FATHERS AND FOUNDERS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

FATHERS AND FOUNDERS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

FATHERS 

Father of English Poetry - Chaucer

Father of English Prose - King Alfred

Father of English Novel - Henry Fielding

Father of English Essays - Francus Bacon

Father of English Drama - Christopher Marlowe

Father of English Criticism - John Dryden

Father of English Modern Prose - Francis Bacon

Father of Modern Linguistics - Bloomfield

Father of Modern Drama - Eugene O'neil

Father of Essays - Montaigne

Father of Historical Novels - Sir Walter Scott

Father of Gothic Novels - Horace Walpole

Father of Short Story - Edger Allen Poe

Father of Revenge Tragedy - Thomas Kyd

Father of American Transcendentalism - Emerson

FOUNDERS

Founder of Metaphysical Poetry - John Donne

Founder of Saitanik Poetry  - Lord Byron

Founder of Knight Poetry - Marlowe

Founder of Sonnet - Petrarch

Founder of T. G. Grammer - Noam Chomsky

Founder of Tough stone method - Matthew Arnold

Founder of Psycho Analysis - Sigmund Freud

Founder of Cockney Poetry - Hazlitt

Founder of Graveyard Poetry - Thomas Geay

Founder of Irish Theatre movement - W. B. Yeats

Biography of Northrop Fyre

NORTHROP FYRE

 (1912–1991)

INTRODUCTION

Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.

FAMILY

Herman Northrop Frye was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec on July 14, 1912. Frye was raised in Moncton, New Brunswick as the third child of Herman Edward Frye and of Catherine Maud Howard. He had an elder brother and a sister named Howard and Vera respectively. The scientist Alma Howard was his first cousin.

EDUCATION

Frye studied for his undergraduate degree at Victoria College, University of Toronto where he edited the college literary journal, Acta Victoriana. He then studied theology at Emmanuel College (part of Victoria College). After a brief stint as student minister in Saskatchewan, he was ordained as a minister of the United Church of Canada. He then received a scholarship to do postgraduate work at Merton College, Oxford. He returned to Canada in 1939 and taught at Victoria College, University of Toronto. Frye became chairman of the English department there in 1952 and served as principal (1959–67) and chancellor (1978–91) of the college. He gave lectures and taught throughout the United States and Great Britain and around the world.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Frye rose to international prominence as a result of his first book, Fearful Symmetry, published in 1947. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, and considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and the Bible. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution to the subject. Moreover, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that was too deeply influence the study of literature in general. He was a major influence on Harold Bloom, Margaret Atwood, and others.

Anatomy of Criticism  (1957), a book that sought to provide a structural framework for the study of literature through an analysis of its various modes, symbols, myths, images, and genres. The Anatomy, heralded for a generation as a twentieth-century Poetics, had a large following in the 1960s and 1970s, and twenty years after its publication it was the most frequently cited book in the arts and humanities by a writer born in the twentieth century. Seventeen translations of the Anatomy into thirteen languages (as of 2003) attest to its international standing. His work, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature is  a monumental and systematic study of the myths, language, metaphor and symbols of the Hebrew-Christian Bible, published in 1982. Mr. Frye had also written extensively on the works of William Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot. He argued in a 1963 book, The Well-Tempered Critic, that literary criticism was a primary means "to produce out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in." In later works Frye supplemented the examination of archetype and genre with practical criticism. His concept of literature was that of a self-contained total history, rather than a linear progression through time, and he saw the Bible, more than any other source, as the body of myth that shaped Western literature.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Frye engaged in cultural and social criticism and was the recipient of some 39 honorary degrees. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1951 and awarded the Royal Society's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1958 and its Pierre Chauveau Medal in 1970. He won the Canada Council Molson Prize in 1971, and the Royal Bank Award in 1978. In 1987 he received the Governor General's Literary Award and the Toronto Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2000, he was honoured by the government of Canada with his image on a postage stamp. An international literary festival The Frye Festival, named in Frye's honour, takes place every April in Moncton, New Brunswick. The Northrop Frye Centre, part of Victoria College at the University of Toronto and Northrop Frye School in Moncton were named in his honour. Frye was named a National Historic Person in 2018.
Frye married Helen Kemp, an educator, editor and artist, in 1937. She died in Australia while accompanying Frye on a lecture tour. Two years after her death in 1986, he married Elizabeth Brown.

SELECTED WORKS

Fearful Symmetry, Anatomy of Criticism, The Educated Imagination, Fables of Identity, The Modern Century, A Study of English Romanticism, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society, Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays, Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays.

BIOGRAPHY OF T.S.ELIOT

                                                     T.S. ELIOT

                                                         (1888-1965) 

INTRODUCTION

T.S. Eliot, the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of the giants of modern literature, highly distinguished as a poet, literary critic, dramatist, and editor and publisher.

FAMILY

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri as a member of the third generation of a New England family that had come to St. Louis in 1834. Eliot's grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, Unitarian minister and founder of schools, a university, and charities. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a prosperous businessman and served the schools and charities his father had helped found. Eliot’s mother, Charlotte Champ was a teacher and a poet. After having six children, she focused her energy on writing.

EDUCATION 

Eliot lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life. He attended Smith Academy in St. Louis and then the Milton Academy in Massachusetts. In 1906 he went to Harvard University, majored in literature, earning a B.A. and an M.A. After graduating, Eliot served as a philosophy assistant at Harvard for a year, and then left for France and the Sorbonne to study philosophy. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but went to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and worked as a schoolmaster, a bank clerk, and eventually a literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director.

CONTRIBUTIONS

It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and except for the poem the title alludes to, the book contained little upon which Eliot’s reputation is now based. In 1919, Eliot published Poems and The Wasteland in 1922. It is considered the most influential poetic work of the 20th century.He edited the journal Criterion throughout the span of its publication (1922-1939). Ash-Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism and was published in 1930. In 1932 he published Selected Essays 1917-1932, a collection of his literary criticism through the 1920s. Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942).

 CRITIC

Eliot was almost as renowned a literary critic as he was a poet. From 1916 through 1921 he contributed approximately one hundred reviews and articles to various periodicals. Beginning in the late 1920s, Eliot’s literary criticism was supplemented by religious and social criticism. In 1919 two of his most influential pieces appeared. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems." Some of his early critical essays were The Sacred Wood (1920), Homage to John Dryden (1924), Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (1932), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) After Strange Gods (1934) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot served as literary editor of the Egoist, a feminist magazine, from 1917 to 1919. He was also writing anonymous reviews and essays for the London Times. 

His critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the context of the artist's previous works. His essay "Hamlet and His Problems" introduced the term "objective correlative", that suggests there can be a non-subjective judgment based on different readers' different interpretations of a work. Late in his career, Eliot focused much of his creative energy on writing for the theatre; some of his earlier critical writing, in essays such as "Poetry and Drama", "Hamlet and his Problems", and "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama", focused on the aesthetics of writing drama in verse.

For his vast influence in poetry, criticism and drama T.S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.He was a recipient of Hanseatic Goethe Prize (1955) Dante Medal (1959) and Thirteen Honorary Doctorates (from various universities).He had received Tony Award for Best Play in 1950, Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score  in 1983.

 After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and remarried Valerie Fletcher in 1956. He died in London on January 4, 1965.

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Collected Poems (1962)   The Complete Poems and Plays (1952)   Four Quartets (1943) Burnt Norton (1941)     The Dry Salvages (1941)    Ash Wednesday (1930)    Poems, 1909–1925 (1925)     Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)     Poems (1919)    The Waste Land (1922)    Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)   East Coker (1940)        

                     

Prose

Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1954)    Poetry and Drama (1951)    The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)     Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)   Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949)     Elizabethan Essays (1934)    The Classics and The Man of Letters (1942)    John Dryden (1932)    The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)    Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)    The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)      After Strange Gods (1933)    Dante (1929)    For Lancelot Andrews (1928)   Andrew Marvell (1922)   The Sacred Wood (1920)   Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature (1929)

Drama

The Elder Statesman     The Confidential Clerk (1953)    The Rock (1934)      
The Cocktail Party (1950)      The Family Reunion (1939)
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)     Sweeney Agonistes (1932)