Chinua Achebe
Achebe, Chinua (1930- ), Nigerian novelist and poet, whose works explore the impact of European culture on African society. Achebe's unsentimental, often ironic books vividly convey the traditions and speech of the Igbo people.
Born in Ogidi, Nigeria, Achebe was educated at the University College of Ibadan (now the University of Ibadan). He subsequently taught at various universities in Nigeria and the United States. Achebe wrote his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), partly in response to what he saw as inaccurate characterizations of Africa and Africans by British authors. The book describes the effects on Igbo society of the arrival of European colonizers and missionaries in the late 1800s. Achebe's subsequent novels No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987) are set in Africa and describe the struggles of the African people to free themselves from European political influences.
During Nigeria's tumultuous political period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Achebe became politically active. Most of his literary works of this time address Nigeria's internal conflict (see Nigeria, Federal Republic of: Civil War). These books include the volumes of poetry Beware, Soul Brother (1971) and Christmas in Biafra (1973), the short-story collection Girls at War (1972), and the children's book How the Leopard Got His Claws (1972). In 1971 Achebe helped to found the influential literary magazine Okike. His other writings include the essay collections Morning Yet on Creation Day (1975), which he later expanded under the title Hopes and Impediments (1988); and The Trouble with Nigeria (1983). Home and Exile (2000), which originated as three lectures given at Harvard University, chronicles Achebe's literary awakening and development in a series of reminiscences and tales.
Richard George Adams
Adams, Richard George (1920- ), British writer of fiction and folktales for both adults and children. His best-known work is the novel Watership Down (1972; film version 1978), for which he received the Carnegie Medal (1972) and the Guardian Award (1973). This story about a community of rabbits and its search for a new warren is memorable for the power of its narration and its detailed, knowledgeable descriptions of the countryside and wildlife. The novel has also been interpreted as a political allegory offering a parallel between the various warrens that the rabbits visit and different systems of government and their effects.
Adams was born in Newbury, Berkshire, England, and educated at Worcester College, University of Oxford, where he studied modern history and received his master of arts degree in 1948. Adams spent the years from 1940 to 1946 in the British army, serving during World War II (1939-1945). Prior to becoming a full-time writer, he was a successful civil servant from 1948 to 1974. Adams is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.
His other works include Shardik (1974) and Maia (1984), both set in the imaginary Beklan Empire; The Plague Dogs (1977), written in a similar vein to Watership Down; The Girl in a Swing (1980), one of his few works with a human main character; Traveller (1988), which recounts the events of the American Civil War (1861-1865) from the perspective of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's horse; and a collection of folktales, The Iron Wolf and Other Stories (1980). Almost all of Adams's works have received mixed critical reviews but enjoyed solid popular success.
Louisa May Alcott
I- INTRODUCTION
Alcott, Louisa May (1832-1888), American author, considered one of the major writers of children’s fiction. Alcott’s best-known book is the novel Little Women (1868-1869), which portrays the trials and triumphs of four sisters growing up in New England in the 19th century. Little Women and its sequels center around family relationships and promote virtues such as perseverance and unselfishness.
II- EARLY WORKS
Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania. She was the second of four daughters of American educator Bronson Alcott and his wife Abigail May Alcott. When Louisa was two years old, the family moved to Boston, Massachusetts. There her father founded the Temple School, which minimized punishment and included organized play, gymnastics, and an honor system (system in which people are trusted without direct supervision). The program urged respect for the intelligence of children and for their potential for personal growth.
In 1839 the Temple School closed, and the next year the Alcott family moved to nearby Concord, Massachusetts, where Bronson became known as a lecturer. He eventually served as superintendent of Concord’s schools, and Abba worked in Boston as a social worker. When Louisa started receiving payments for her fiction, however, she became the main breadwinner for her family. In her writings she indicated that she wrote some of her books, even her admired children’s fiction, primarily for money.
Louisa’s first book, Flower Fables, was published in 1854. The work is a collection of fairy tales. In the late 1850s Alcott began writing Gothic stories for magazines. These dramatic tales emphasized mystery, adventure, and horror. In all, Alcott wrote more than 150 short stories, many of them in the Gothic vein. However, she did not confine herself to one type of writing. Her flexibility as an author showed in her volume Hospital Sketches (1863). Written for an adult audience, this work wryly and vividly describes her experiences as a volunteer nurse for the Union during the American Civil War (1861-1865). Her next book, Moods (1864), also for adults, describes women’s struggles in marriage.
III- LITTLE WOMEN AND ITS SEQUELS
In 1867 Alcott began working as an editor for Merry’s Museum, a children’s magazine. Soon after, she began to write mainly for young readers. Little Women, published in two parts in 1868 and 1869, became her best-known book written for children. The novel focuses on the four sisters of the March family. The characters are based on Louisa and her sisters, and each of these “little women” wrestles with an inner flaw: Meg (Anna Alcott in real life) with vanity, Beth (Elizabeth) with excessive gentleness and timidity, Jo (Louisa) with a hot temper, and Amy (May) with selfishness.
Jo March, the central character of Little Women, is considered the most intriguing personality in the book. Attracted to boyish activities from an early age and brimming with creativity, she represents the independent and rebellious streak found in Alcott herself. In the course of the novel, Jo softens, and she eventually marries an older man. Jo and her husband agree that theirs will be a two-career marriage partly supported by her earnings as the headmistress of a boys’ academy.
Capitalizing on the popularity of Little Women, Alcott produced sequels to the book: Little Men (1871), in which Jo and her husband pattern their academy after Bronson Alcott’s Temple School; and Jo’s Boys (1886), tracing the lives of Jo’s nephews and nieces. Alcott’s other popular books for children include An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870) and Under the Lilacs (1878).
IV- SOCIAL IDEAS
In Alcott’s time, American social reformers such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought to achieve social and political equality for women, particularly through the right for women to vote. Alcott did not formally join the women’s rights movement, but she endorsed its goals. At the same time, Alcott supported some traditional ideas. Although she herself never married, her novels promoted the ideals of married life, summed up by her statement in Little Women that “a woman’s happiest kingdom is her home, her highest honor the art of ruling it not as a queen, but a wise wife and mother.” Work (1873), a novel for adults, dramatized a woman’s quest for fulfillment in various jobs that Alcott herself had tried, including governess, seamstress, and domestic servant. Alcott devoted the last years of her life to her writing, to caring for one of her nieces, and to the temperance movement, which worked to prohibit the drinking of alcohol.
V- RENEWED ATTENTION
In 1995 a previously unpublished suspense story by Alcott, A Long Fatal Love Chase, was released. In 1996 her first work, the novel The Inheritance, which she wrote in 1849, was sold for publication for the first time. These two events, along with the 1994 release of a motion-picture adaptation of Little Women, sparked interest in Alcott’s work in the mid-1990s. Editions of her writings include The Journals of Louisa May Alcott (1989), Louisa May Alcott: Selected Fiction (1990), The Best of Louisa May Alcott (1994), and Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers (1995).
Rudolfo Anaya
Anaya, Rudolfo (1937- ), American novelist and short-story writer, whose best-known work, Bless Me, Ultima (1972), is one of the most celebrated novels of Hispanic literature. Anaya was born in the rural village of Pastura, New Mexico, and while he was growing up in the area, he became familiar with the practices of traditional Hispanic farming and ranching, which would become the subject of many of his narratives. Anaya was educated at the University of New Mexico and subsequently taught in public schools in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He joined the faculty of the English department of the University of New Mexico in 1974, and he retired from teaching in 1994.
In Anaya's novel Bless Me, Ultima, the protagonist, a boy named Antonio, must find his place in the society of the American Southwest by choosing between two competing family heritages: the indigenous farming traditions that are followed by his mother's side of the family, and the Spanish-influenced ranching practices of his father's side. Antonio's choices represent two different ways of viewing humanity's relationship to the natural world. He must also decide whether knowledge should come through religious or secular (nonreligious) experience. Antonio follows a mystic quest through the real dangers in the world around him as well as through the mysteries of his own puzzling dreams. His mentor throughout this quest is Ultima, a wise old faith healer. In 1971 Bless Me, Ultima won the Premio Quinto Sol, the major award at that time for Chicano literature in the United States. Largely based on the popularity of this novel, Anaya was given the City of Los Angeles Award in 1977 and the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence and Achievement in Literature in 1980.
In most of his works, Anaya is concerned with instinct and intuition as guides to humanity's understanding of the universe. He shows the importance of these guides in the context of plots, characters, and symbols drawn directly from the Hispanic culture of New Mexico. Anaya's other books include the novels Heart of Aztlán (1976); Tortuga (1979); The Legend of La Llorona (1984); and Alburquerque (1994; the name spelled to reflect the original Spanish spelling of Albuquerque, New Mexico), and the short story collection My Land Sings (1999).
Maya Angelou
Angelou, Maya (1928- ), American author, poet, and entertainer, best known for her portrayals of strong African American women. Born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, Angelou spent most of her childhood living with her grandmother in rural Arkansas. She moved to her mother's home in San Francisco after graduating with honors from Lafayette County Training School in 1940. At the age of 16 she graduated from high school, gave birth to her son Guy, and began a series of jobs, including cooking and waiting tables. In the 1950s she became a nightclub performer and began careers as a singer, dancer, actor, playwright, magazine editor, civil rights activist, poet, and novelist.
Much of Angelou's writing stresses the themes of courage, perseverance, self-acceptance, and realization of one's full potential. In her works she frequently presents strong female role models. Her most prominent writing includes her series of autobiographical books, which starts with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) and in which she describes African American life in witty, intelligent language rich in rhythm and texture. The series continues with Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986).
Angelou's books of poetry include Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971), Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975), And Still I Rise (1978), Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? (1983), Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987), I Shall Not Be Moved (1990), and Phenomenal Woman (1994). The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou appeared in 1994. Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now, a book of inspirational meditations on life, was published in 1993. A collection of essays, Even the Stars Look Lonesome, appeared in 1997.
Angelou read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in January 1993. She has received many awards and honorary degrees, including Grammy Awards (1994 and 1996) for her recordings of her poetry on the albums On the Pulse of Morning (1993) and Phenomenal Woman (1995). In 1998 Angelou made her directing debut with the release of the motion picture Down in the Delta. The film is about a troubled woman who returns to the home of her ancestors in the Mississippi Delta.
Matthew Arnold
Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888), English poet, whose work is representative of Victorian intellectual concerns and who was the foremost literary critic of his age.
Arnold was born in Laleham, Middlesex, the son of Thomas Arnold, famous headmaster of Rugby School. Matthew Arnold was educated at Rugby and at Balliol College, University of Oxford, where, in 1843, his poem “Cromwell” won the Newdigate prize.
After a period teaching the classics at Rugby, Arnold served as an inspector of schools from 1851 to 1886. From 1857 to 1867, he was also professor of poetry at Oxford. Arnold visited the Continent repeatedly in the interests of education and journeyed twice to the United States as a lecturer, in 1883 and 1886.
A meditative, elegiac tone is characteristic of Arnold's poetry, notably “Empedocles on Etna” (1852), “The Scholar-Gipsy” (1853), “Sohrab and Rustum” (1853), “Thyrsis” (1866), “Rugby Chapel” (1867), “Dover Beach” (1867), and “Westminster Abbey” (1882). Arnold's philosophical despair and sense of isolation are best expressed in the following lines from “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” (1855 :
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Despite his religious doubts, Arnold wrote several pieces seeking to establish the essential truth of Christianity against conventional dogmatism. He also defended culture against scientific materialism in his collection of essays Culture and Anarchy (1867-1868). Arnold believed that literature shaped culture, and he argued for England to become sensitized to art and to accept high standards of literary judgment. His most influential literary criticism is found in essays such as “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865) and “The Study of Poetry” (1880).
Austen, Jane
I-Introduction
Austen, Jane (1775-1817), English novelist, noted for her witty studies of early-19th-century English society. With meticulous detail, Austen portrayed the quiet, day-to-day life of members of the upper middle class. Her works combine romantic comedy with social satire and psychological insight.
Two common themes in Austen’s books are the loss of illusions—usually leading characters to a more mature outlook—and the clash between traditional moral ideals and the everyday demands of life. In most of her novels, her characters correct their faults through lessons learned as a result of tribulation. Because of her sensitivity to universal patterns of human behavior, many people regard Austen as one of the greatest novelists of the 19th and 20th centuries.
II- Life
Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, England. She was the seventh child of eight, and her family was close, affectionate, and lively. She lived most of her life among the same kind of people about whom she wrote. Her lifelong companion and confidant was her older and only sister, Cassandra. Neither woman ever married, but dozens of relatives and friends widened Austen’s social experiences beyond her immediate family. The Austens frequently staged amateur theatricals, and they were devoted readers of novels at a time when reading novels was regarded as a questionable activity. They also provided a delighted audience for Jane’s youthful comic pieces, and later for her novels. Jane had almost no formal education, but she read extensively and critically. At age 13 she was already writing amusing and instructive parodies and variations on 18th-century literature—from sentimental novels to serious histories.
By the time she was 23 years old, Austen had written three novels: Elinor and Marianne, First Impressions, and Susan, which were early versions of, respectively, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Northanger Abbey (1818). A fragment, Lady Susan, which scholars date between 1793 and 1795,most likely also belongs to this period, but it was not published until 1871.
In 1801 the family moved to the town of Bath. After Jane’s father died in 1805, Jane, Cassandra, and their mother moved several times, eventually settling in 1809 in the village of Chawton, very near Steventon. Austen lived and wrote there for the last eight years of her life.
All of Austen’s novels were originally published anonymously. Several of them went through two editions in her lifetime. Pride and Prejudice was particularly praised, and Emma (1816)received a favorable review from English writer Sir Walter Scott, who was a prominent literary figure of the time.
III- Earky works
After her literary experiments as a teenager, Austen had two periods of busy and fruitful writing. The first lasted from 1795 to 1798. During this time she wrote the first versions of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Susan.
Austen’s family preserved the writing she did as a teenager, which was published more than a century after her death as Love & Freindship and Other Early Works. It includes the story “Love and Freindship” [sic], which Austen completed when she was about 15 years old. It is a comic parody of 18th-century melodramatic fiction.
The main theme of Austen’s first full novel, Sense and Sensibility, is that sensibility—responsiveness, openness, enthusiasm—is highly desirable, but that it must be tempered by good sense and prudence. In other words, a person needs both sense and sensibility for fulfillment and survival. Nineteen-year-old Elinor Dashwood, the elder of the two sisters at the center of the story, combines both qualities; her 16-year-old sister, Marianne, is less balanced.
The novel focuses on the romantic affairs of the two sisters. When Marianne sprains her ankle on a hillside in a rainstorm and handsome John Willoughby rescues her, she follows her heart and passionately responds to what she believes is his courtship. He, however, breaks off the relationship when he learns that Marianne is not rich. In the meantime, Elinor becomes involved with a young man of integrity, Edward Ferrars, who, unknown to her, in a foolish moment of his youth had become secretly engaged to a woman whom he did not love. Both heroines suffer, but Elinor bears her suffering stoically while Marianne dramatizes hers, playing the role of the jilted maiden. Elinor is ultimately rewarded with a happy marriage to Edward while Marianne eventually accepts the proposal of the dull though loyal Colonel Brandon.
In Sense and Sensibility Austen challenges her readers and her characters to look closely at all facets of an individual’s personality. In so doing, Austen has been criticized for creating characters who are morally good, but too flawed to be appealing. For instance, Elinor may strike an ideal balance between sense and sensibility, but she also can strike the reader as cold and judgmental. Austen recognized that real people are flawed in significant ways, and so she did not permit the characters in her romances to drift too far from life.
Pride and Prejudice is Austen’s first undoubted masterpiece. The book focuses on the Bennet family and the search of the Bennet daughters for suitable husbands. Austen illuminates the topic of husband hunting and marriage in an acquisitive society and shows most of its aspects and consequences—comic, trivial, sensual, opportunistic, desperate, and hopeless. The story follows Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, both of whom are romantic and intelligent, as they are forced to give up their personal pride and prejudices before they can enter into a happy relationship together.
As do Austen’s earlier writings, Pride and Prejudice displays the themes of appearance versus reality, and impulse versus deliberation. Elizabeth, trusting her own impulses, makes a mistake about Darcy and his apparent arrogance that deliberation and further experience eventually cause her to correct. Of Elizabeth, Austen wrote: “I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her...I do not know.”
In contrast to Elizabeth, her father, Mr. Bennet, is the book’s example of what it means to live with one’s mistakes. When he was courting Mrs. Bennet, her beauty blinded him to her silliness. Another character, Charlotte Lucas, scared of spinsterhood, deliberately chooses to ignore personal desire and the basic requirements of a good marriage according to every Austen novel—friendship and respect—and she marries for security and social status only.
Northanger Abbey—the novel originally titled Susan—parodies the exaggerated, mystery-filled and horror-filled Gothic novel form. The story is about Catherine Morland, a gullible and naive girl who enjoys reading Gothic novels. With the help of Henry Tilney, Catherine learns that real-life villains, specifically Henry’s social-climbing father, are characterized by mundane nastiness rather than melodramatic Gothic violence, and that extremely charming people, specifically Catherine’s friend Isabella Thorpe, can withdraw their affections as quickly as they offer them. Northanger Abbey is a novel of sustained and sparkling inventiveness, displaying the accurate and ironic social and psychological observation that also shows up in Austen’s mature fiction.
IV- Later works
Austen’s second important period of writing lasted from 1811 to 1816, when her works first received public recognition and she deepened her mastery of her subjects and form. In this later period she revised and prepared Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice for publication, and wrote her last three completed novels, Mansfield Park (1814), Emma, and Persuasion (1818). (Austen had already revised Susan in 1803, but it was not renamed Northanger Abbey and published until 15 years later.)
Mansfield Park is Jane Austen’s most ambitious novel—in length, in variety of characterization, and in the scope of its theme. It centers on the effects of upbringing on personal morality in three families—the middle-class Bertrams, the fashionable Crawfords, and the impoverished Prices. Austen has been praised for her presentation of the complex relations between the members of the families, but as in Sense and Sensibility, she frustrates the expectations of her readers that the hero and heroine be vital, attractive characters.
Fanny Price is intelligent, true to her values, and sensitive, but she is also frail, self-pitying, and terribly shy. “Creepmouse” is the label the character Tom Bertram pins on her. Edmund Bertram is witty and attractive when he is allowed to be, but circumstances usually keep him on the defensive, and he often seems prim and judgmental. Fanny and Edmund are, however, destined for one another, and after difficulty and growth on both their parts, they end up marrying. Mary and Henry Crawford, on the other hand, who were raised in London high society by an aunt and uncle who loved them but were not much concerned with their moral education, possess the vitality and charm expected in a hero and heroine. Some people have argued that Fanny and Edmund should have married Henry and Mary, thus combining morality and vitality. Others maintain that Fanny and Edmund are warm, wonderful people who make a perfect match, and that while Mary and Henry might be attractive, they are irredeemably shallow.
An important topic in Mansfield Park, as in Persuasion, and to a lesser extent in the rest of Austen’s fiction, is religion. Near the end of the novel, Edmund Bertram is ordained a priest in the Church of England—in spite of Mary Crawford’s insistence that a career in the church is unchallenging and dull, unworthy of Edmund. The Anglican ministry, and its significance and importance (or lack thereof), are discussed several times in the course of the novel.
Modern critics have asserted that Austen’s interest in heredity, education, economics, and social forces leaves no doubt that her fictional world is a modern one unconcerned with religious affairs. But some critics insist that the moral intensity of the novels strongly indicate a spiritual dimension to the stories. Critics see this dimension in the willingness of moderate and practical heroines to sacrifice their chances of worldly happiness rather than compromise their basic values, the constant emphasis on unselfish love and self-sacrifice, and the awareness of the limitations and mystery of the human mind and personality.
The subject of the novel Emma is self-deception, and the book’s heroine is the personification of this subject. The novel follows the evolution of the lovely Emma from a domineering, self-infatuated meddler into a chastened young woman ready for marriage to the admirable and aptly named Mr. Knightly. He helps her to see herself more clearly and guides her away from a future as disastrously, and comically, muddled as her past. Emma is considered not as witty as Pride and Prejudice, and its heroine is not as appealing as Elizabeth Bennet. But Emma’s self-delusion, and the slow but progressive awareness by which she arrives at self-knowledge, give the novel a unity and perfection of form.
Persuasion, Austen’s last completed work, is very different from its predecessors. The main character, Anne Elliot, at 27 years old, is older than any other Austen heroine, and the great romance in her life seemingly has taken place more than seven years before the novel begins. She had been courted by a dashing but penniless young naval officer, Frederick Wentworth, and had accepted him. Then, persuaded by a cautious older friend that the marriage would not work out well, she broke the engagement. Since the unhappy episode, Anne has led a life of almost total isolation. Anne’s mother, who shared her intelligence and sensitivity, died when Anne was 14. Her father, Sir Walter, and her two sisters are shallow, self-absorbed, and contemptuous of Anne. Only Anne’s inner strength and determination keep her from succumbing to self-pity and resentment.
When Sir Walter is forced to lease his estate to an admiral returning from the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), Anne discovers that the admiral’s wife is a sister of the now promoted and wealthy Captain Wentworth. He thus reenters Anne’s life, but he still resents her having broken their earlier engagement and begins courting another, younger woman.
Over time Anne and Wentworth are slowly drawn together again, and this time it is the man who learns from the woman that his values are askew, not the other way around, as in Emma. This subtle work follows the themes of chance and fate, and it shows a constant awareness of the mystery and frailty of human existence.
Scholars debate how Austen’s deteriorating physical condition during the last year of her life affected her work. Persuasion has been called autumnal in its tone. Yet Sanditon, the novel she undertook a few months before her death and left unfinished, explores ambiguities of appearance and difficulties of judgment with a boldness of technique and a flexibility of tone that shows progress even from Pride and Prejudice and Emma.
Several other incomplete works were published after Austen's death. These include The Watsons (1923), Fragment of a Novel (1925), and Plan of a Novel (1926). Her correspondence has been published as Jane Austen’s Letters (1932; revised edition, 1952). Popular interest in Austen and her works increased during the 1990s, in part because of motion-picture and television adaptations of Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Persuasion.
Francis Bacon (philosopher)
I- INTRODUCTION
Bacon, Francis (philosopher) (1561-1626), English philosopher and statesman, one of the pioneers of modern scientific thought.
II- LIFE
Bacon was born on January 22, 1561, at York House, in the Strand, London, and educated at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Elected to the House of Commons in 1584, he served until 1614. He wrote letters of sound advice to Elizabeth I, queen of England, but his suggestions were never implemented, and he completely lost favor with the queen in 1593, when he opposed a bill for a royal subsidy. He regained the respect of the court, however, with the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603. Bacon proposed schemes for the union of England and Scotland and recommended measures for dealing with Roman Catholics. For these efforts he was knighted on July 23, 1603, was made a commissioner for the union of Scotland and England, and was given a pension in 1604. His Advancement of Learning was published and presented to the king in 1605. Two years later he was appointed solicitor general.
In the last session of the first Parliament held (February 1611) under James I, the differences between Crown and Commons grew critical, and Bacon took the role of mediator, despite his distrust of James's chief minister, Robert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury. On Salisbury's death in 1612, Bacon, in order to gain the king's attention, wrote several papers on statecraft, particularly on relations between Crown and Commons. In 1613 he was appointed attorney general.
In 1616 Bacon became a privy councillor, and in 1618 he was appointed lord chancellor and raised to the peerage as Baron Verulam. In 1620 his Novum Organum was published, and on January 26, 1621, he was created Viscount Saint Albans. In the same year he was charged by Parliament with accepting bribes. He confessed but said that he was “heartily and penitently sorry.” He submitted himself to the will of his fellow peers, who ordered him fined, imprisoned during the king's pleasure, and banished from Parliament and the court. After his release, he retired to his family residence at Gorhambury. In September 1621 the king pardoned him but prohibited his return to Parliament or the court. Bacon then resumed his writing, completing his History of Henry VII and his Latin translation of The Advancement of Learning (De Augmentis). In March 1622 he offered to make a digest of the laws, with no further consequence despite repeated petitions to James I and James's successor, Charles I. He died in London on April 9, 1626.
III- WORKS
Bacon's writings fall into three categories: philosophical, purely literary, and professional. The best of his philosophical works are The Advancement of Learning (1605), a review in English of the state of knowledge in his own time, and Novum Organum; or, Indications Respecting the Interpretation of Nature (1620).
Bacon's philosophy emphasized the belief that people are the servants and interpreters of nature, that truth is not derived from authority, and that knowledge is the fruit of experience. Bacon is generally credited with having contributed to logic the method known as ampliative inference, a technique of inductive reasoning (see Induction). Previous logicians had practiced induction by simple enumeration, that is, drawing general conclusions from particular data. Bacon's method was to infer by use of analogy, from the characteristics or properties of the larger group to which that datum belonged, leaving to later experience the correction of evident errors. Because it added significantly to the improvement of scientific hypotheses, this method was a fundamental advancement of the scientific method.
Bacon's Novum Organum successfully influenced the acceptance of accurate observation and experimentation in science. In it he maintained that all prejudices and preconceived attitudes, which he called idols, must be abandoned, whether they be the common property of the race due to common modes of thought (“idols of the tribe”), or the peculiar possession of the individual (“idols of the cave”); whether they arise from too great a dependence on language (“idols of the marketplace”), or from tradition (“idols of the theater”). The principles laid down in the Novum Organum had an important influence on the subsequent development of empiricist thought (see Empiricism).
Bacon's Essays, his chief contributions to literature, were published at various times between 1597 and 1625. His History of Henry VII (1622) shows his abilities in scholarly research. In his fanciful New Atlantis Bacon suggested the formation of scientific academies. Bacon's professional works include Maxims of the Law (1630), Reading on the Statute of Uses (1642), pleadings in law cases, and speeches in Parliament. The theory that Bacon, rather than an obscure actor from Stratford-upon-Avon, is the true author of William Shakespeare's plays has been thoroughly discredited.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861), English poet, political thinker, and feminist. Browning was born at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, and privately educated. In 1826 her An Essay on Mind and Other Poems was published anonymously. Her translation of Prometheus Bound, by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, appeared in 1833 and was highly regarded. Five years later, in The Seraphim and Other Poems, she expressed Christian sentiments in the form of classical Greek tragedy. She was incapacitated for nearly a decade after 1838 as a result of a childhood spinal injury and lung ailment. She continued writing, however, and in 1844 produced a volume of poems including “The Cry of the Children” and “Lady Geraldine's Courtship,” with an American edition that had an introduction by Edgar Allan Poe. These verses were so highly regarded that in 1850, when William Wordsworth died, Browning was suggested as his successor as poet laureate of England.
In 1845 the poet Robert Browning began to write to Elizabeth to praise her poetry. Their romance, which was immortalized in 1930 in the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier, was bitterly opposed by her father. In 1846, however, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth regained her health and bore a son at age 43. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret before her marriage, was published in 1850. Critics generally consider the Sonnets, one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English, to be her best work. She expressed her intense sympathy with the struggle for the unification of Italy in the collections of poems Casa Guidi Windows (1848-1851) and Poems Before Congress (1860). Her longest and most ambitious work is the didactic, romantic poem in blank verse Aurora Leigh (1856), in which she defends a woman's right to intellectual freedom and addresses the concerns of the female artist. This work is undergoing a critical reassessment and is newly appreciated.
Samuel Beckett
Beckett, Samuel (1906-1989), Irish-born poet, novelist, and playwright, who won international fame with his play En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), which premiered in 1953. He won the Nobel Prize in 1969 and influenced a generation of dramatists, including English playwrights Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard and American playwrights Edward Albee and Sam Shepard.
Born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, Beckett attended the prestigious Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, in what became Northern Ireland, and Trinity College in Dublin. After graduating with a degree in Romance languages in 1927, he lectured at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from 1928 to 1930. During this time he befriended Irish author James Joyce, who was to have a profound effect on his writing. Much of Beckett’s early poetry and fiction, including the collection of short stories More Pricks than Kicks (1934) and his first published novel, Murphy (1938), was written with Joyce’s works as the literary model.
Having studied the works of French philosopher René Descartes and written a book on French novelist Marcel Proust, published in 1931 during his tenure in Paris, Beckett returned to Dublin in 1930 to complete his M.A. degree and to accept a lectureship in French at Trinity College. But the formal academic life held little appeal, and in December 1931 he resigned from Trinity with no better prospects than a vague hope for his writing. This difficult period is described in some of his earliest writing: Dream of Fair to Middling Women, an unfinished novel written in English shortly after his resignation but published in 1992, and the three-act play Eleutheria (Greek for “freedom”), written in French in 1947 and published in 1995.
Beckett went through a period of family conflict and self-doubt, especially after his father’s death in June 1933, which further strained Beckett’s difficult relationship with his mother. From 1934 to 1936 he underwent psychoanalysis in London. He then spent a year traveling in Germany, witnessing firsthand the rise of German dictator Adolf Hitler and Nazism. In October 1937 he settled in Paris more or less permanently. A few months later he was inexplicably stabbed on a Paris street. While recovering in the hospital he was visited by an acquaintance, Suzanne Dumesnil, who would become his lifelong companion and, in 1961, his wife. After Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940 (during World War II), Beckett began working for the French Resistance. His unit was betrayed in August 1942, however, and he and Dumesnil fled on foot to the south of France. They spent the war years in the village of Roussillon, where Beckett wrote the novel Watt (completed 1945; published 1953). For his efforts in fighting the German occupation, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance in 1945 by the French government.
After the war Beckett returned to Paris and entered his most creative period, which he called “the siege in the room” (for the onslaught of ideas and inspiration he experienced), and began writing in French. In this language he was able to break free of the burden of English literary tradition and the influence of James Joyce. Half-jokingly, he explained that in French one could “write without style.” In rapid succession he completed three novels, which slowly found publishers: Molloy (completed 1947; published 1951; translated 1955); Malone meurt (completed 1948; published 1951; translated as Malone Dies, 1956); and L’innomable (completed 1950; published 1953; The Unnamable, 1958); and two plays, Eleutheria and En attendant Godot (completed 1949; published in French in 1952 and in English in 1954).
Devoid of traditional plot and recognizable characters, Beckett’s works attacked systems of communication, including language itself. Rather than representing the observable surface of life, the author seemed intent on demonstrating its inconsistencies and absurdities. Consequently, some early critics saw Beckett as part of a “literature of the absurd,” a representation of life’s irrationality (see Theater of the Absurd). Such an emphasis on this side of his work, however, ignored Beckett’s rational dissection of human consciousness and of the systems through which we struggle to order our lives.
En attendant Godot, about two tramps waiting near a tree on an isolated country road for someone named Godot to arrive, was first performed at the Théâtre Babylone in Paris in January 1953. Written in French and translated into English by the author, the play fused music-hall comedy with philosophic musings about the nature of human existence. Its nearly bare stage and disconnected dialogue defied the conventions of realistic theater and both puzzled and captivated early audiences. With the international success of the play, Beckett’s literary and economic fortunes turned, and publishers were eager to bring out all of his work. From 1953 onward he wrote in both English and French, translating his work from the language of composition into French or English. From 1967 onward he staged most of his own plays, most often in Germany and France. His other major theater works include Fin de partie (1957; Endgame, 1958); Krapp’s Last Tape (1958); Happy Days (1961); and a series of short plays: Play (1963); Eh, Joe (written for television, 1966); That Time (1976); Footfalls (1976); Rockaby (1981); and Ohio Impromptu (1981). Beckett continued to write fiction as well, including Comment c’est (1961; How It Is, 1964), The Lost Ones (1972), and three short novels—Company (1980), Mal vu mal dit (1981; Ill Seen Ill Said, 1981), and Worstward Ho (1983)—-which were published as a trilogy titled Nohow On in 1996. The novels of Nohow On contain ghostly, almost mystical scenes from a narrator’s memory, all in Beckett’s compact prose. At his death, Beckett was hailed as the most innovative and influential dramatist of the 20th century for his unconventional approach to language and plot and his uncompromising, often shocking dramatizations of human relationships.
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