LITERATURE AND ITS STUDY
What is Literature?
The word 'literature' comes from Latin 'litteraturae' meaning 'writings'. The word has been commonly used since the 18th century alongwith the French term 'belles letters' meaning 'fine letters'. It refers to fictional and imaginative being commonly divided into poetry,prose fiction and drama. It also designates any writings that are addressed to general audience and that are distinguished in form, expression and emotional power. This includes philosophy, history, and even scientific works. On the basis of this larger sense the philosophical writings of Plato and William James, the history of Gibbon, the scientific essays of T H Huxley and the psychoanalytic lectures of Sigmund Freud may also be called 'literary'.
As imaginative writing 'literature' has an evaluative as well as descriptive function due to which its proper use has become a matter of controversy. Modern critical movements stress the strong but covert role played by gender, race and class in establishing what has been accounted as literature or in forming the ostensibly timeless criteria of great and cannonical literature or in distinguishing between 'high literature' and 'mass literature'.
Literature is composed of those books which, by reason of their subject matter and their mode of treating it, are of general human interest and in which the element of form and the pleasure which form gives are to be regarded as essential.
A work of literature differs from a specialised treatise on astronomy,politics,economics,philosophy or history because it appeals, not to a particular class of readers, but to men and women as men and women. Whether literature imparts knowledge or not but surely one ideal end is to yield aesthetic satisfaction by the manner in which it handles its theme.
The Study of Literature
Why do we care for literature? We care for literature on account of its deep and lasting human significance. A great book grows directly out of life. In reading such books we are brought into large, close and fresh relations with life.
Literature is a vital record of what men have seen in life, what they have experienced of it and what they thought and felt about it. Thus literature is an expression of life through the medium of language.
As literature grows directly out of life hence we have to seek its sources in life itself. The great impulses behind literature may be marked as
a) our desire for self expression
b) our interest in people and their doing
c) our interest in the world of reality in which we live
d) our interest in the world of imagination which we conjure into existence
e) our love for form as form.
We are strongly impelled to confide to others what we think and feel; hence the literature which directly expresses the thoughts and feelings of the writer.
We are strongly interested in men and women, their lives, motives, passions, relationship; hence we have the literature which deals with the great drama of human life and action.
We are fond of telling others about the things we have seen or imagined; hence we have the literature of description.
And where the aesthetic impulse is present at all, we take a special satisfaction in the mere shaping of expression into forms of beauty; hence the very existence of literature as an art.
Man is a social animal hence due to his actual nature he is unable to keep his experiences, observations, ideas, emotions and fancies to himself. On the contrary he is under stress of a constant desire to impart them to those about him. The various forms of literature are to be regarded as only so many channels which he has opened up for himself for the discharge of his sociality through media which in themselves testify to his paramount desire to blend expression with artistic creation.
Being almost as varied as life itself literature deals with a variety of subjects. Just for practical purposes we may arrange them into five large groups :
1) the personal experiences of the individual as individual --- the things which make up the sum total of his private life, outer and inner.
2) the experiences of man as man --- those great common questions of life and death, sin and destiny, God, man's relation with God, the hope of the race here and hereafter--- which transcend the limits of the personal lot and belong to the race.
3) the relations of the individual with his fellows, or the entire social world, with all its activities and problems.
4) the external world of nature and our relations with this.
5) man's own effort to create and express under the various forms of literature and art.
On the basis of the above points we may thus distinguish five classes of literary production ----
a) the literature of purely personal experience
b) the literature of the common life of man as man
c) the literature of the social world under all its different aspects
d) the literature which treats of nature
e) the literature which treats of literature and art.
By combining the above mentioned points we may get a comprehensive scheme of classification. First we have the literature of self expression which includes different kinds of lyric poetry, the poetry of meditation and argument and the elegy; the essay and the treatise of personal nature, and the literature of artistic and literary criticism.
Secondly we have the literature in which the writer, instead of going down into himself, goes out of himself into the world of external human life and activity; this includes history and biography, the ballad and the epic, the romance in verse and prose, the story in verse and prose, the novel and the drama.
Thirdly we have the literature of description, comprising in the books of travel, the descriptive essay and poem, some fairly minor forms of literary art.
All these divisions contain different elements of composition. In the first place there are the elements furnished by life itself which constitute the raw material for literature. Then there are elements contributed by the author in his fashioning of such raw material into this or that form of literary art. This has the intellectual element, the emotional element, the imaginative element and the element of composition and style.
Literature, according to Matthew Arnold, is a criticism of life but this can only mean that it is an interpretation of life as life shapes itself in the mind of the interpreter. A famous French epigram says "art is life seen through a temperament", for the mirror which the artist holds upto the world about him is necessarily the mirror of his own personality.
A great book is born of the brain and heart of its author. Therefore it is to the man in the book that we should begin with. We want first of all to become good readers and we can become good readers only when we make our reading a matter of close and sympathetic companionship. "Personal experience is the basis of all real literature."
The mark of a really good book is that it has something fresh and original to say and it says this in a fresh and independent way.
We should distinguish between what Carlyle calls the 'genuine voices' and mere 'echoes'. It is necessary to keep in mind the essential difference between the literature which draws its life directly from personality and experience, and that which draws its life mainly at second hand from contact with the personality and experience of others.
Our study of literature thus begins in a very simple and humble way. We take a great book, and we try to penetrate as deeply as we can into its personal life. We make our reading of it to the fullest extent possible to us, a matter of actual interface between its author and ourselves.
What George Eliot said of art in general is equally true of the art of literature. She said "it is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot." Thus literature makes us partakers in a life larger, richer and more varied than we ourselves can ever know of our own individual knowledge. It opens up new fields of experience and new lines of thought and speculation. It also carries us beyond the pinched and meagre humanity of our everyday round of existence into contact with those fresh, strong and magnetic personalities who have embodied themselves in the world's great books.
Between the mere reader of books and the students of literature the true difference is that the one reads in a haphazard and desultory way, while the other's reading is organised according to some regular order or plan. It is only when we introduce method into our reading that we become students.
Our most natural course is to pass directly from the reading of books to the study of authors. Our first aim being to establish personal relations with a man in his work. We want to realise his genius in its wholeness and variety. To achieve this end we have to consider his works, not separately, but in their relations with one another , and thus with the man himself , the growth of his mind, the changes of his temper and thought, the influence upon him of his experiences in the world.Those records of himself which he has left us in his books are not to be regarded as detached and independent expressions of his personality. They are rather to be taken as a corpus, or organic whole.
The most natural and profitable of all plans of study is the chronological ---- the study of a writer's work in the order of their production. Taken in this way such works become for us the luminous record of his inner life and of his craftsmanship.
Our next step is to sharpen our impression of his personality by comparing and contrasting him with others -- with men who worked in the same field, took up the same subject, dealt with the same problems, wrote under similar conditions etc.
In our study of the personal life in literature we shall of course be greatly helped by the judicious use of good biography. Our interest in the writings of any great author being once aroused, the desire will inevitably be stimulated to learn something of the man himself.
We are fully alive to the danger lest biography may too easily degenerate into idle and impertinent gossip about unimportant things. In good biography it will be found that a line is commonly drawn between the important, intrinsic and fundamental aspects of experience and character and those which are merely trivial, superficial and accidental.
We should cultivate a spirit of sympathy with our author. Literature contains the revelation of many different personalities and we ourselves have our well marked leanings and antipathies. To reach the best in literature, as in life, sympathy is a preliminary condition. Only through sympathy can we ever get into living touch with another soul.
While still dealing with literature on the personal side style or expression first becomes important for us. It is very commonly supposed that the formal element in literature is a matter for the specialist only. This is a serious mistake. The study of style is itself full of broad interest for every reader who seeks to enter into the human life in literature. The choice of the words, the turn of the phrases, the structure of the sentences, their peculiar rhythm and cadence -- these are all curiously instinct with the individuality of the writer.
Style is fundamentally a personal quality. According to Carlyle style is not the coat of a writer, but his skin. And as sincerity is the foundation principle of all true literature, so it is the foundation principle of all true style. A man who has something really personal to say will seldom fail to find a really personal way in which to say it.
"Literature is the personal use or exercise of language. That this is so..... proved from the fact that one author uses it so differently from another.... . The throng and succession of ideas, thoughts, feelings, imaginations, speculations, which pass within him, the abstractions, the juxtapositions, the comparisons, the discriminations, the conceptions, which are so original in him, his views of external things, his judgements upon life, manners, and history, the exercise of his wit, of his humour, of his depth, of his sagacity, all these innumerable and incessant creations, the very production and throbbing of his intellect, does he image forth.... in a corresponding language, which is as multi-form as this inward mental action itself, and analogous to it, the faithful expression of his intense personality, attending on his inward world of thought as its very shadow; so that we might as well say that one man's shadow is another's as that the style of a really gifted mind can belong to any but himself."
While the majority of men use the language of their time as they find it, the man of genius subjects such language to his own purpose, and moulds it according to his own peculiarities. The difference is sometimes so great that we may know a language very well in an ordinary way, and yet be unable to enjoy perfectly some of the greatest writers in it.
As we pass from individual books to their authors, so by an equally natural transition we pass from an individual author to the age in which he lived, and the nation to which he belonged. A great writer is not an isolated fact. He has his affiliations with the present and the past. He leads us inevitably to his contemporaries and predecessors and to a national literature as a developing organism having a continuous life of its own yet passing in the course of its evolution through many varying phases.
A nation's literature is not a miscellaneous collection of books which happen to have been written in the same tongue or within a certain geographical area. It is the progressive revelation, age by age, of such nation's mind and character.
The study of literature is a form of travel. It enables us to move about freely among the minds of other races. It gives us the power of travelling also in time. We become familiar not only with the minds of other races, but with the minds of other epochs as well.
The history of any nation's literature, then, is the record of the unfolding of that nation's genius and character under one of its most important forms of expression. History deals mainly with the externals of a people's civilisation, portrays the outward manner of their existence, and tells us what they did or failed to do in the practical work of the world. But it is to their literature that we must turn if we would understand their mental and moral characteristics, realise what they sought and achieved in the world of inner activity, and follow through the stages of their changing fortunes the ebb and flow of the forces which fed their emotional energies and shaped their intellectual and spiritual life.
The study of the literature of an age as the expression of its characteristic spirit and ideals is a singularly interesting and fertile line of enquiry. Even the most casual reader is soon struck by the many qualities exhibited in common by writers belonging to the same time.
As there is a common racial character in the literary production of any given people, so therefore there is a common time-character in the literary production of such people at any given period. A nation's life has its moods of exultation and depression; its epochs now of strong faith and straneous idealism, now of doubt, struggle, and disillusion, now of unbelief and flippant disregard for the sanctities of existence; and while the manner of expression will vary greatly with the individuality of each writer, the dominant spirit of the hour, whatever that may, will directly or indirectly reveal itself in his work; since every man, according to Goethe's dictum, is a citizen of his age as well as of his country, and since, as Renan puts it, "one belongs to one's century and race even when one reacts against one's century and race."
Thus when we speak of periods of literature, we have in mind something far more than the establishment of such chronological divisions as may be arbitrarily made for the sake of mere convenience. It refers to those distinctive qualities of theme, treatment, manner, spirit, tone, by which the literature of each period as a whole is marked, which are more or less profound in all the writers of that period.
Therefore we have to study the literature of an age as a great body of work expressing a common spirit under many diverse individual forms. We may do this by looking no further than literature itself. Our chief object will then be to investigate the origin, growth and decay of literary fashions and tastes, the formations of schools, the rise and fall of critical standards and ideals, the influence of particular men in initiating fresh tendencies and giving a new direction to literature.
Taine attempted to interpret literature in a rigorously scientific way by the application of his famous formula of the race, the milieu, and the moment. By race he means the hereditary temperament and disposition of a people; by milieu he means the totality of their surroundings, their climate, physical environment, political institutions, social conditions etc; and by moment he means the spirit of the period or of that particular stage of national development which has been been reached at any given time.
Taine's interest is not in literature as literature but in literature as a document in the history of national psychology, and that thus, subordinating as he does the study of literature to the study of society.
To relate literature to the whole world of varied activity of which it is one expression, is not to destroy its living interest, but to make that interest broader and deeper; without ceasing to be essentially individual, literature thus comes to be more comprehensively human, as a record of the life of man as well as of the lives of men.
The comparative method, the importance of which has already been recognised in the study of individual authors, becomes of great service when we are dealing with literature historically.
Even if, our interest in literature being of the most narrowly personal kind, we set out with the purpose of confining ourselves to the writings of a single author, we are certain sooner or later to discover that we shall never properly understand such author if we remain obstinately within the limits of his own personality and work. We are repeatedly reminded by him of the influence of exerted upon his thought and style by the thought and style of other men, and to estimate him rightly we have to take account of such influence, to consider its sources, range and significance, and to measure its extent for good and evil.
In the general evolution of literature, will the genius of one race or age be found to have influenced ------ sometimes slightly, sometimes to the extent of turning it aside from its natural course of development, and of almost destroying for a reason its essential characteristics ------ the genius of another age or race.
One another aspect of the historical study of literature is the historical study of style. Style is not an accidental or arbitrary feature of literature but an organic product of vital forces. Some considerations of the larger movements of style from age to age, and of their significance, of the causes, literary and extra-literary, which have been combined to bring them about, and of their connection with corresponding changes in the inner life of literature, will come to constitute an almost necessary part of our study of the literature of any given period. Whatever affects the inner life of literature will both directly or indirectly affect at the same time that outer organism which the inner life fashions for its manifestations.
Thus, in the way in which he expresses himself no less than in what he has to express, every individual author will betray something of his affiliations with his age; and the form of his work, like the substance and tone of it, will , however personal to himself, find its place in the history of those comprehensive moments which, diversely as they may be represented in the writings of different men, are movements nevertheless in which they are all involved.
Style is the index of personality.
One essential characteristic of any piece of literature is, that, whatever its theme, it yields aesthetic pleasure by the manner by the manner in which such theme is handled. Beyond its intellectual and emotional content, therefore, beyond its fundamental quality of life, it appeals to us by reason of its form. This means that literature is a fine art , and that, like all fine arts, it has its own laws and conditions, like the laws and conditions of all arts, may be analysed and formulated, one another phase of literary study is obviously the study of literary technique.
Every stage in the history of play, poem, or novel, from raw material to finished product, will now come in for scrutiny; we shall observe the conditions under which the given work was wrought; the technical difficulties which the artist had to encounter; the way in which these difficulties were met and the extent to which they were overcome; the effects which he designed to obtain and the measure of his success in obtaining them; and from the consideration of these and other such points we shall pass naturally to a critical judgement upon the qualities of his work as a piece of literature --- upon its merrits and defects, its power and limitations, when regarded simply as drama or poem or novel.
Other than the personal side and the historical side of style there is one more side in which style may be studied and that is the technical or rhetorical side. Experts have drawn up for us various list of the elements which should combine in the making of a good style. There are the intellectual elements --- the precision which arises from the right use of the right words; the lucidity which results from the proper disposition of such proper words in the formation of sentences; propriety, or the harmony which should exist between the thing said and the phrasing of it. There are the emotional elements of force, energy, suggestiveness, or the elements by which a writer conveys not only his thought but feeling, stimulating in his reader sentiments and passions akin to his own, and calling up vivid pictures of things he wishes his reader to see with him. There are the aesthetic elements of music, grace, beauty, charm, which make style a pleasure in itself apart from the thought and feeling of which it may be the vehicle.
The art of the artist is to hide the art and the business of the critic is to find it again. But we must be on our guard lest in our search for the art the true results of the art may be lost for us. Analysis must not be allowed to out run its proper purpose and to become an end in itself.
To stand before a picture and to forget its totality of quality and effect as a picture in the interest which the method and technique of the painter may arouse, is to confuse the means of artistic study with the end which should always be kept in view. So it is with the study of a piece of literary art; for here too the ultimate secret of its power over us must be sought in our own personal apprehension, not of the artist's method in the creation of its life and beauty, but in the life and beauty themselves.
Good reading is better than all scholarship, and the cultivation of the art of good reading is infinitely more important than all the acquisitions of scholastic learning. The study of literature in all its phases and details may be so planned and conducted as to render our enjoyment of literature ampler and richer.
with extensive inputs from:
A Glossary of Literary Terms by M H Abams
An Introduction to the Study of Literature by W H Hudson
As imaginative writing 'literature' has an evaluative as well as descriptive function due to which its proper use has become a matter of controversy. Modern critical movements stress the strong but covert role played by gender, race and class in establishing what has been accounted as literature or in forming the ostensibly timeless criteria of great and cannonical literature or in distinguishing between 'high literature' and 'mass literature'.
Literature is composed of those books which, by reason of their subject matter and their mode of treating it, are of general human interest and in which the element of form and the pleasure which form gives are to be regarded as essential.
A work of literature differs from a specialised treatise on astronomy,politics,economics,philosophy or history because it appeals, not to a particular class of readers, but to men and women as men and women. Whether literature imparts knowledge or not but surely one ideal end is to yield aesthetic satisfaction by the manner in which it handles its theme.
The Study of Literature
Why do we care for literature? We care for literature on account of its deep and lasting human significance. A great book grows directly out of life. In reading such books we are brought into large, close and fresh relations with life.
Literature is a vital record of what men have seen in life, what they have experienced of it and what they thought and felt about it. Thus literature is an expression of life through the medium of language.
As literature grows directly out of life hence we have to seek its sources in life itself. The great impulses behind literature may be marked as
a) our desire for self expression
b) our interest in people and their doing
c) our interest in the world of reality in which we live
d) our interest in the world of imagination which we conjure into existence
e) our love for form as form.
We are strongly impelled to confide to others what we think and feel; hence the literature which directly expresses the thoughts and feelings of the writer.
We are strongly interested in men and women, their lives, motives, passions, relationship; hence we have the literature which deals with the great drama of human life and action.
We are fond of telling others about the things we have seen or imagined; hence we have the literature of description.
And where the aesthetic impulse is present at all, we take a special satisfaction in the mere shaping of expression into forms of beauty; hence the very existence of literature as an art.
Man is a social animal hence due to his actual nature he is unable to keep his experiences, observations, ideas, emotions and fancies to himself. On the contrary he is under stress of a constant desire to impart them to those about him. The various forms of literature are to be regarded as only so many channels which he has opened up for himself for the discharge of his sociality through media which in themselves testify to his paramount desire to blend expression with artistic creation.
Being almost as varied as life itself literature deals with a variety of subjects. Just for practical purposes we may arrange them into five large groups :
1) the personal experiences of the individual as individual --- the things which make up the sum total of his private life, outer and inner.
2) the experiences of man as man --- those great common questions of life and death, sin and destiny, God, man's relation with God, the hope of the race here and hereafter--- which transcend the limits of the personal lot and belong to the race.
3) the relations of the individual with his fellows, or the entire social world, with all its activities and problems.
4) the external world of nature and our relations with this.
5) man's own effort to create and express under the various forms of literature and art.
On the basis of the above points we may thus distinguish five classes of literary production ----
a) the literature of purely personal experience
b) the literature of the common life of man as man
c) the literature of the social world under all its different aspects
d) the literature which treats of nature
e) the literature which treats of literature and art.
By combining the above mentioned points we may get a comprehensive scheme of classification. First we have the literature of self expression which includes different kinds of lyric poetry, the poetry of meditation and argument and the elegy; the essay and the treatise of personal nature, and the literature of artistic and literary criticism.
Secondly we have the literature in which the writer, instead of going down into himself, goes out of himself into the world of external human life and activity; this includes history and biography, the ballad and the epic, the romance in verse and prose, the story in verse and prose, the novel and the drama.
Thirdly we have the literature of description, comprising in the books of travel, the descriptive essay and poem, some fairly minor forms of literary art.
All these divisions contain different elements of composition. In the first place there are the elements furnished by life itself which constitute the raw material for literature. Then there are elements contributed by the author in his fashioning of such raw material into this or that form of literary art. This has the intellectual element, the emotional element, the imaginative element and the element of composition and style.
Literature, according to Matthew Arnold, is a criticism of life but this can only mean that it is an interpretation of life as life shapes itself in the mind of the interpreter. A famous French epigram says "art is life seen through a temperament", for the mirror which the artist holds upto the world about him is necessarily the mirror of his own personality.
A great book is born of the brain and heart of its author. Therefore it is to the man in the book that we should begin with. We want first of all to become good readers and we can become good readers only when we make our reading a matter of close and sympathetic companionship. "Personal experience is the basis of all real literature."
The mark of a really good book is that it has something fresh and original to say and it says this in a fresh and independent way.
We should distinguish between what Carlyle calls the 'genuine voices' and mere 'echoes'. It is necessary to keep in mind the essential difference between the literature which draws its life directly from personality and experience, and that which draws its life mainly at second hand from contact with the personality and experience of others.
Our study of literature thus begins in a very simple and humble way. We take a great book, and we try to penetrate as deeply as we can into its personal life. We make our reading of it to the fullest extent possible to us, a matter of actual interface between its author and ourselves.
What George Eliot said of art in general is equally true of the art of literature. She said "it is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot." Thus literature makes us partakers in a life larger, richer and more varied than we ourselves can ever know of our own individual knowledge. It opens up new fields of experience and new lines of thought and speculation. It also carries us beyond the pinched and meagre humanity of our everyday round of existence into contact with those fresh, strong and magnetic personalities who have embodied themselves in the world's great books.
Between the mere reader of books and the students of literature the true difference is that the one reads in a haphazard and desultory way, while the other's reading is organised according to some regular order or plan. It is only when we introduce method into our reading that we become students.
Our most natural course is to pass directly from the reading of books to the study of authors. Our first aim being to establish personal relations with a man in his work. We want to realise his genius in its wholeness and variety. To achieve this end we have to consider his works, not separately, but in their relations with one another , and thus with the man himself , the growth of his mind, the changes of his temper and thought, the influence upon him of his experiences in the world.Those records of himself which he has left us in his books are not to be regarded as detached and independent expressions of his personality. They are rather to be taken as a corpus, or organic whole.
The most natural and profitable of all plans of study is the chronological ---- the study of a writer's work in the order of their production. Taken in this way such works become for us the luminous record of his inner life and of his craftsmanship.
Our next step is to sharpen our impression of his personality by comparing and contrasting him with others -- with men who worked in the same field, took up the same subject, dealt with the same problems, wrote under similar conditions etc.
In our study of the personal life in literature we shall of course be greatly helped by the judicious use of good biography. Our interest in the writings of any great author being once aroused, the desire will inevitably be stimulated to learn something of the man himself.
We are fully alive to the danger lest biography may too easily degenerate into idle and impertinent gossip about unimportant things. In good biography it will be found that a line is commonly drawn between the important, intrinsic and fundamental aspects of experience and character and those which are merely trivial, superficial and accidental.
We should cultivate a spirit of sympathy with our author. Literature contains the revelation of many different personalities and we ourselves have our well marked leanings and antipathies. To reach the best in literature, as in life, sympathy is a preliminary condition. Only through sympathy can we ever get into living touch with another soul.
While still dealing with literature on the personal side style or expression first becomes important for us. It is very commonly supposed that the formal element in literature is a matter for the specialist only. This is a serious mistake. The study of style is itself full of broad interest for every reader who seeks to enter into the human life in literature. The choice of the words, the turn of the phrases, the structure of the sentences, their peculiar rhythm and cadence -- these are all curiously instinct with the individuality of the writer.
Style is fundamentally a personal quality. According to Carlyle style is not the coat of a writer, but his skin. And as sincerity is the foundation principle of all true literature, so it is the foundation principle of all true style. A man who has something really personal to say will seldom fail to find a really personal way in which to say it.
"Literature is the personal use or exercise of language. That this is so..... proved from the fact that one author uses it so differently from another.... . The throng and succession of ideas, thoughts, feelings, imaginations, speculations, which pass within him, the abstractions, the juxtapositions, the comparisons, the discriminations, the conceptions, which are so original in him, his views of external things, his judgements upon life, manners, and history, the exercise of his wit, of his humour, of his depth, of his sagacity, all these innumerable and incessant creations, the very production and throbbing of his intellect, does he image forth.... in a corresponding language, which is as multi-form as this inward mental action itself, and analogous to it, the faithful expression of his intense personality, attending on his inward world of thought as its very shadow; so that we might as well say that one man's shadow is another's as that the style of a really gifted mind can belong to any but himself."
While the majority of men use the language of their time as they find it, the man of genius subjects such language to his own purpose, and moulds it according to his own peculiarities. The difference is sometimes so great that we may know a language very well in an ordinary way, and yet be unable to enjoy perfectly some of the greatest writers in it.
As we pass from individual books to their authors, so by an equally natural transition we pass from an individual author to the age in which he lived, and the nation to which he belonged. A great writer is not an isolated fact. He has his affiliations with the present and the past. He leads us inevitably to his contemporaries and predecessors and to a national literature as a developing organism having a continuous life of its own yet passing in the course of its evolution through many varying phases.
A nation's literature is not a miscellaneous collection of books which happen to have been written in the same tongue or within a certain geographical area. It is the progressive revelation, age by age, of such nation's mind and character.
The study of literature is a form of travel. It enables us to move about freely among the minds of other races. It gives us the power of travelling also in time. We become familiar not only with the minds of other races, but with the minds of other epochs as well.
The history of any nation's literature, then, is the record of the unfolding of that nation's genius and character under one of its most important forms of expression. History deals mainly with the externals of a people's civilisation, portrays the outward manner of their existence, and tells us what they did or failed to do in the practical work of the world. But it is to their literature that we must turn if we would understand their mental and moral characteristics, realise what they sought and achieved in the world of inner activity, and follow through the stages of their changing fortunes the ebb and flow of the forces which fed their emotional energies and shaped their intellectual and spiritual life.
The study of the literature of an age as the expression of its characteristic spirit and ideals is a singularly interesting and fertile line of enquiry. Even the most casual reader is soon struck by the many qualities exhibited in common by writers belonging to the same time.
As there is a common racial character in the literary production of any given people, so therefore there is a common time-character in the literary production of such people at any given period. A nation's life has its moods of exultation and depression; its epochs now of strong faith and straneous idealism, now of doubt, struggle, and disillusion, now of unbelief and flippant disregard for the sanctities of existence; and while the manner of expression will vary greatly with the individuality of each writer, the dominant spirit of the hour, whatever that may, will directly or indirectly reveal itself in his work; since every man, according to Goethe's dictum, is a citizen of his age as well as of his country, and since, as Renan puts it, "one belongs to one's century and race even when one reacts against one's century and race."
Thus when we speak of periods of literature, we have in mind something far more than the establishment of such chronological divisions as may be arbitrarily made for the sake of mere convenience. It refers to those distinctive qualities of theme, treatment, manner, spirit, tone, by which the literature of each period as a whole is marked, which are more or less profound in all the writers of that period.
Therefore we have to study the literature of an age as a great body of work expressing a common spirit under many diverse individual forms. We may do this by looking no further than literature itself. Our chief object will then be to investigate the origin, growth and decay of literary fashions and tastes, the formations of schools, the rise and fall of critical standards and ideals, the influence of particular men in initiating fresh tendencies and giving a new direction to literature.
Taine attempted to interpret literature in a rigorously scientific way by the application of his famous formula of the race, the milieu, and the moment. By race he means the hereditary temperament and disposition of a people; by milieu he means the totality of their surroundings, their climate, physical environment, political institutions, social conditions etc; and by moment he means the spirit of the period or of that particular stage of national development which has been been reached at any given time.
Taine's interest is not in literature as literature but in literature as a document in the history of national psychology, and that thus, subordinating as he does the study of literature to the study of society.
To relate literature to the whole world of varied activity of which it is one expression, is not to destroy its living interest, but to make that interest broader and deeper; without ceasing to be essentially individual, literature thus comes to be more comprehensively human, as a record of the life of man as well as of the lives of men.
The comparative method, the importance of which has already been recognised in the study of individual authors, becomes of great service when we are dealing with literature historically.
Even if, our interest in literature being of the most narrowly personal kind, we set out with the purpose of confining ourselves to the writings of a single author, we are certain sooner or later to discover that we shall never properly understand such author if we remain obstinately within the limits of his own personality and work. We are repeatedly reminded by him of the influence of exerted upon his thought and style by the thought and style of other men, and to estimate him rightly we have to take account of such influence, to consider its sources, range and significance, and to measure its extent for good and evil.
In the general evolution of literature, will the genius of one race or age be found to have influenced ------ sometimes slightly, sometimes to the extent of turning it aside from its natural course of development, and of almost destroying for a reason its essential characteristics ------ the genius of another age or race.
One another aspect of the historical study of literature is the historical study of style. Style is not an accidental or arbitrary feature of literature but an organic product of vital forces. Some considerations of the larger movements of style from age to age, and of their significance, of the causes, literary and extra-literary, which have been combined to bring them about, and of their connection with corresponding changes in the inner life of literature, will come to constitute an almost necessary part of our study of the literature of any given period. Whatever affects the inner life of literature will both directly or indirectly affect at the same time that outer organism which the inner life fashions for its manifestations.
Thus, in the way in which he expresses himself no less than in what he has to express, every individual author will betray something of his affiliations with his age; and the form of his work, like the substance and tone of it, will , however personal to himself, find its place in the history of those comprehensive moments which, diversely as they may be represented in the writings of different men, are movements nevertheless in which they are all involved.
Style is the index of personality.
One essential characteristic of any piece of literature is, that, whatever its theme, it yields aesthetic pleasure by the manner by the manner in which such theme is handled. Beyond its intellectual and emotional content, therefore, beyond its fundamental quality of life, it appeals to us by reason of its form. This means that literature is a fine art , and that, like all fine arts, it has its own laws and conditions, like the laws and conditions of all arts, may be analysed and formulated, one another phase of literary study is obviously the study of literary technique.
Every stage in the history of play, poem, or novel, from raw material to finished product, will now come in for scrutiny; we shall observe the conditions under which the given work was wrought; the technical difficulties which the artist had to encounter; the way in which these difficulties were met and the extent to which they were overcome; the effects which he designed to obtain and the measure of his success in obtaining them; and from the consideration of these and other such points we shall pass naturally to a critical judgement upon the qualities of his work as a piece of literature --- upon its merrits and defects, its power and limitations, when regarded simply as drama or poem or novel.
Other than the personal side and the historical side of style there is one more side in which style may be studied and that is the technical or rhetorical side. Experts have drawn up for us various list of the elements which should combine in the making of a good style. There are the intellectual elements --- the precision which arises from the right use of the right words; the lucidity which results from the proper disposition of such proper words in the formation of sentences; propriety, or the harmony which should exist between the thing said and the phrasing of it. There are the emotional elements of force, energy, suggestiveness, or the elements by which a writer conveys not only his thought but feeling, stimulating in his reader sentiments and passions akin to his own, and calling up vivid pictures of things he wishes his reader to see with him. There are the aesthetic elements of music, grace, beauty, charm, which make style a pleasure in itself apart from the thought and feeling of which it may be the vehicle.
The art of the artist is to hide the art and the business of the critic is to find it again. But we must be on our guard lest in our search for the art the true results of the art may be lost for us. Analysis must not be allowed to out run its proper purpose and to become an end in itself.
To stand before a picture and to forget its totality of quality and effect as a picture in the interest which the method and technique of the painter may arouse, is to confuse the means of artistic study with the end which should always be kept in view. So it is with the study of a piece of literary art; for here too the ultimate secret of its power over us must be sought in our own personal apprehension, not of the artist's method in the creation of its life and beauty, but in the life and beauty themselves.
Good reading is better than all scholarship, and the cultivation of the art of good reading is infinitely more important than all the acquisitions of scholastic learning. The study of literature in all its phases and details may be so planned and conducted as to render our enjoyment of literature ampler and richer.
with extensive inputs from:
A Glossary of Literary Terms by M H Abams
An Introduction to the Study of Literature by W H Hudson
