8/ What is Dickens’s contribution to the world literature?

Dickens has given a full picture of 19th century English life. He revealed all that was irrational and monstrous and through his wit and humor people began to see their own time and environment in a new light. Dickens never loses his warmth of feeling and quickness of sympathy. His method of writing inspired many others to write realistically and great works of critical realism appeared after him. Dickens portrays people of all this types seen in the streets of great cities in his time. He lived for the people. He “never talked down to the people, he talked up to the people.” Some social improvements in England were attributed to the influence of Dickens’s works. To many European cities, Dickens ranked only among the moralists and reformers of the 19th century. His works were not considered works of art because in his writing he was not inspired by beauty but by human suffering.

Câu 9: Romanticism

1 .A deep interest in nature and in obscure: humble or underprivilege people.

It was then believed that civilization was harmful to man. As a result, nature was turned into a hiding place for those who wanted to escape from the complexities of civilization in industrial towns where men had dropped their good nature, growing luxurious and artificial, to escape from the sickness of town-life, there was no other way but to return to mountains, hills and meadows. There, in "humble and rustic life" the real feelings of the heart flourished best.

2. A vivid imagination that can produce supernatural or fantastic dream worlds.

In Coleridge's poetry, there was an extremely strange territory of memory and dream, of strange birds, phantom ships, Arctic sea-caverns, and unearthly instruments.

3. An enthusiasm in fighting against tyrannical authority and glorifying liberty.

Keats wrote in one of his letters:" You speak of Lord Byron and me- there is this great difference between us: He describes what he sees, I describe what I imagine "What Byron saw was that his dreams could not be realized. This resulted in a kind of poetry characterized by a deep hatred of social injustice, of every type of oppression and by an ardent belief in self- sacrifice and heroism as the only way to pull mankind out of its troubles. In this sense, Byron was the most forceful embodiment of the spirit of rebellion against tyrannical authority.

4. A love for the remote in time and distance

 Byron provided his readers with a political geography in verse, a vast panorama of different countries through Childe Harald's Pilgrimage. Sir Walter Scott, through his historical novels, took his readers to "old, far-off things and battles long ago" in his native Scotland.

5. A sense of disappointment mixed with a melancholy mood.

The age was, to use Coleridge's phrase, an age of anxiety. Disillusioned, the individual man shrank into his own ego, becoming drowned in loneliness and opposed to everything which was "non-ego" This state of things led to prideful subjectivism penetrated with gruesome loneliness. Loneliness was the decease of the age.

6. A revolution in literary language-use

The romantics made a revolution in literary language-use. Their actual poetry showed that they were the enemies to conventionality and daintiness of the earlier classical poetic diction, to the triteness and pompousness of its metaphors and simile, and to its failure to record direct observation and emotion. The use of everyday language was a characteristic feature of the innovating verse.

10/ What is the difference between Swift’s realism and the realism of Defoe?

Swift’s realism was different from Defoe’s. Defoe presented extremely precise pictures of bourgeois life. Swift used his favorite weapon – laughter – to mock at bourgeois reality. He criticized it and his criticism was hidden away in a whole lots of allergorical pictures. At the same time, he gave very realistic descriptions; exact mathematical  proportions it the tiny Lilliputs and this giants from Brobdingnag. Sometimes his laughter was simply goodnatured homor, as for instance, when he wrote of the intelligent horses.

Swift’s language was more elaborate and literary than Defoe’s. This does not mean that he did not make use of the language of the common people. He resorted to it when his criticism became most severe.