, the French Normans invaded England in 1066. In the famed Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror defeated the English king Harold II, and the Normans’ victory brought French to the conquered land as the language of the ruling class. This era of English linguistic history, dated between 1100 and 1500 CE, is referred to as Middle English. Because French is a Romance language (that is, it descends directly from Latin, as do Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian), Latin influenced the development of English both in itself, as the Christian Church’s preferred language, and in its descendant tongue of French as the Norman aristocracy’s lingua franca. Post-Conquest England, a polyglot land, was populated with an aristocracy speaking French, with commoners speaking Middle English, and with many educated persons, particularly those engaged in ecclesiastical and administrative functions, speaking Latin as well. In 1325 CE, the poet William of Nassyngton advocated that English should be the land’s prevailing language:

In ynglych [English] tonge I sale [shall] yow telle,

If ye with me so lang [long] wille dwelle;

Na latyn will I spek na wast,

Bot in ynglych that men vses mast [use must],

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

That cane ilk man vndirstand,

That is born in ynglande.

(lines 62–65, 68–69)

This defense of English argues for the necessity of a common tongue for a multilingual land, as it also recognizes the simple fact that the majority of English people speak English.

As a vernacular language, Middle English lacked cultural prestige, but in the late 1300s Geoffrey Chaucer transformed it from a language of the common people into a language of poetry. His most famous work, The Canterbury Tales, begins with an ode to spring declaimed in the Middle English vernacular:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour.

(lines 1–4)

While occasional words of Chaucer’s Middle English vocabulary appear unrecognizable to most speakers of Modern English, such as soote for sweet, many initially unfamiliar words become recognizable through their modern descendants—shoures for showers, droghte for drought, and flour for flower. When one learns a few basic rules of Middle English pronunciation, many words sharpen into focus as ancestors of their Modern English kin.

Chaucer’s Middle English was spoken in London, and Modern English descends from this dialect. In linguistic terms, dialect refers to a variant of a common language, with dialects often used to distinguish between and among various peoples. Chaucer’s English contrasts sharply with other regional dialects in the land; had one of these variants of Middle English flourished equally to Chaucer’s London English, Modern English would likely sound remarkably different than it does today, or at least enjoy an even greater variety of words and pronunciations. For example, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian romance recounting Gawain’s quest to defeat a monstrous adversary menacing Camelot, is more difficult for most speakers of Modern English to decipher, as the following passage demonstrates:

Gawan glyght on the gome that godly hym gret,

And thught hit a bolde burne that the burgh aghte;

A hoge hathel for the nonez, and of hyghe eldee;

Brode, bryght, watz his berde, and al beuer-hwed.

(Tolkien and Gordon, lines 842–45)

Gawain studied the man who greeted him courteously,

And thought him a bold one who governed the castle,

A great-sized knight indeed, in the prime of life;

Broad and glossy was his beard, all reddish-brown.

(Winny, lines 842–45)

Some words in this passage are evident in their Modern English descendants, such as brode for broad, bryght for bright, and berde for beard; even beuer-hwed is recognizable as beaver-hued (that is to say, in the color of a beaver, or reddish-brown). For the most part, though, readers of Modern English find this northwestern dialect of Middle English challenging to comprehend, in contrast to Chaucer’s Middle English with its more obvious parallels to Modern English.

With the close of the Middle Ages and the advent of the Renaissance, the English language entered the phase known as Early Modern English, which ranges between 1500 and 1800 CE. The Great Vowel Shift marks the transition from Middle English to Early Modern English, and as a result of this linguistic metamorphosis, Chaucer’s fourteenth-century English sounds vastly different from Shakespeare’s seventeenth-century tongue. Scholars continue to debate the causes of the Great Vowel Shift, yet it is clear that English long vowels changed their pronunciations, although the distinction between each vowel and its neighbors remained. (Long vowels sound like the vowels’ names—a, e, i, o and u, whereas short vowels are the sounds of pat, pet, pit, pot, and put.) For example, Middle English long e was pronounced like Modern English long a, and Middle English long i was pronounced like Modern English long e. After the Great Vowel Shift, however, these vowels assumed their current intonations. For the most part, short Middle English vowels were pronounced similarly to their Modern English equivalents, with short a registering the greatest degree of variation from its former sound as if in hot and pot to its current sound as in man and can. Despite slight variations in stress or vocalization, consonants remain mostly consistent in their pronunciation between Middle and Early Modern English. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath opens her Prologue with a cry to understand women’s experience of medieval life, but her words also illustrate the shifts in pronunciation between the Middle Ages and today:

Experience, though noon auctoritee

Were in this world, is right ynogh for me

To speke of wo that is in mariage.

(lines 1–3)

Many words of this passage, including experience, were, and world, are pronounced similarly whether in Middle or Modern English. The vowel shifts are most evident in Middle English right, which would be pronounced with the vowel sound of Modern English long e, and Middle English me and speke, which would be pronounced like Modern English may and spake. The causes behind the Great Vowel Shift notwithstanding, it dramatically affected the sounds and tones of the language, such that, as for readers of Middle English today, many Renaissance readers found this earlier version of their language challenging to decipher.

The striking shifts in English—particularly those of vocabulary and pronunciation—that were evident from its beginnings as Old English through its transition into Chaucer’s Middle English and then in its transition into Early Modern English, have since slowed remarkably. Despite their many differences, Modern English of the twenty-first century is much closer to Shakespeare’s Early Modern English of the early 1600s than Chaucer’s Middle English is to the Old English spoken 400 years before him. The invention of the printing press in the mid-1400s slowed such linguistic changes. Although languages are forever in flux as new words enter their vocabularies and outdated words fade into obsolescence, the printing press codified words and pronunciations in a manner hitherto unachieved in the language’s history. In a similar manner, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, completed in 1755, helped to establish various preferred spellings and usages. Johnson’s Dictionary, a truly magnificent achievement, compiles the definitions of over forty thousand words that he illustrated with over 114,000 quotations. As Johnson declares in the preface to this tome, “tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration” (Samuel Johnson 326–27), and he aimed through his dictionary to preserve the English language fr...