Andhra University CDOE — M.A. English Literature
Year 1, Semester 2
Paper III: British Prose and Fiction-II
Assignment I
Introduction: T. S. Eliot, both a major poet and one of the twentieth century's most influential literary critics, outlines in essays such as "The Function of Criticism" and "The Perfect Critic" (from The Sacred Wood) the essential qualities that distinguish genuine critical judgment from impressionistic or merely emotional response.
Sensibility Disciplined by Fact: Eliot insists that the perfect critic must possess a highly developed sensibility, but one always disciplined and corrected by attention to concrete facts about the work — its historical context, technical construction, and precise textual detail — rather than indulging in vague, subjective impressions detached from the object itself.
Comparison and Analysis as Method: Central to Eliot's critical ideal is the method of "comparison and analysis," whereby the critic places works alongside one another to illuminate their qualities objectively, rather than relying on abstract theorizing or emotional rhapsody. This comparative method grounds criticism in verifiable textual evidence rather than personal impression.
Impersonality and Suppression of Personal Prejudice: Echoing his broader theory of poetic impersonality, Eliot argues the perfect critic must suppress personal likes, dislikes, and emotional reactions in favor of objective, disinterested judgment, treating the work as an autonomous object worthy of dispassionate scrutiny rather than a vehicle for the critic's self-expression.
Historical Sense and Tradition: Drawing on his concept of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot maintains that genuine criticism requires a historical sense — an awareness of how a given work relates to the broader tradition of literature, situating individual works within an ongoing, simultaneous order rather than judging them in isolation.
Erudition Combined with Sensitivity: Eliot criticizes critics who possess either erudition without sensibility or sensibility without adequate knowledge; the ideal critic combines wide, precise learning with a finely attuned aesthetic responsiveness, allowing informed judgment rather than either dry scholarship or untethered impressionism.
Conclusion: For Eliot, the perfect critic unites disciplined sensibility, comparative and analytical method, impersonal objectivity, historical awareness, and erudition, producing criticism that illuminates the work itself rather than merely expressing the critic's personality, a standard that profoundly shaped twentieth-century critical practice.
Introduction: In his controversial essay "Hamlet and His Problems," T. S. Eliot argues that Shakespeare's Hamlet, despite its enduring fascination, is ultimately an artistic failure because the emotion the play seeks to express exceeds and remains disproportionate to the dramatic facts as presented.
The Concept of the "Objective Correlative": Central to Eliot's argument is his theory of the "objective correlative" — the idea that the only way to express emotion in art is through a set of objects, situations, or events that will evoke that precise emotion when presented. Eliot claims Shakespeare fails to provide an adequate objective correlative for Hamlet's overwhelming disgust and revulsion, particularly regarding his mother Gertrude's guilt.
Disproportion Between Emotion and Cause: Eliot argues that Hamlet's feelings — his corrosive disgust, indecision, and emotional excess — are in "excess of the facts as they appear," meaning the dramatic situation (his mother's hasty remarriage) is insufficient to justify or fully explain the intensity of Hamlet's emotional state, leaving the emotion "unmastered" and not properly integrated into the play's action.
Comparison with Shakespeare's Source Material: Eliot suggests this failure stems partly from Shakespeare's imperfect adaptation of his source material (the earlier Ur-Hamlet and Kyd's revenge tragedy conventions), arguing that Shakespeare superimposed a more complex psychological problem — Hamlet's disgust with his mother's sexuality — onto an inherited revenge-plot structure that could not adequately accommodate or express it.
Critical Reception and Controversy: Eliot's judgment has been widely debated and often rejected by subsequent critics, who argue that the very indeterminacy and excess Eliot identifies as failure is precisely what generates the play's psychological depth and enduring interpretive richness, making Hamlet's very "problem" its most compelling and modern feature rather than a formal flaw.
Eliot's Broader Critical Agenda: This essay reflects Eliot's broader classicist critical values — his preference for formal control, impersonality, and precise emotional correspondence over romantic excess or psychological ambiguity, values that also informed his own poetic practice and his skepticism toward purely psychological approaches to literature.
Conclusion: While Eliot's claim that Hamlet is an artistic failure remains a minority and much-contested position, it offers a valuable lens into his broader critical theory of emotional objectification in art, even as most critics continue to celebrate the play's very excess and ambiguity as central to its greatness.
Introduction: Walter Pater's aesthetic philosophy, articulated in works such as The Renaissance and his essay "Style," centers on the idea that human identity and consciousness are not fixed but exist in continuous flux, famously captured in his image of the self as a "perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves" — a formulation with profound implications for his theory of literary style.
Origin in Pater's Impressionist Philosophy: This phrase derives from Pater's broader impressionistic epistemology, articulated most famously in the "Conclusion" to The Renaissance, where he argues that reality dissolves into a flux of fleeting impressions, and the self is likewise not a stable entity but a continuous process of dissolution and reconstitution moment to moment.
Implications for Literary Style: Applied to style, this concept suggests that authentic literary expression must capture this constant flux of consciousness rather than imposing false stability or fixed convention upon experience. For Pater, true style arises from the writer's fidelity to their own continuously shifting inner impressions, requiring language flexible and precise enough to register subtle, evanescent shades of perception and feeling.
Style as Self-Expression and Selection: In his essay "Style," Pater argues that good prose style involves both fidelity to the writer's individual "soul" or personality and a disciplined process of selection — choosing the precise word that captures a particular nuance of thought or feeling, mirroring the "weaving and unweaving" process by which the mind continuously reconstructs meaning from sensory and emotional flux.
The Ideal of "Mind" in Style: Pater distinguishes between mere accurate description ("soul" in style, concerned with the writer's individual truthfulness) and the demands of clear structural intelligibility ("mind" in style), arguing the truly great stylist reconciles both — remaining faithful to the fluid, ever-changing inner self while still achieving lucid, well-ordered expression accessible to readers.
Influence on Aestheticism: This conception profoundly influenced the late-Victorian Aesthetic Movement, encouraging writers to prioritize the cultivation and precise expression of intense, transient impressions and sensations — "to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame" — over conventional moral or narrative coherence, positioning style itself as the primary vehicle of authentic selfhood.
Conclusion: Pater's image of the self as perpetual weaving and unweaving thus underlies his entire theory of style, positing literary language as the necessary, ever-renewed instrument through which the fluid, impermanent human consciousness seeks momentary, precise, and beautiful articulation.
Introduction: Lytton Strachey, a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group and author of the landmark Eminent Victorians, revolutionized English biography by openly abandoning Victorian conventions of reverential, comprehensive biography in favor of a sharply selective, ironic, and often deliberately critical approach to his subjects.
Rejection of Victorian Hagiography: Strachey explicitly rebelled against the multi-volume, uncritically admiring "life and letters" tradition of Victorian biography, which he regarded as tedious and dishonest in its suppression of subjects' flaws. His preface to Eminent Victorians announces his intent to approach his subjects "with a becoming brevity" and critical detachment, signaling from the outset his departure from reverential convention.
Ironic and Satirical Technique: Strachey's portraits of figures such as Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, and General Gordon employ pervasive irony, wit, and selective emphasis to expose the gap between his subjects' public reputations and their private failings, hypocrisies, or eccentricities, revealing his clear authorial judgment and evident personal bias throughout.
Selective Use of Evidence: Rather than aiming at exhaustive, balanced coverage, Strachey deliberately selected episodes and details that supported his critical, often deflationary interpretation of his subjects, a method he defended as necessary "to row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket," openly privileging artistic shape and pointed commentary over comprehensive neutrality.
Psychological and Debunking Approach: Strachey's biographies often adopt a quasi-psychoanalytic interest in exposing the unconscious motivations, vanities, and self-deceptions underlying his subjects' public achievements, a debunking impulse that made his bias explicit and central to his interpretive project rather than an incidental flaw.
Literary and Historical Impact: Despite — or because of — this evident partiality, Strachey's work proved enormously influential, establishing a new, more psychologically probing and stylistically brilliant mode of biography that prioritized interpretive insight and readability over exhaustive documentary neutrality, shaping the modern biographical genre.
Conclusion: Strachey's open, unapologetic bias — expressed through irony, selective evidence, and psychological debunking — constituted not a failure of objectivity but a deliberate artistic and critical strategy that transformed biography from reverential record into incisive literary interpretation.
Introduction: D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is widely recognized as a deeply autobiographical novel, drawing closely upon Lawrence's own childhood and youth in a Nottinghamshire mining community and his intense, complicated relationship with his mother.
Parallel Family Structure: The novel's central family — the coarse, hard-drinking miner father Walter Morel and the refined, ambitious mother Gertrude Morel — closely mirrors Lawrence's own parents, Arthur and Lydia Lawrence, with the novel's depiction of class tension, marital discord, and the mother's emotional and intellectual superiority reflecting Lawrence's own family dynamics.
Paul Morel as Lawrence's Self-Portrait: The protagonist, Paul Morel, is widely understood as a thinly veiled self-portrait of the young Lawrence, sharing his artistic sensibility, his stifling closeness to his mother, his early romantic relationships, and his gradual, painful movement toward independence and creative vocation, closely paralleling Lawrence's own biography.
The Oedipal Mother-Son Bond: Central to the novel's autobiographical power is its unflinching depiction of the intense, almost possessive bond between Mrs. Morel and Paul, which inhibits his capacity for mature romantic relationships with both Miriam and Clara. This dynamic closely reflects Lawrence's own psychologically intense relationship with his mother, later explicitly analyzed through Freudian, Oedipal terms by critics and by Lawrence himself.
Setting and Social Milieu: The novel's vivid depiction of the mining community of Bestwood, its industrial landscape, class distinctions, and domestic textures, draws directly upon Lawrence's own upbringing in Eastwood, lending the novel a documentary authenticity rooted in lived experience rather than purely invented setting.
Emotional and Psychological Authenticity: Beyond mere factual correspondence, the novel's power derives from its psychological authenticity — the raw, unresolved emotional conflicts of guilt, desire, and filial obligation that Lawrence had personally experienced, giving the narrative an intensity difficult to achieve through pure invention.
Conclusion: Through its closely mirrored family structure, autobiographical protagonist, authentic regional setting, and psychologically intense mother-son relationship, Sons and Lovers stands as one of the most significant autobiographical novels in modern English fiction, transforming Lawrence's personal experience into enduring literary art.
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