Four Literary Nobles

By Fatemehsadat Mousavifard and Alireza Kargar

This book looks at the lives of four literary nobles; indeed their thoughts and characteristics are also presented. Thus, it awards a brief and valuable tale of the whole period.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365561368

Book preview

Four Literary Nobles

Four Literary

Nobles

Blake, Dickens, Hawthorn & Hemingway

FOUR SELECTED WORKS

Fatemehsadat Mousavifard

Alireza Kargar

Copyright © 2012 , F. Mousavifard, A. Kargar

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover design by Day System Research Center Experts;  www.day-system.ir;                   Tel: [phone]

ISBN: 978-1-365-56136-8

TO

My Dear Mother and Father

With Love

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER ONE: William Blake:  Songs of Innocence and Experience

Introduction

Literary Biography

Songs of Innocence and Experience and Social Impression

CHAPTER TWO: Charles Dickens Great Expectations    

Dicken’s Life Story

Short Summary of Great Expectation     

Portrait of Women in the Novel                                         

CHAPTER THREE:Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter 

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Life                                               

Summary of Scarlet Latter                                                  

Symbolism                                                                  

Langer’s Theory of Symbolism                                           

Symbolism in the Scarlet Letter                                       

Symbolic Characters in the Scarlet Letter                           

Conclusion                                                                 

CHAPTER  FOUR: Farewell to Arms Earnest Hemingway

Introduction            

Hemingway Literary Life                                                  

Biography of Hemingway                                                 

Short summary of the story                                              

Symbolism in the Novel                                                   

Symbolic Atmosphere                                                      

Further Readings                                                              

REFERENCES     

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My special thanks and appreciation with the deepest respect to Shirkhani, Ph.D. who guided us to the first steps of writing and granted us the idea. I must acknowledge as well my friends who assisted, advised, and supported my research and writing efforts over the years. Especially, I need to express my gratitude and deep appreciation to Ms. Somayeh Pournia, Ms. Aliyeh Nakhaee, Ms. Rezvan Safarean whose friendship, hospitality, knowledge, and wisdom have supported, enlightened, and entertained me over writing this book.

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PREFACE

Literature has a wide range of tendencies in which we can find a lot of writers, poets, and critics; each one of them has his own style, views and principals. It is said to be a mirror that reflects human life and society with its characteristics and developments, and this is what makes differences between  literary works of one nation and another, or one period and

another.

The present work is divided into four chapters. The first chapter deals with ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ which was written by William Blake while it was decorated with his own paintings. Here, we study the reflection of social impression of these poems. 

The second chapter focuses on the role of women in Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectation’; it seems that Dickens has a limited view of women; this issue is studied in this chapter while  his biography is also presented in details.

The third chapter tackles the notion of symbolism as a movement and as a literary device, and it indicates the elements of symbolism which is attributed to Hawthorne’s masterpiece ‘The Scarlet Letter’.

And chapter four highlights on Earnest  Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’ which seems to be a simple war story, but it is actually a symbol of life even in harsh times.

This book looks at their lives; indeed to the one work which is representative of their thoughts and characteristics. Thus, it awards a brief and valuable tale of the whole period. 

F. Mousavifard

July-2016

All you have to do is write one true sentence.

Ernest Hemingway

Chapter One

William Blake: 

Songs of

Innocence and Experience

What we learn in this chapter includes:

•William Blake’s Literary Biography and His Life Story;

•Analysis of Songs of Innocence and Experience;

•Study of Social Impression in Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Introduction:

William Blake, a poet and engraver, was one of the greatest revolutionary artists. In 1780, he took part in a riot in which they burnt a prison, and the prisoners got free. In 1803, he stood for a rebellion. Throughout his working life, he used all his artistic talent to start war on the institutions of the state and the church, which he passionately believed were instruments of repression and corruption. He raged against misery and bondage imposed on the mass of the population, and at the same time celebrated of the possibility of human liberation.

Literary Biography:

William Blake, poet, painter, illustrator, and printer, is one of the most compelling and idiosyncratic figures in the history of British culture. His works, little known until their rediscovery some forty years after his death, have eluded one interpretive category after another, including genre, period, and even conventional distinctions between literature and the graphic arts. In considering Blake's relation to the British tradition of writing for children, the difficulties in classifying his work become even more pronounced, as it remains unclear whether Blake wrote for children at all. Are the Songs of Innocence (1789) and For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793) books intended for children, parodies of children's books, or sophisticated versions of children's genres aimed primarily at adults? Despite lasting uncertainty regarding the intended audience of these works, Blake has become a crucial presence in modern interpretations of early children's literature as a brilliant adapter and implicit critic of the writing for children available in his time, and as an exemplar of what children's poetry and picture books could become (Alan Richardson, 2005).

William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 in London, and he would live most of his life in or near the city. His father, James Blake, was a hosier (selling stockings, gloves, and haberdashery) who maintained a precarious competency somewhere above working-class poverty and below middle-class prosperity. His mother, Catherine Harmitage Blake, was thirty, a year older than her husband, when they married in  1752; she gave birth to seven children during the next fifteen years, two dying in infancy. The youngest, Robert (born in 1767) became William's favorite sibling.

Although city bred, Blake lived within walking distance of the fields, hills, and rustic villages then bordering on London, and as a child he wandered urban streets and rural lanes alike. According to his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, Blake's visionary tendencies were already manifest when, at around age nine, he looked up in the course of a country ramble to see a tree filled with angels. Still younger, at age four, Blake had allegedly screamed when he saw God put his head to the window. Blake's parents, probably Baptists (at least by the mid 1760s), did not encourage these visions: William's insistence once nearly led to a beating (for lying) by his father.

Neither did he force William to attend school, for which Blake later expressed gratitude. If fundamentally self-taught, however, Blake did receive instruction in drawing, painting, and engraving, a marketable skill that his father encouraged. At age ten, Blake began drawing lessons at Henry Pars's academy; at fourteen he was apprenticed to James Basire, a master engraver who held to an unfashionable preference for clean outline. One of Blake's assignments as apprentice was to sketch the tombs at Westminster Abbey, exposing him to a variety of Gothic styles from which he would draw inspiration throughout his career. After completing his apprenticeship at twenty-one, Blake briefly enrolled (1779-1780) in the Royal Academy, though the theory and practice of its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, were antithetical to Blake's emerging aesthetic ideals.     On 18 August 1782 Blake married Catherine Boucher, who signed the marriage register with an X. Under her husband's tutelage she became an able assistant and something of a disciple.

Given Blake's fierce sense of artistic independence and his often fiery temperament, it is hardly surprising that he eventually broke with the patronizing Mathews and went on to satirize them in An Island in the Moon (composed in 1784). This work, unpublished in Blake's lifetime, is a sometimes trenchant, sometimes airy satire in prose and verse; its targets are not only avant-garde conversation parties of the type held by the Mathews but also the scientific, philosophical,