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A Brief History of Children's Literature

CONCEPTS TO REMEMBER:
The Ancient World [ancient Rome; 50 BCE to 500 CE]

* oral tale; composed not to be read but to be heard
* children borrowed stories they enjoyed from ones adults told
* very few works composed for children
* children listened to poems of Homer, the Iliad, the Trojan War, the Odyssey
* adults might be drawn by love story; children by adventure, monsters
* Aesop's Fables--animal tales with pointed morals

The Middle Ages [500 to 1500 CE]

* Reading
o fewer children could read; little written for them
o childhood generally ignored and kept as short as possible
* Medieval Epics
o children had to be content with adult works which held some interest for them
o Beowulf, Song of Roland, El Cid
* Medieval Romances
o King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table [high middle ages: 12th-13th C]
o Robin Hood
* Fables and other tales
o The Deeds of the Romans [late 13th C] collection of moral tales and fables; sources of plots for centuries]
o animals stories have always been favorites of children
o biblical stories; lives of saints; local legends
o no distinction between fantasy and reality; storytellers freely mingled magic, enchantment, the ludicrous, and the serious
o miracles were as real as taxes
o the literature was rich with childlike imagination, full of wonder, mystery, excitement

The European Renaissance [1500-1650 CE]

* The Printing Press [mid 15th C]
o movable type printing press
o possible to print books in quantities--reducing time, labor and cost; therefore more accessible
o most important technical innovation since the wheel
o increased literacy, growth of education, dissemination and advancement of knowledge
* Social Changes
o Crusades of 11th-12th C opened trade routes to the East as far as India
o strong central monarchies harnessed warring feudal lords--encouraged peaceful commerce and industry
o European arrival in the Western Hemisphere ("New World") and wealth and opportunity
o created a new middle class of merchants which valued education
* Instructional Books
o children more literate
o reading materials were instructional books (Books of Courtesy) and works written primarily for adults
o still had Aesop's Fables
o Book of Martyrs (1563), anti-Catholic work of horrific scenes of violent death for the sake of religion, most popular reading material for children
o Earliest children's illustrated book--Latin through pictures (Orbis Sensualium Pictus)--1658, a Latin vocabulary book
o by end of the 17th century social changes were well underway and there was a path cleared for a genuine literature for children.

The 17th Century

* childhood began to take on new importance
* adults began to recognize the special needs of childhood, including the need for childhood reading
* two specific influences brought a heightened sense of special needs of the child
o Religious: rise of Puritanism, that placed special emphasis on the individual's need to tend to his or her own salvation
o Intellectual: work of John Locke, the English philosopher

* The Puritans
o knowledge of the Bible was necessary for every human being
o consequently, the ability to read and to understand the Bible was a principal requirement for Puritan children
o in 1636 established a college--Harvard--to emphasize their commitment to the primacy of education
o Bible stories were the staple of Puritan children
o horn books contained rudimentary language lessons (alphabet, numerals, etc.)
o The New Primer--first appearing 1685-90 and continuing in print until 1886. A Puritan publication introducing young children to the alphabet through rhymes (A: In Adam's fall/We Sinned all)
* John Locke
o 1693 wrote a famous essay Thoughts Concerning Education, in which he formulated his notion that the minds of young children were similar to blank slates (tabula rasa) just waiting to be written upon and this instructed.
o believed every child possessed the capacity for leaning and that it was the responsibility of adults to see to the proper education of children
* Bunyan, Defoe, Swift
o children continued to adopt certain adult works of literature--Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels

The 18th and Early 19th Centuries

* John Newbery
o Little Pretty Pocket Book (1744) first significant publication for children
o sought their edification and also their enjoyment
o a collection of songs, moral tales, crude woodblock illustrations
* Rousseau and the Moral Tale
o expressed his ideas about education in Emile (1762), emphasized the importance of moral development--through simple living
o books taught children how to be good and proper human beings
o children¹s writing was considered inferior to adult writing and therefore mostly composed by women
* Rise of the Folktales
o vthrough the early 19th century there was little to distinguish children's literature 1729--Tales of Mother Goose by Charles Parrault, retellings including Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty
o throughout the eighteenth century, more and more retellings appeared
o beginning of 19th century--Grimm brothers
o folktales were not considered expressly for children
o some adults felt them unsuitable for children as they contained adult themes, alarming frankness and violence, lack of moral messages
o children, nevertheless, continued to read and love the old tales


The Victorians: The Golden Age

* during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) children's literature first blossomed
* influenced by the Romantic Movement which idealized childhood and lead to a greater interest in children
* first-rate authors and illustrators began to turn their talents to children and their books

* Fantasies
o 1865, Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson--math prof at Oxford) published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and began a new era in children¹s literature
o first significant publication for children that abandoned all pretense of instruction and was offered purely for enjoyment
o Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863); MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872); Baum's The Wizard of Oz (1900); Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908).
* Adventure Stories (for boys)
o especially popular Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883); Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1976) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
o British children seemed to prefer stories set in faraway and unfamiliar places; Americans more attracted to adventure stories set in America and rags-to-riches stories
o Dime Novels--sensational, lacking style and depth, cheap--were immensely popular
* School Stories (for boys)
o antics of boys at boarding schools: Tom Brown's School Days (1857)
o school stories (virtually always coming-of-age tales) occasionally appear in the 20th century, such as The Chocolate War
* Domestic Stories (for girls)
o tales of home and family life focusing on the activities of a virtuous heroine, usually coming from dire straits and achieving good fortune and ultimate happiness in the person of a handsome young man
o Alcott's Little Women (1868) and Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908)
* Children's Book Illustration
o books of 18th century and earlier either lacked illustrations altogether or contained crude woodblock illustration--serious artists did not draw for children's books
o At the end of the 19th century, changes in publishing and printing attracted great illustrators
o by end of the 19th century, stunningly illustrated children's books were available at reasonable prices
o by 1st quarter of 20th century, libraries were designating children's rooms--or at least children¹s shelves--children's literature had at last come of age.

Twentieth Century: Widening Worlds

* greater diversity in children's books
* picture books to poetry to fantasy to realistic fiction to informational books
* greater appreciation for quality
* numerous book award established
o Newbery Medal, most distinguished American book written for children in a given year
o Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American contribution to children's book illustration

Deconstructing Children Literature

CONCEPTS TO REMEMBER:
• Children are sufficiently different from adults.
• There exists a literature written specifically for children which attempts to fulfill children¹s needs for special texts.
• Who you are, that is, all the experiences and knowledge you have gained, will influence how you perceive and understand literature, specifically children¹s literature.
• Children¹s literature tends to create special worlds and to evoke moods and feelings unlike those provided by other forms of literature.
• The ability to enjoy literature is a learned skill.
• Readers tend to come from homes where reading occurs.
VOCABULARY:
The implied reader is the person for whom the text is written. In the process of reading and making sense of the text we can construct the characteristics and qualities of the implied reader. In reading and making sense of a text, we can also imagine we are the implied reader and understand the text through [the eyes of] the implied reader.
A repertoire is the knowledge and experiences of life and of other literature which a text assumes the implied reader possesses.
Strategies [of reading] are the ways of thinking about texts which allows us to see the text as meaningful. A set of strategies is part of the repertoire of the implied reader. Strategies for reading a literary text will be covered later in the term.
Intertextuality refers to the link between ideas, images, emotions, stories in different stories. This is like resemblances among people. One person may do or say something which is like or reminds you of another person.
READING AND MAKING-SENSE OF LITERATURE
CONCEPTS TO REMEMBER:
Reading against the text involves thinking about what the text is trying to get us to agree to and then to resist its manipulations.
Consciousness of one¹s owns response to literature and of the response of others to literature is the most basic literary strategy.
In order to facilitate response to literature, we need to develop an understanding of how literary texts provoke response in the reader.
A gap in a text is any aspect of that text that a reader makes sense of by providing knowledge from their pre-existing repertoire.
In reading, we have the expectation of consistency within the story; that is, that everything that is said or done in the story fits together to make a meaningful whole story. When we fit the pieces of a story into a previously held schema, we are participating in consistency-building.
Strategies for building consistency (filing in the gaps) include:
• Concretization - forming mental pictures by imagining, as exactly as the text will allow, what is being described
• Character - information about the personalities of the people the text describes
o flat character - has only one or two readily identifiable traits and those traits do not change
o round character - has a more complex cluster of traits which develops or changes as the story develops
 round character can develop by the text providing new information about the character which causes the reader to see the character differently and in more depth
 round character can develop by events in the story changing the character and making him or her more complicated
• Plot - the sequence of events that makes up the story
o climax -- the culminating point in the story; a series of actions lead up to the culminating point and then the story¹s plot quickly comes to an end
• Theme - meaning(s) or central idea(s) in the story; the strategy of finding meaning in a text consists of:
o Identification - perceiving that a character in the text is like oneself
o Manipulation - recognition that something will happen to the character in the story which will teach the reader a lesson about his or herself
• Structure - the way the various parts of a story relate to each other and form patterns; structure depends on repetition and variation of the same or similar elements
• Focalization - the position of the person who sees and understand the events being described in the story (this is different from the person who is telling the story)
• Point of view - the perspective from which a story is told; Implied speaker - the person who is telling the story and whose personality is suggested by the words of the text
o First-person narrator - the person who is telling the story is the relaying events he or she personally experienced; could be a character in the story or a participant in the action of the story who never really appears as a character in the story itself; "I"
o third-person narrator - the person who is telling the story is someone separate from the events taking place; "he," "she"
Consistency-building within the text as a whole; stories tend to have two plots at once: the series of actions that make up the events the story narrates and the series of actions that make up the narration of those events:
• Discourse - how a story is told: some events in great detail, some events in brief mention, some events in flashback; the order and detail of events in the discourse affects how the reader understands the events of the story.
• Trajectory - the path of the discourse through the story; this is the order in which the author chooses to inform us of what is or has been going on in the story; the order in which the story is revealed to the reader affects how the reader understand the events of the story.
Deconstructing Children's Literature
Approaches to reading a text (Literary Criticism)
-- Methods of deriving meaning from collected words [on a page].
• Reader-Response Approach
o Prior to the reader-response approach, it was believed the text itself held all components of meaning and the reader was to discover that meaning in reading.
o Today we acknowledge that each reader brings their own background and understandings to a text and meaning is derived, in part, through what the reader brings to the reading.
o The reader-response approach attempts to account for the differences in interpretations by seeing the reader and the text as equal partners in the interpretative process. That is, the text is the stimulus which recalls in the reader past experiences and other texts, permitting one to give meaning to the other.
o As experiences and exposure to other literature occur between re-readings of a text, meaning from one reading to another is transactional.
• Historical Approach
o How the period in which a work was written influenced the work itself.
o The effect of external political, social, and intellectual influences on literature.
o How these influences affect writings about an earlier period or future time.
o The historical context can help in the understanding of a work; and vice versa.
• Psychoanalytical Approach
o Examines the work in relationship to its author.
o To probe the unconscious of the characters, to determine what their actions really reveal about them.
o Carl Jung, a student of Freud, believed each person held, in his or her unconscious, archetypes--repeated patterns and images of human experience--which emerge in literature. The archetypes include the changing seasons, the cycle of birth, death, rebirth, the heroic quest, the beautiful temptress, etc.
o The danger in the psychoanalytical approach is in seeing a symbol in every object or act.
• Feminist Approach
o How gender affects a literary work, its writer, and its reader.
o The major concern is male bias in literature.
o The feminist approach is a cultural criticism of how societal norms and attitudes influence subgroup (e.g. female, male) behavior.
• Formalist Approach
o A literary work should be analyzed for meaning apart from the values or beliefs of the author or reader.
o A literary work should be analyzed for its architecture (for example, rising and falling of the action; foreshadowing of event to come; use of language and metaphor).
Purpose of Criticism--sense-making, understanding, and pleasure in reading.
Elements of Literature [the vocabulary of criticism]
• Point of view - who is telling the story
o First-Person -- "I"; the narrator is usually a character (major or minor) in the story
o Omniscient -- the narrator knows the thoughts and actions of anyone in the story at any time and any place
o Limited (or third-person) -- told from the point of view of a single character but that character is not the narrator; "he", "she"
• Setting - time, geographical place, general environment and circumstance of the story.
o Some texts rely heavily on the setting to establish the feeling or environment (milieu) of places, especially places unfamiliar to the reader.
o Some texts can exist with a very minimal setting (folktales have minimal settings, allowing the story to be easily transported and adapted to other times and places).
• Characters
o Principal characters in a story are:
 the protagonist
 hero or heroine
 main character with whom the reader is expected to sympathizes
 the antagonist
 villain
 character who works against the protagonist
o Characters are expected to be properly motivated (have believable reasons for their actions)
o Types of characters:
1. Flat and Round Characters
 flat character - has only one or two readily identifiable traits and those traits do not change
 round character - has a more complex cluster of traits which develops or changes as the story develops
 round character can develop by the text providing new information about the character which causes the reader to see the character differently and in more depth
 round character can develop by events in the story changing the character and making him or her more complicated
2. Static and Dynamic Characters
 static character - remains essentially the same throughout the story and has no noticeable development [flat or round character]
 dynamic character - undergoes some important character transformation during the course of the story [always a round character]
o Foil Characters - possess personality traits opposite to those of another character, often the main character. Foil characters can set off, make more visible, traits of other characters.
o Character Development - the means the author uses to tell us about a character:
 the narrator
 other characters in the story telling/talking about them
 what the character says in dialogue
 the actions of the character
o Character Consistency - fictional characters behave in ways consistent with their nature as presented in the story.
Internationalism in Children's Literature
Three important aspects of internationalism in children's literature:
• Development of printed and visual materials in areas of the world which have until recently had a primarily oral literature and the development of opportunities for children to experience these materials, such as in libraries and cultural centers;
• Exchange of children¹s books from one country to another, either in original form or in translation; and
• The way different cultures are depicted and represented in the children's books of any given country.
Printed and visual materials infusing oral literature
Considerations
• Is there improvement in the extent of children's literature published in countries with an oral-based literature; and
• Has the quality and quantity of children's literature improved in countries with modest amounts of printed and visual literature for children.
Viewed globally, worldwide production of children¹s books is concentrated in North American European and Japanese literatures for children.
• For young children to whom books must be read aloud, there is little indigenous publishing in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia--outside of Japan.
• Brazil, India, Turkey, and Venezuela recently began improving the quantity, quality, and availability of books for young children. China even more recently has begun an effort to upgrade the quantity and quality of picture books.
• Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, and the Philippines have increased the primarily the quantity of books available in the middle and upper primary grades and a little of the quality.
• Mass-market materials in all areas of children's literature are imported primarily from Italy, Japan, Spain, and the United States. Many areas of the world must learn to read in non-native languages in order to borrow a written literature, especially for children. These materials do not meet the total reading needs of the cultures which borrow them.
Exchange of materials between countries
Indigenous literature of emerging markets have to only a very small degree penetrated and affected the children¹s literature of Europe, North America, and Japan.
• Between 1968 and 1981, only 12 direct translations or adaptations of children's books came to the United States from developing areas: 5 from Iran, 3 from Greece, 2 from Nigeria, and one each from Brazil and Puerto Rico.
• During this same time, seven authors from developing areas were not published in their home countries but had books appear directly in English: 3 from Vietnam, 2 from Jamaica, and one each from South Africa and Thailand.
European artist fled to the United States between and after the two World Wars. This group was a major force in the "internationalizing" of looks of U.S. children¹s books up to 1960. Immigration of European artists has been replaced with the immigration of artists from Asia and Latin America.
Fictional and factual representation [by U.S. Publications] of other cultures
It has been pointed out that American authors, when writing about other countries, tend to focus only on child characters from lower socioeconomic groups, whereas non-American authors describe a much wider range of characters.
In trying to establish the validity of fictional and folkloric materials, those following questions might be helpful:
• Was the material created by a participant of the culture or by an observe of it? Is this made clear in the introductory material?
• Has it been edited to remove all elements which are morally or socially not accepted in our society or have some of the intrinsic values of the society concerned been allowed to remain intact, e.g., polygamy, mater-of-fact acceptance of body functions, early marriage or love relationships?
• If it is historical, is this clearly indicated?
• If it is folkloric, is the source clearly identified?
In evaluating illustrations, photographs, or films, the following questions might be helpful:
• Is there obvious stereotyping, such as always depicting Chinese children with pigtails, Mexican children with barefoot and with burros, etc.?
• Are the facial characteristics of any race almost always the same, without regard for the fact that there are infinite varieties within all races?
• Is the comparative wealth or poverty of a nation or people illustrated with honesty or is it exaggerated?
• Is there over emphasis on rural or village live with no proportionate attention to urban life?
• Are the unusually different customs depicted more for their shock value than as illuminations of parts of the total structure of the culture?
In evaluating factual materials, the following questions might be helpful:
• What is the copyright date? Does this limit the usability of the work?
• If the copyright date is recent, do geographical and political facts truly reflect the latest changes?
• Whose point of view is represented--the insider or the outsider or both?
• What kinds of sources are given?
[Notes from an article by Ann Pellowski]
CHILDREN'S LITERATURE AND DIVERSITY
Some authors use "multicultural" and "cultural diversity" as the broader topic covering racial/ethnic diversity and social diversity. Other authors use "multicultural" and "cultural diversity" for racial and ethnic diversity and "social diversity" for other diversities.
Both the text and pictures of American children's literature over the years preserves a history of the biases, misunderstandings, fascinations, and melting-pot ethos of our dominant culture.
The study of this history of children's literature provides a way of increasing awareness of the ways biases, misunderstandings, and ethos creep into children¹s books to potentially reinforce problems which already exist in society.
Collections today should reflect the diversity of the communities they serve as well as the diversity of the cultures of the country and the world.
Books today should strive for accuracy and honesty in representing individuals and groups.

Literary Symbols

Note that one purpose of this page is to demonstrate how to integrate information from different sources into an essay and how to document these sources.

Symbols are concrete objects or explicit acts that retain their real nature while standing for ideas or values that do not have material existence. They are artifacts of culture and cognition. A written language is a common form of symbolic representation. The characters of a language are grouped and organized according to rules and represent objects, acts, relations, as well as abstract ideas. Drawings and paintings may also be symbols of abstractions, while actions, such as a dance or ritual, may be similarly representative.

In literature, symbolism is an important device for writers. Literary symbols extend meaning beyond the prosaic representation of realities afforded by literal description or extracted through analysis and exposition. As Michael Meyer remarks: “Symbols are educational devices for evoking complex ideas without having to resort to painstaking explanations that would make a story more like an essay than an experience” ("Symbol"). The following will define literary symbols and discuss some of their characteristics.

According to Barton and Hudson, a literary symbol designates “an object or a process that not only serves as an image itself but also refers to a concept or abstract idea that is important to the theme of a work” (191). Harmon notes that there are two broad types of symbols (498). First, there are symbols that carry a universal meaning. In this case, a sunrise may represent a new beginning or a stream the passage of time. With the second type, an object or process is invested with a particular meaning by an author. Moby Dick is a book rich in both types. For example, while the voyage in search of the white whale is a universal symbol of a quest, the whale itself is an invested symbol that comes to represent, among other things, the incarnation of evil.

Frye, Baker, and Perkins also distinguish between different kinds of symbols, but they identify three types. First, there are “natural symbols” that “present things not for themselves, but for the ideas people commonly associate with them” ( 453). Examples are a star to represent hope, a mountain to represent a barrier, or a sun set to represent an ending. The second are “conventional symbols.” These “present things for the meanings people within a particular group have agreed to give them” ( 453). For example, a national flag may represent patriotism and a badge civil authority.

The third kind are “literary” and are “sometimes built upon natural or conventional symbols, adding meanings appropriate primarily with the work at hand,” and like the symbols with invested meaning which Harmon identifies, these symbols may sometimes “create meanings within a work for things that have no natural or conventional meaning outside it” (Frye, Baker, and Perkins 453).

Barton and Hudson point out two other important attributes of literary symbols. First they note that in the real world, "a symbol may be associated with only one referent" (192). For example, roads sign that indicates a curve to the right, or the blue light on a police car. But in literature, symbols may not retain such a simple one-to-one correspondence; indeed, they may be "multivalent"; that is, they may convey more than one meaning.

This is the case with the scarlet "A" that Hester Prynne wears in Hawthorne's tale, The Scarlet Letter. At first the letter stands for her sin of adultery, but as the tale unfolds, the "A" comes to represent her "ministry to the poor and the sick" (192)The second attribute of a literary symbol that distinguishes it from the symbols we depend upon in the everyday world is that "in some cases, the reference or meaning of literary symbols is deliberately indeterminate" (192). With such symbols, it is not possible to say for certain what the poet's intended meaning is. Perrine claims that this is the case with Robert Browning's poem, "My Star."

All that I know
Of a certain star
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue;
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!
Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it. (Browning 591)

Perrine speculates that the star may symbolize the poet's wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Browning's own perculiar genius, 'his gift for seeing in events and things a significance hidden from other men,'" or "his own peculiar poetic style" (593). "The point", says Perrine "is not that any one of these interpretations is right or necessarily wrong. We cannot say what the poet had specifically in mind" (593). Therefore, we can guess that the poet was perhaps intentionally ambiguous.

Scholars also distinguish symbols from images, metaphors, and allegory. An image is “a literal and concrete representation of a sensory experience or of an object that can be known by one or more of the senses” (Harmon 257). The poem, “winter,” by William Shakespeare is richly illustrative:

When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipped and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
“Tu-whit, tu-who!”
A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

In the lines above, the images evoke their referents in a powerful way, conveying the sense of intense cold in primitive circumstances.

A symbol “is like an image in doing the same thing but different from it in going beyond the evoking of the objective referent by making that referent suggest a meaning beyond itself” (Harmon 497-98). Thus, within the context of a particular work, the images of cold could be invested with the idea of emotional cold, a lack of love and sympathy. This is the case in Orson Welles' famous film, Citizen Kane. As a child, Kane is willingly sent away by his mother. Her emotional frigidity is represented symbolically as she repeatedly opens a window in the midst of a snowstorm. In literature, the essence of symbolism is that the object or action goes beyond evoking an image to suggest an abstract level of meaning.

Metaphors are like symbols in that they too evoke images that suggest meaning. The difference lies in the fact that whereas a symbol establishes a direct and logical relation between the object or process and the idea it represents, a metaphor involves a trope or “turn” in which the meaning conveyed is literally nonsensical when applied to the referent. For example, it is in accordance with experience, and therefore logical, to identify darkness with the unknown; whereas, it is literal nonsense to write of a “vegetable love” as Andrew Marvell does in "To His Coy Mistress" (Marvell 815 )

Finally, symbolism is different from allegory. Barton and Hudson define allegory as “a work of art intending to be meaningful on at least two levels of understanding: typically, a literal level and an abstract (e.g. moral) level” (6). According to Harmon, the difference between the two lies in the fact that “in allegory the objective referent evoked is without value until it is translated into the fixed meaning that it has in its own particular structure of ideas” (498). In contrast, a natural or conventional symbol retains its ability to evoke a particular idea independent of any literary context (498).

As an example, “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne is an allegorical tale in which the scientist, Aylmer, symbolizes man's pride in his own skill and an idealism that overcomes his ability to feel sympathy. This leads him to kill his wife in an effort to rid her of an insignificant blemish on her face. However the figure of a scientist may be perceived in the world in general, it is within the context of Hawthorne's moral tale that pride and coldness are magnified, making the scientist the embodiment of these traits, and as Frye, Baker and Perkins point out, “the simplest form of allegory is usually conveyed by personification” (12).

These authors also define personification as “the technique of treating abstractions, things, or animals as persons” (345). So within an allegory, abstractions are named explicitly and given a human form, being made to speak and act in a way consistent with their nature; they are walking, talking symbols of the abstract qualities their names denote.

Thus, literary symbols serve to extend the meaning of a text beyond what is explicitly stated. They evoke what is extrinsic to the text by calling on the universal knowledge shared by a culture. They may also contribute to an intrinsic system of meaning by allowing an author to represent abstract ideas in personal terms consistent with the world he has created.

Works Cited

Barton, Edwin J. and Glenda A. Hudson. A contemporary Guide to Literary Terms. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. 6, 191-193.

Browning, Robert. "My Star." Perrine. Literature. 591.

Frye, Northrop, Sheridan Baker, and George Perkins. The Harper Handbook to Literature. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. 452-453.

Harmon, William. A Handbook to Literature. ^{9 th}ed. Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 2003. 497-498.

Marvell, Andrew. "To His Coy Mistress." The Norton Anthology. English Literature: The Major Authors. M. H. Abrams. Gen. Ed. ^{6 th}ed. New York: Norton, 1996. 815.

Meyer, Michael. "Symbol." Glossary of Literary Terms. Bedford Saint Martins. 20 Jan. 2005. Http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/ bedintrocompact/pages/bcs-main.asp?v=&s=01000&n=00060&i=01060.01&o=

Perrine, Laurence. Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. ^{4 th}ed. New York: Harcourt, 1983. 591-593.

Shakespeare, William. "Winter." Sound and Sense." ^{2 nd}ed. Lawrence Perrine. New York: Harcourt, 1956. 6.

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LITERARY THEORY

Preface

So large and perhaps intimidating a section may need a few words of explanation. Some readers will find it hard going, and more will wonder why it's necessary.
First it should be said that theory has definite limits. English departments and writing schools generally provide their students with a theoretical background to their future labours. But once exams are over, most students happily dispense with theory and take to the practical application of what has been taught them, i.e. in the craft that will earn them standing in their community and a modest (usually very modest) income. Good writers are intuitive creatures, and they come to know instinctively when something has to be recast, shortened or bolstered with argument. Theory is there to help them should they need it, but its wider reaches and philosophical implications are not generally of interest.
Theory does not deal with absolutes but with possibilities, speculations, elusive chains of thought. Those who write "now Derrida has shown that. . . or "with our better understanding of post-colonial issues. . . " are laying claim to what does not exist. These are philosophical positions, with insights and modes of argument. It is perfectly possible to believe that the senses consistently deceive us, for example, and to argue that this world is a delusion. And that position, respectable and with a long history behind it, brings certain consequences that philosophy explores. But the issues remain speculative, and expounding Berkley's theories to the magistrate's bench will not get us off a speeding fine. Much in life is conducted by shared values, tacit assumptions, unsupported codes of behaviour, and these are only dug up and examined when the unexpected happens.
But today much is being questioned, particularly in the arts of the avant garde: poetry, visual arts, music. The more progressive arts wish to be challenging and experimental and free to represent the world in their own way. Sometimes their explorations are guided by theory, or by deductions from current theory, but more usually the theory acts in a consulting or supporting role. To explain themselves, obtain employment and get their work sold, their protagonists extract what they can from notions and fashionable opinions that float round the art world. The result may be a patchwork of inconsistent ideas imperfectly understood, but critics, gallery owners and writers of concert notes ask for these viewpoints, and artists find it comforting to have them.
Many twentieth-century poetry movements boil down to very dubious notions, as they have over the centuries. Poets issue statements which are vague, wildly inconsistent and hardly followed through. Manifestos urge crusades to claim aesthetic new ground, which exists only through their own misunderstandings. Critics announce new associations of poets, who themselves deny such a movement exists. Even more vexing is radical theory. Even if largely a tangled mass of assertions and misunderstandings of technicalities, it is still necessary reading. For all its deficiencies, theory can focus attention on what writers should be trying to do, act as a prophylactic against the false and stultifying, and open up disciplines that support writing and are fascinating in their own right.

A Correct Theory?

Is there now a generally correct theory of literature? No. Is there a body of thought that is broadly accepted? Far from it: the scene is a battlefield of opinions and assertions, with little supporting thought or experiment.
What then? First we shall find in this section that matters are not much better in other disciplines, though the battle is more discretely conducted. And second we should note the particular value of literature, which is so often lost sight of. Logic and mathematics seem more worthy contenders for truth, and science is more practical. But by investigating the alternatives, meeting them on their own ground, we find that logic and science have enormous shortcomings. Both work towards abstraction, but cannot find a bedrock for their beliefs. There are many types of logic and mathematics, and each is not wholly compatible with others. Science in the end comes down to procedures which long experience has found to work.
The arts have a different conception of truth, and aim at fullness and fidelity to human experience. By a twist of fate, science itself — through complexity theory, research in brain functioning, and in some aspects of linguistics — is now suggesting that poetry's view is not simply a viable alternative, but in some ways closer to how human beings really function.

Worth Pursuing?

What should also be obvious, but is perhaps worth stressing, is that literature is not built on or even assessed by theory. It is all too easy to justify an atrocious piece of writing by selective appeal to abstruse matters. Literary theory explores and attempts to evaluate the bases of criticism, but literary criticism itself is a practical activity carried out in a community of interests. Ability comes with experience, by reading and thinking on a wide range of material, literature and criticism. And most particularly by writing ourselves, even if it's only notes, thumbnail sketches, or letters to friends. For those who do wish to press on, I offer below a defence of literary theory for the jobbing poet.

Literary Theory: A Defence

Why bother with theory? Fascinating to academics, but surely not to the professional writer who has a living to earn? But poetry is more a calling than a career. The larger publishing houses subsidize their poetry publications with profits elsewhere: best-sellers, gardening and cookery books, textbook updates. Poets support themselves by reviewing, adjudicating, workshops and the odd radio appearance. Poetry is a minority interest, where commercial rules seem hardly to apply. {1}
But surely there are standards? We can learn from the pronouncements of fellow practitioners: scan the reviews in the more literary publications, analyze the essays in academic journals and leading poetry magazines. Of course, and so we should. But poets disagree, a good deal more privately than in print, and there exists not a consensus but a kaleidoscope of unexamined and partisan opinions. Reviewers do what is possible, but the fee doesn't allow more than a cursory reading, and it is usually the shape of their own copy that exercises their minds. Academics generally fight shy of contemporary work. Poetry magazines, then: the record of professional judgement? Sometimes. But in general their editors are ludicrously overworked — with subscriptions to chase, copy to type, hundreds if not thousands of submissions to read between issues. Whatever the claims, space for the unknown poet is limited, and star billing in a top magazine very long odds indeed. {2}
Supply has always exceeded demand in the arts, however, and competition is only a little sharper than the usual dogfights of business and the professions. Wherever we look — Tang China, Republican Rome, Mughal Delhi — we find the literati have promoted and traduced each other in their scramble to the top. Time sorts out reputations, separating the good from the indifferent, and we must remember that if Wang Wei was known throughout China, his greater contemporary Du Fu died destitute and ignored. Literature has always been hard to read, and harder still to assess, and a lifetime's devotion to its intricacies is hardly sufficient to appreciate the better writers in their varied dimensions.
But, you say, but I'm not aspiring to great heights. Something memorable, pleasing and apt is all I intend, just for myself, and my immediate circle of friends. Very well: dispense with theory. Your work will jog along with the great majority, neither original nor necessarily bad. And in the literary world where so much is built on airy hopes and opinions — 75% of US poets never earn anything — there is much to be said for modest realism. {3}
But for those who want to get ahead of the pack? Reviewers play safe, and editors don't write critiques. Workshop conveners do their best, and fellow practitioners are sometimes helpful, but ultimately the judgements will be yours. Only you know, more or less, what you intended. Poems start in odd phrases, an image, a tune in the head, a deeply incoherent pain. How these develop is the poetry. There is nothing difficult in stringing words together, not the backbreaking labour of novel-writing, or the exhaustion of getting actors to stage your play properly. It's in responding to what you have written, feeling it, understanding it, extending its possibilities with imagination, honesty and sensitivity. And that means very fine discriminations. Verbal originality, wide sympathies, generosity of heart and a compassion for the human condition are essential for poetry, but they are nothing without continual exercise and training. Character above all makes an artist, the infinite capacity to be honest and take pains. And those pains constitute criticism, self-criticism, which cannot be evaded. Learn all that you can if you would see your work clearly, with the depth and detachment to understand its effect on others.
Very well: criticism, you say, but not theory. One is practical and is judged on the sense it makes of the poem: how well it explains, illuminates and appraises. The second is aesthetics, a branch of philosophy, an altogether more intellectually strenuously activity. The critic must realize as completely and sensitively as possible whatever is before him on the page. {5} The philosopher aims for generality, consistency and objectivity, drawing his arguments ever tighter to avoid refutation. Even aesthetics, which must serve both masters, finds the combination uncomfortable, and good philosophers are not noticeably good critics, nor the other way round. But unless criticism is content to remain personal preference, an unsupported elaboration of gut feelings, there must be some larger body of understanding, some agreement as to what poetry is and does.
Possibly that understanding will only be secondary to begin with, before analysis feeds through into our responses. Poetry is initially an event, an experience, something arousing delight and approval. We do not conjure up theory as we read or listen. But afterwards we consider, reread, re-enjoy. Theory helps us to map out those responses, think what they amount to. It is surely a common observation that responses are not settled, that appreciation comes slowly, after much effort. Criticism is not a handing down of judgements, but an education in our own responses, of faculties which we need to appraise and extend our own work. And our poems also shift from day to day in our appraisal, until they arrive at what our skills and time cannot materially improve.
But what purpose does theory serve in the immediate present, before we have grown to critical maturity? Perhaps we should call it a book of reference, something resembling those guides to grammar we consult when we're unsure of some expression. Theory will not dissuade us from calling something banal or plodding, but we shall know the grounds of such judgements. And if we reflect further we shall find ourselves asking more searching questions. While everyone wrote in much the same way, as in Augustan England, guiding principles could remain unexamined, but that is not the case today. Widely different views of art and society are canvassed in contemporary literature, and these determine how we respond to what grows increasingly more challenging and specialized.

Radical Theory

Many commentators would disagree. {6} There has been altogether too much theory of late: wildly speculative, politically-motivated, opaque and unhelpful. A bludgeoning style, riddled with non sequiturs and appeals to fashionable gurus, destructive of literature and a good deal else. Perhaps so. Large sections of current literary theory are preposterous, too wrong-headed to be worth untangling by the professional philosopher, an affront to commonsense and practical experience. But the older procedures of marshalling fact and argument are apparently tainted with the shortcomings of western society, complicit with its cheap intellectualizations, its hypocrisies and technical barbarism. {7} Perhaps the personal and the authentic, what literature has championed down the ages, have been set aside by a rampant materialism. Academic life has been terrorized by crass market forces, literature prostituted, the publishing houses hijacked by lawyers and accountants indifferent to art. {7} Yes, but one weapon remains: language itself. From its obvious imperfections, its ad hoc growth, and the mysteries of its ultimate creation, can be created a belief that meaning is a delusion, a vanity of vanities, a code that ramifies into itself, with no real anchorage on the world or our affections.
Perhaps the English Departments, into which radical criticism irrupted in the late sixties and seventies were slow to appreciate the hopes and misunderstandings employed. Perhaps they were not trained, these mild-mannered academics, in the linguistics, psychiatry, politics and aesthetics that now seemed necessary, and they found academic colleagues kept quietly to the other side. But that has changed, and battle lines can now be seen zigzagging between contending parties, most particularly in the Internet resources.
But the rest should not blithely ignore the issue. Radical theory rules in many English departments and in countless literary publications. Unless your productions observe current fads they will be rejected. Most certainly it is not sufficient to study the market and adopt the right dress codes. You will be found out, your slumming despised. Your work must positively reek of the right attitudes if it is to pass beneath the gaze of editorial boards. Cynical advice? Remember that to be published regularly calls for a long and coolly thought-out strategy. Poems have to look right. In poet and poem, first appearances count, and go on counting throughout the selection process.
But there is another reason for attending to theory. Poetry is the workshop of language, the most acute and comprehensive way we have of expressing ourselves. And in poetry the medium is words. Prose may employ ready-made phrases — generally has to, given the needs of a busy world — but poetry works at a deeper level. One essential distinction between poetry and prose — and only one: refer to aesthetics for the arguments — lies in the more sustained and elaborate attention paid to its constituent parts. Words for poets have meanings, appropriate uses, associations, connotations, etymologies, histories of use and misuse. They conjure up images, feelings, shadowy depths and glinting surfaces. Their properties are marvellous, endless, not to be guessed at from casual inspection. And each property — meaning, association, weight, colour, duration, shape, texture — changes as words are combined in phrases, rhythms, lines, stanzas and completed poems. Out of these properties the poetry is built, even if the end cannot be entirely foreseen but grows out of the very process of deployment, that continual, two-way dialogue between writer and poem. Radical theory was often wildly incoherent, but it dared to ask what had been overlooked in more traditional approaches. What purpose does language serve? How does it mediate between ourselves and the outside world? What happens when we view language through such disciplines as linguistics, psychiatry, sociology?
The exercise needed doing, {9} even if the radical critics who went shopping to continental philosophy came home with indigestible notions. Continental philosophy can be luminously clear, full of insights and imaginative suggestions, but a long training is needed for sensible use. The radical critics cut corners: concepts were snatched at, names dropped, and the whole wrapped up in a worse-than-academic style. Perhaps they more lost themselves in these dense verbal thickets, but the radical critics were not wrong in their basic intuitions. Language is an important matter, and deserves the writer's continued study. Certainly the radical critics erred in their choice of champions — psychiatry, semiotics, Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Marxism — but the exploration is valuable if conducted properly. Rhetoric, hermeneutics, metaphor theory, depth psychology, brain functioning and cognitive science do give back a key role to writers, though it is one where they must stop playing God, and assume more mundane and human activities.
What these new approaches offer can be seen here. A Summing Up concentrates on the approaches that survive scrutiny. The Criticism sections show the theories in operation. Nonetheless, there remain two traditional, perhaps inveterate, resistances to theory. One argues that literary theory is unnecessary, ineffective, restrictive and reductive. The second contends that theory has done more harm than good to twentieth century literary criticism. To these we now turn.

Theory is Unnecessary

Writing is a craft learnt by emulation and practice. {10} And in the harsh world of commercial publishing, novels, guides, biographies and feature articles make their way on their perceived merits, not on underlying theory. Indeed something showing its stitching can only be maladroit or unfinished.
That does not mean that theory was irrelevant or unhelpful. Theory at its most basic, those practical maxims that writers carry in their heads — maintain the viewpoint, shun cliché, employ the active tense — are applications of the aesthetic demands for pleasing shape and emotive appeal.
No doubt theory has its limits. Five minutes of practical demonstration may be worth an hour of written instructions, and there are many areas of everyday skill — tasting of food, riding a bicycle — where language is particular limited. {11} But that shortcoming is with language rather than with theory, and if theory is no better than the language it employs, it need not be worse.
But theory must nonetheless make sense in its own terms — i.e. must not only explain the "facts" but combine those explanations into a larger, autonomous and self-referencing whole. Of course there are dangers in such a coherence view of truth. But a theory that glibly explained everything would not be theory but a myth. Ideas grow by resistance, by being measured against experience, and there is nothing in the world which is free of assumptions and preconceptions, however much familiarity may persuade us otherwise.

Theory is Ineffectual

But not only is theory unnecessary, it is argued, but ineffectual. See how many theories have gone their way, and yet the giants of literature — Homer, Kalidasa, Du Fu, Rumi, Shakespeare — bask unmolested on the peaks of Parnassus. On the contemporary scene there may be junketings of the literary stockmarket, but the canon of English literature remains largely the same. New techniques and theories may radically change the scientific disciplines — undoubtedly do: witness the electron microscope or plate tectonics — but theory in the arts has no such power.
Is that true? Past writers do not enjoy their reputations regardless, but through the various schools of criticism. The theories were no doubt incomplete but gave novel perspectives and insights, which we inherit. Often a writer's stature was by no means apparent to contemporaries. Success, popularity, giving the age what it demanded — yes, but the public is ever fickle and most writers went through periods of neglect or opprobrium. Appreciation grows as work is read and discussed, and the terminology of that discussion is theory, something additional to the work. We read not to rank but to enjoy, and to understand our own lives a little better. {12} That we do recognize the defining elements in great writing is testimony to our ability to abstract, generalize, derive ideas and concepts — in short to make theories and test them.

Theory is a Diversion

We first strive to understand a poem, then ask ourselves what is good, what is bad, and why. But all too often, in books, journal and magazine articles, a rather circular argument appears. The poem was written by an author of importance. We know that because literary theory has asserted so. Important authors write important poems. We can therefore dispense with evaluative analysis of the poem in question, and simply display our erudition by showing how the poem conforms to certain tenets of contemporary theory. In fact, we'd be wise to dispense with criticism, since Professors X, Y and Z have staked their reputation on the writer's importance, and we shall need the favourable opinion of them, and of the literary community at large, if we are to advance in our academic careers.
Much of that is surely inevitable, and contemporary journals naturally look for contemporary viewpoints. But theories still need to be tested, to prove that do indeed explain properly why we like certain aspects of a poem. We need to see a. that the theory explains our liking better than do other theories, b. that the theory fully explains that liking, and c. that all aspects of the poem's quality are explained by the theory. If the theory fails in these respects, then any decently critical approach requires that we start probing and modifying the theory. Repeated testing, and not appeal to authorities, is what makes theory reliable.

Theory is Reductive

But a more general objection is urged. Theory is pernicious, a generalization from actual works of literature, and therefore reductive. {13} Determine what is common to the very different tragedies of Sophocles, Shakespeare and Racine, and we shall have a very meagre yardstick with which to measure the work of other playwrights. And we shall miss the ways these masters reflected and transcended the genre and expectations of their times.
Of course. But theory is not simple generalization. Newton is not honoured for observing that objects invariably fell to earth but by intuiting and then substantiating his general laws of motion — laws which were far from obvious but which linked and explained the most diverse of phenomena. Traditionally, science is a search for invariable relations and regularities that appear when phenomena are studied by the procedures laid down by the relevant community. Perhaps there is now a realization that the reductive approach works badly for social and biological behaviour. But whatever theories may represent, they operate on a level different from the phenomena they explain, and are subject to different requirements: to coherence, explanatory power, comprehensiveness, simplicity and elegance.
Literature is not science. We do not seek in literary theory the replicable results of scientific experiment, nor expect its clinching predictions. But we do want illumination, a view deeper and more comprehensive than before. And as for definition, which is a separate requirement, the difficulties of precise and unambiguous specification were long ago considered by Wittgenstein's theory of games. If we intuit greatness in Shakespeare, it is literary theory that provides that intuition with its wider habitation and a name. Theory crystallizes, develops and tests that intuition on a broader stage.

Theory is Restrictive

Can we be blinkered by theory, refusing to recognize excellence because current theory supplies no suitable criteria for judgment? Undoubtedly: history is littered with writers neglected in their lifetime who later became important: Leopard, Hopkins, Vallejo, etc. Yet it was not theory as such that delayed recognition, but a narrow provincialism of taste, the very thing that theory with its wider viewpoints seeks to overcome.
Perhaps theory does not possess such liberality and tolerance, but is coercive and possessive? So contend the irrationalists. Paul Feyerabend argued that true science was being stifled by the scientific establishment, an institution as self-serving and undemocratic as the medieval Christian Church. Barthes argued on Marxist lines that ideology created meaning. Foucault saw language as an instrument of state repression.
Some evidence was provided, more by way of illustration than proof perhaps. And certainly science polices its communities, their practices and their habits of belief. The objectivity of the scientific paper is a deception, a rhetoric employed to publicize personal achievement under the guise of selfless furtherance of knowledge. But then language is a complex web of semantic interactions in which there is no sharp distinction between the individual and public or between the literal and the metaphoric. {14}
Additionally, and very importantly, however, language is a social construction, and a collective representation, so that discrepancies between the real and imagined soon crop up, a point John Davidson used to validate his very different theory of meaning. Do such discrepancies appear? Not to any obvious extent. So what remains to the irrationalists? We all suffer, they suppose, from the collective and sustained delusions that psychoanalysts claim to understand and cure. And the evidence for such delusions? None; there can't be, as the ever cunning superego removes all knowledge of our sickness. Well then: we turn to the cures of psychoanalysis, and find them equally nonexistent. {15}

Criticism Misled

So to the second group of arguments, that literary criticism has been distracted from its proper job by an over-reliance on critical theory. Is this so? Probably yes, but with this proviso. It is not theory per se that led criticism astray, but the wrong theories. Many scholars pointed out shortcomings with earlier theories of literature, but there were few attempts to build better. Humanism with its inherent belief in the perfectibility of man, New Criticism with its simplistic psychology, Structuralism with its mathematical analogies between literature and society, semiotics which misread its originator, Poststructuralists with theories contrary to common sense and the authorities quoted — surely these should have been overturned? Perhaps it was academic caution, the realization that no profit was to be had in fishing these troubled waters. Or the increasing specialization in university life that kept scholars on the narrow escalators of their careers.
Yet perfectly sensible theory has been available throughout the twentieth century. Aesthetics is not easy reading, nor much developed in Anglo-American schools of philosophy, but literary scholars might well have gone back to the philosophers from whom Coleridge drew his inspiration. They might have read Collingwood or Dewey or Cassirer. Or they might simply have asked themselves what spiritual or practical or ethical good was conferred by the award of a degree in English Literature.

Conclusions: Place of Theory

What conclusion can we reach, reviewing the vagaries of theory and criticism of the last century? How can these notes possibly help in the writing of poetry?
In these ways:
1. Theory requires us to look at the larger picture. Had literature been approached with some grounding in aesthetics, some realization that expression, purpose, fidelity to life, and formal aspects all had their part of play, we might have had poets prepared to go out and write cogently on matters of deep and lasting importance. It is at least to the credit of radical criticism that it took seriously, and still takes seriously, the philosophical issues involved.
2. Though much contemporary theory serves only to perplex and discourage the contemporary writer, there are important questions raised. Hence the Theory section, which provide material to critically assess, to separate the plausible from the bogus, and to put down intellectual roots.
3. The subjects which current literary theory claims to oversee are fascinating domains in their own right. Their study enriches, deepens and invigorates our understanding of the world. Writing which remains in ignorance of larger issues condemns itself to provincialism, neither interesting to the present age or those to come. No doubt the subjects touched upon are too complex to be digested in their entirety, but these notes may enable the reader to understand the basic issues in the increasing amount of material becoming available on the Internet.
4. Indeed, far from inhibiting expression, a true understanding of theory is an immensely liberating experience. Rules all have some basis in theory, which the writer must understand to escape from blind conformity.
5. Theory can also be the means to better writing. Whatever the beginner supposes, his ideas and outlooks come from somewhere, and the self-evident is usually the shallow and unexamined public mind. Humanism was inspiring but did not stoop to verification. Radical theory is closer to contemporary realities, but is often shabby in detail. Both can be brought into hermeneutics and a deeper view of human functioning that science is now developing. What we understand of ourselves, and the world, is what we write about, and that understanding in the end needs outlooks, world-views and philosophies. At its very least, theory serves as a prophylactic against the preposterous and stultifying, and may provide something of the unifying inspiration that artists seek in their work.
But not only artists. We are all social creatures. Communication, so necessary and instinctive to us, can be done well or badly, so that inescapably art enters into all human activities. Many attempts have been made this century to identify the distinguishing features that separate art from non-art, poetry from prose, the authentic from the secondhand. They have failed. Art is too various and pervasive to be compartmentalized.
That is no argument against standards, however, or reason for not doing well what is anyway inescapable. No doubt that calls for many human qualities, and will involve our human frailties, individual and communal. Yet imagination is not a private indulgence but an inheritance with demands and responsibilities through which we learn the geography of our common home.