Page 48 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Researching an answer 47
values in its past history. Shelley himself, for instance, wrote a
poem called ‘England in 1819’ about a major political event of
that year. Unarmed and peaceful demonstrators in Manchester
had been listening to speeches in favour of ordinary people
being allowed the vote. Cavalry with drawn sabres were sent in
to disperse them. Many men and women were injured. Some
were killed. Shelley in that year wrote more than one poem
which might have made the massacre an unforgettable
martyrdom to be remembered by any reader who values
freedom. The poems, like those whom they seek to
commemorate, are in fact now largely forgotten. Yet as an
attentive student of literary history, you may still learn to
remember 1819 as a crucial year because it was then that Keats
wrote odes to a nightingale and to a piece of ancient Greek
pottery.
Literary biography can be as tendentious as literary history.
Sentimental concentration upon Milton’s physiological
blindness or gossip about his personal difficulties in relating to
women are obviously distractions from the poetic texts. But
even the most sophisticated literary biographies encourage
certain responses to the text and discourage others. By
definition of genre, such biography implies that a text’s author
is a major issue; that discovering what a writer intended in
composing a text is possible and indeed profitable; that the
author’s own interpretation and even evaluation may
legitimately determine ours.
Moreover, personalizing a text as the product of some
interestingly individualistic intellect often leads to its content
being structured around other supposed individuals. A novel’s
characterization may be assumed to matter more than its
support for, or challenge to, the values of a given society. If a
playwright’s own idiosyncrasies of behaviour are emphasized,
then the voices of the dramatic text are likely to be explored as
interestingly deviant from, rather than typical of, a particular
social group or economic class.
The alliance of literary historians and biographers can be
exemplified by the reported superiority of Elizabethan to
medieval drama. Dr Faustus is often described as an advance on
Everyman less because it offers a subtler analysis of its society
than because it explores the idiosyncratic thoughts and feelings
of its individualistic characters. You are likely to be reminded—