Outlines of English and American Literature. William J. Long

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">       and Verse. The Knickerbocker School. Halleck, Drake, Willis and Paulding.

       Southern Writers. Simms, Kennedy, Wilde and Wirt. Various New England

       Writers. First Literature of the West. Major Writers of the Period. Irving.

       Bryant. Cooper. Poe. Summary of the Period. Selections for Reading.

       Bibliography.

      CHAPTER III. THE PERIOD OF CONFLICT

      Political History. Social and Intellectual Changes. Brook Farm and Other

       Reform Societies. The Transcendental Movement. Literary Characteristics of

       the Period. The Elder Poets. Longfellow. Whittier. Lowell. Holmes, Lanier.

       Whitman. The Greater Prose Writers. Emerson. Hawthorne. Some Minor Poets.

       Timrod, Hayne, Ryan, Stoddard and Bayard Taylor. Secondary Writers of

       Fiction. Mrs. Stowe, Dana, Herman Melville, Cooke, Eggleston and Winthrop.

       Juvenile Literature. Louisa M. Alcott. Trowbridge. Miscellaneous Prose.

       Thoreau. The Historians. Motley, Prescott and Parkman. Summary of the

       Period. Selections for Reading. Bibliography.

      CHAPTER IV. THE ALL-AMERICA PERIOD

      The New Spirit of Nationality. Contemporary History. The Short Story and

       its Development. Bret Harte. The Local-Color Story and Some Typical

       Writers. The Novel since 1876. Realism in Recent Fiction. Howells. Mark

       Twain. Various Types of Realism. Dialect Stories. Joel Chandler Harris.

       Recent Romances. Historical Novels. Poetry since 1876. Stedman and Aldrich.

       The New Spirit in Poetry. Joaquin Miller. Dialect Poems. The Poetry of

       Common Life. Carleton and Riley. Other Typical Poets. Miscellaneous Prose.

       The Nature Writers. History and Biography. John Fiske. Literary History and

       Reminiscence. Bibliography.

      GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

      OUTLINES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

       Table of Contents

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

      INTRODUCTION: AN ESSAY OF LITERATURE

      (Not a Lesson, but an Invitation)

      I sleep, yet I love to be wakened, and love to see

       The fresh young faces bending over me;

       And the faces of them that are old, I love them too,

       For these, as well, in the days of their youth I knew.

      "Song of the Well"

      WHAT IS LITERATURE? In an old English book, written before Columbus dreamed of a westward journey to find the East, is the story of a traveler who set out to search the world for wisdom. Through Palestine and India he passed, traveling by sea or land through many seasons, till he came to a wonderful island where he saw a man plowing in the fields. And the wonder was, that the man was calling familiar words to his oxen, "such wordes as men speken to bestes in his owne lond." Startled by the sound of his mother tongue he turned back on his course "in gret mervayle, for he knewe not how it myghte be." But if he had passed on a little, says the old record, "he would have founden his contree and his owne knouleche."

      Facing a new study of literature our impulse is to search in strange places for a definition; but though we compass a world of books, we must return at last, like the worthy man of Mandeville's Travels, to our own knowledge. Since childhood we have been familiar with this noble subject of literature. We have entered into the heritage of the ancient Greeks, who thought that Homer was a good teacher for the nursery; we have made acquaintance with Psalm and Prophecy and Parable, with the knightly tales of Malory, with the fairy stories of Grimm or Andersen, with the poetry of Shakespeare, with the novels of Scott or Dickens—in short, with some of the best books that the world has ever produced. We know, therefore, what literature is, and that it is an excellent thing which ministers to the joy of living; but when we are asked to define the subject, we are in the position of St. Augustine, who said of time, "If you ask me what time is, I know not; but if you ask me not, then I know." For literature is like happiness, or love, or life itself, in that it can be understood or appreciated but can never be exactly described. It has certain describable qualities, however, and the best place to discover these is our own bookcase.

      [Sidenote: THE TREE AND THE BOOK]

      Here on a shelf are a Dictionary, a History of America, a text on Chemistry, which we read or study for information; on a higher shelf are As You Like It, Hiawatha, Lorna Doone, The Oregon Trail, and other works to which we go for pleasure when the day's work is done. In one sense all these and all other books are literature; for the root meaning of the word is "letters," and a letter means a character inscribed or rubbed upon a prepared surface. A series of letters intelligently arranged forms a book, and for the root meaning of "book" you must go to a tree; because the Latin word for book, liber, means the inner layer of bark that covers a tree bole, and "book" or "boc" is the old English name for the beech, on whose silvery surface our ancestors carved their first runic letters.

      So also when we turn the "leaves" of a book, our mind goes back over a long trail: through rattling printing-shop, and peaceful monk's cell, and gloomy cave with walls covered with picture writing, till the trail ends beside a shadowy forest, where primitive man takes a smooth leaf and inscribes his thought upon it by means of a pointed stick. A tree is the Adam of all books, and everything that the hand of man has written upon the tree or its products or its substitutes is literature. But that is too broad a definition; we must limit it by excluding what does not here concern us.

      [Sidenote: BOOKS OF KNOWLEDGE AND OF POWER]

      Our first exclusion is of that immense class of writings—books of science, history, philosophy, and the rest—to which we go for information. These aim to preserve or to systematize the discoveries of men; they appeal chiefly to the intellect and they are known as the literature of knowledge. There remains another large class of writings, sometimes called the literature of power, consisting of poems, plays, essays, stories of every kind, to which we go treasure-hunting for happiness or counsel, for noble thoughts or fine feelings, for rest of body or exercise of spirit—for almost everything, in fine, except information. As Chaucer said, long ago, such writings are:

      For pleasaunce high, and for noon other end.

      They aim to give us pleasure; they appeal chiefly to our imagination and our emotions; they awaken in us a feeling of СКАЧАТЬ