Language Access Centre

Abstract

Contacts with the West encouraged written African literature which had been eminently oral. The European languages became the means of expression and communication for African writers whom some classified as creative artists and others as translators. Even though there are traces of translation in the work of African writers, this study aims at explaining that there is not enough evidence to address them as translators. Works of linguists, translators, language experts, anthropologists, and literary scholars are used as reference documents. An analytical, deductive, and synthetic approach is used. It is discovered that African writers are creative artists manifested by the presence of elements of translation in their work in combination with transposition, transcription, integration and deviation methods. The study further reveals that the attitude of African writers is gradually Africanizing the European languages they use in their works. The study concludes that the method of creativity of the African writers, which preserves some traces of translation, could be used to advance the techniques of translation.

Key words: African writers, translation, transposition, transcription, culture.

Most Africans write in the European languages. The two most prominent languages of communication are English and French. African literature is therefore the consequence of the contacts of Africa with Europe. The French encouraged assimilation in Francophone Africa, while in the Anglophone Africa, the British ruled indirectly through local administrators. Both systems led Africans to adopt the language of the master as the official language of administration and education. Africans have a local or regional language, which is usually their mother tongue, and an official language or language of administration. African writers, in an attempt to react to the existing order, had no choice but to express their displeasure and criticism in a language unknown to the majority of their people. During the colonial era and thereafter, African writers have communicated with their chosen public by educating them about African daily life, the existence of an African culture, African humanism, and their hostility to African leaders. The socio-political problems of independence were expressed, sometimes dramatically and sometimes tragically, using a story-teller's style. Writers are not only mediators, they also diffuse cultures. They are bilingual message conveyors. They are creative artists, and the African writers' main focus is Africa. They rely on historical facts, which make their creations not totally fictitious, thus bringing their readers and their subject matters closer together. They have also used various styles and forms, depending on the target public. Translators, like writers, communicate, conveying messages and adapting the cultures of the source language and text to the target language and public. Translators, but not writers, are aptly and professionally trained to break the language and cultural barriers that separate people of different cultural backgrounds, thus satisfying the desire and curiosity to communicate with others. Can writers then be referred to as translators? What remains a fact is that writers and translators have several traits in common and a few areas of conflict. In this research, we attempt to provide a critical assessment of an African writer as a translator. The research will also look for a way of deducing an approach to translation from the attitude of an African writer who behaves like a translator.

African writers and their translation status

Several theories of translation have been proposed, and yet a general theory is far from being formulated that is, a theory which is scientifically acceptable and can be experimentally proven. The difficulties result from the simple fact that the elements involved in translation are not stable and could be influenced by the flexible mind of man dominated by a variety of choices and needs. More difficult to comprehend is the variety of cultures and the limited intercultural and cross-cultural interactions. An attempt to find a solution to a serious problem in translation is also a step to promoting one. Tremendous progress has been made in the field of translation research, but the failure to prove that translation is a science kept raising more questions. The most frequent one is that of fidelity or trust in the translator, which Ladmiral quoted by El Medjira (2001) proved to be questionable because the target text cannot be the same as the original. Following the same line, Nicolas Froeliger (2005) introduces the factor of doubt, by proposing to put aside the issue of fidelity and trust in translation, thus making a clear distinction between the author and the translator in the following way.

A l'auteur de se demander si ce qu'il écrit cadre avec la vérité; au traducteur de faire en sorte que l'ensemble soit raccordé au réel, à défaut d'être vrai.

[Asking the author that his writing be truthful, and the translator that, if not truthful, it be realistic]

The factor of doubt introduced by Froeliger raises a question of choice which gives room for the translator to guess the mind of the author in the text being translated. Even if the author is by the translator' side, he cannot tell exactly what the author meant when he was writing his text. He may further confuse the translator because sometimes readers help the author to expatiate more than he intended. The theory of doubt, which is acceptable in translation, may not be suitable in the context of African writers who generally, according to Claude Wauthier (1964: 24), had the theme of Africa at the center of all their writings, thus rooting themselves in historical facts. It is better expressed by Théophile Munyangeyo (2000: 96) who suggests an onomastic study of African novels of the 1990s to help understand the history, geography, and socio-political problems of the authors' regions. He further affirms that the newly adopted attitude by writers of the 1990s removes or weakens the fictitious aspect in the novel because history is built on facts. Some practical examples are found in the novels such as Kin-la joie Kin-la folie of Achille Ngoye, Les Soleils des independences of Ahmadou Kourouma, and Crépuscule des temps anciens of Nazi Boni. If doubt widens the distance between writer and translator, the introduction of facts in African literature reduces it between the target public and the novel, thus increasing the readers understanding. The attitude of departing from history is well explained by Ahmadou Kourouma in an interview he granted to Students on 10th December, 1998. He stated:

...Ce n'est pas l'histoire que je raconte, je prends les bases historiques sur lesquelles je scanne les faits que je raconte.....Voilà! C'est ma fiction, c'est ma lecture de l'histoire....mais je présente l'Histoire comme elle est. Moi je veux aller à l'essentiel! C'est tout ce qu'il y a de cruel qui s'impose à moi et que j'écris.

[I do not tell history; I select the facts I will tell on historic bases... Look! This is my fiction, my reading of history... but I present history as is. I wish to go to the essential; I write about all that is cruel and that has impressed me.]

Going by the definition of Hermêneus1 and Interpres, African writers are translators because a simple definition of a writer is the act of conveying a message by writing, using a style. In the case of Africa, said Claude Wauthier (1964:38), an African writer was able to marry the African realities and the techniques of African oral literature to the norms of European languages. He stresses this by affirming that the attitude of the African writers to combine the techniques of the African oral literature with European languages at the expense of the techniques of the latter, was encouraged by the literary movement of surrealism, which places no restrictions on style. Still according to Wauthier, David Diop will rather prefer to use the term partial translation for the literary work of the African writer who conveys his message in the colonial language. Prefacing Les Nouveaux Contes d'Amadou Koumba of Birago Diop, Léopold Sédar Senghor confirmed the translator's status of French-speaking African writers who, like Birago Diop and Bernard Dadié, put in writing the spoken words, yet acknowledging the unwritten source. Senghor put it this way.

Voilà quelque cent cinquante ans que les Blancs s'intéressent à la literature des nègres d'Afrique, qu'ils dissertent sur elle, comme l'abbé Grégoire ou qu'ils en donnent des traductions,...Mais que les négro-Africains de langue française veulent eux-mêmes manifester cette literature, et ils se présentent en traducteurs le plus souvent. C'est le cas de l'Eburnéen Bernard Dadié...Or, donc, Birago Diop ne pretend pas faire oeuvre originale; il se veut disciple du griot Amadou, fils de Koumba, dont il se contenterait de traduire les dits. Mais, on le devine, c'est par modestie. Car Birago Diop ne se contenterait pas du mot à mot (Birago Diop, 1961:7).

[The Whites have been interested in the literature of African Blacks and have discussed it as the Abbot Gregory did, or translated it, ... but now the French-speaking African Blacks wish to write literature themselves, most often appearing as translators. This is the case of the Eburnean Bernard Dadié... Now, Birago Diop does not claim to be writing original work; he considers himself a disciple of the poet Amadou, son of Koumba, and he is content with translating his sayings. However, you can guess it, he says this out of modesty, because Birago Diop is not content with the word-for-word.]

In line with the freedom in the style of francophone African writers, Aduke Adebayo clearly makes a distinction between the first generation of writers who were bent on speaking and writing in the style of Vaugelas, that is, attaining excellence in the use of French language and targeting a limited French and francophone audience. They were Léopold Sédar Senghor, Camara Laye, Cheikh Hamidou Kane (Adebayo, 2000) and others whom Abiola Irele (1969) described as accomplished African writers for their handling of the French language and tradition at a level that no-one could guess that the author was not a Frenchman. In Anglophone Africa, Duruoha (2000) sees Wole Soyinka's English as destructive to the cause of African literature because of his standard of writing. This group of African writers left no traces of translation in their writing. For Adebayo (2000) the second generation of francophone African writers did not mind blending the language of la Sorbonne to satisfy their ambition and please their target public by using a combination of strategies, translation, transgression, integration, transliteration, transposition, and deviation. These strategies, affirms Abiola Irele, were fashioned to integrate the folk-tales by re-creating them in the French language with a new outlook. Irele adopts the word "retell" to describe the transposition made by Djibril Tamsir Niane in his book Sundiata (1960) and Nazi Boni in Crépuscule des temps anciens (1962), knowing well that translation is an act of retelling or re-creating. Adebayo (2000) describes specifically the style of writing of Ahmadou Kourouma who deliberately deviates from the norms of the language of "la Sorbonne" to be able to describe the life of the Malinke. Having being influenced by his African reading public, he imposes the structure of African languages on the norms of French language. Adebayo (2000) concludes that it is all about creativity, instead of translation, which, however, Kourouma refuses to accept as his method of writing. Kourouma's unique way of writing made him different and inspired many critics and lovers of African literature. Reporting Ade Ojo, Haruna J. Jacob (2002) says the translating skill of African writers graduated them to the status of creative artists and then to the practice of transliteration. Jacob disagrees with Ojo for equating translation with transliteration but, as a matter of fact, like Adebayo (2000) observes, it is a combination of all the strategies of translation, transposition, and transcription that resulted in creativity, aptly summarized by Joseph Ukoyen (2000: 86) in the following manner in the case of Kourouma.

Another device which contributes most decisively to the quaintness of Ahmadou Kourouma's narrative technique is the use of Malinke speech habits mediated through the French language.

Generalizing the findings of Ukoyen to African writers, Alphamoye Sonfo and Urbain Dembele (Notre Librairie, No. 75-76) reasoning like Adebayo (2000) argue as follows:

Les écrivains maliens s'inspirent effectivement de la literature orale sous le double aspect du contenu et de la forme. La culture et la civilization maliennes que véhicule la literature orale fournissent la matière de la plupart des œuvres écrites....Les écrivains maliens, voire africains agissent sur ces divers apports pour créer des œuvres originales mûries de l'intérieur vivifiées par l'extérieur, jamais gratuites, toujours engagées...
[Malian writers get their inspiration from the oral literature in both form and content. The Malian culture and civilization reflected by the oral literature supply the material for most written works... From these different contributions, Malian writers, like most of their African colleagues, create original works, which have matured from the inside acquired life from the outside, never gratuitous, always committed...]

Ukoyen (2000) by using the verb "mediate" in the above quotation agrees that Kourouma is a translator because of the simple fact that Isabelle Hoorickx-Rauq (2005) and Aiwei Shi (2004) say that a translator is a mediator, a definition supported by Alex Gross (2001), for whom translator is Hermêneus. Ukoyen, by attributing to Kourouma the role of mediator of the Malinke speech habits and the French language, agrees with the assertion of Jacob (2002) who concludes that African writers are accomplished translators, a status that makes Kourouma uncomfortable. But African writers are bilingual at least. It is a weak bilingualism sometimes because most of them do not write and read their regional language properly. They often speak the first language while the European language, i.e., the language of their education, is understood, read, and written. Ironically, most of the African writers are not trained translators, but they know their cultures and the history of their society and regions. If we consider them to be translators, then we should be asking for the original text that was translated. Because of their inability to produce a source text, the African writers could be seen as creative artists, as agreed by Claude Wauthier (1964), Abiola Irele (1969), Adebayo (2000), Ukoyen (2000) because in the process of writing, writers are largely influenced by the target public and a culturally loaded message, a message which they intend to leave as is, expecting the same reaction if the message had been in the African language. They then use different strategies but do not stick to one to the point of being considered a translator or a transliterator or a transcriber. The bilingualism of African writers is not enough evidence for them to be tagged translators who, according to Roger Chriss are by definition bilingual. Wauthier (1964: 22) is very well disposed to rightly tell us that not only African writers are bilingual, African historians, theologians, ethnologues, anthropologists, scientists, geographers and physicians are also bilingual. But historians and others in the course of their various profession may not agree to be called translators. An African writer thinks within the framework of his cultural background and expresses himself first in his mind in words guided and loaded in meaning within the structure of his culture. The writer alone can visualize, read, and re-read the chain of ideas expressed in words in the imaginary pages of his mind. The writer is the only one to have access to his memory where the ideas are kept. The words and sentences in the mind of the writer are considered not to be in either written or oral form. The African writer later puts whatever message is in his mind on paper in the European language. The source text, physically absent, is fused to the target text. The physical absence of the source text gives no room for comparison or evaluation with the translated version. Professionally, African writers are not translators. If "translation" is defined in relation to cultures and aimed at cross-cultural multi-formulation rather than communicational adjustment, as presented by Hewson and Martin (McElhanon, 2005), it appears incorrect for someone not familiar with the source culture to appreciate or evaluate the work being done. Kourouma was writing for an African reading public, a point which needs to be explored to position the African writer vis-à-vis translation. According to Adebayo (2000), the Francophone African writers who targeted a foreign (French) reading public and were considered more accomplished among French African prose-writers by Abiola Irele (1969) were those whom Léopold Sédar Senghor (Birago Diop, 1961:23) saw as dynamic such as Birago Diop who transposed African oral literature into French, like a genius fully respecting the norms and concepts of the French language. This group did not deserve being called translators. The second group, I mean the group of Kourouma, did not have a limited French or English reading public. Ahmadou Kourouma, Calixthe Bayela, Sony Labou Tansi, Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Gabriel Okara, and Amos Tutuola are some of many African writers who fall into this category. They have the subject matter in their African language, but at the same time want to pass their culturally loaded message to their reading public in the European language, without destroying the message. In the process, the second group of writers sometimes behave as translators.

The transposition approach of African writers in translation

The transposition approach is not dealing at the level of equivalence because it gives no room to evaluate two texts word for word or sentence for sentence. The transposition theory could also be viewed beyond equivalence in meaning because again the African writer leaves no traces of the source text. The approach could be associated with the third text of Neubert and Shreve (McElhanon, 2005), which is a mental construct that refers to facts and fiction within a cultural context. The mental representation is then put on paper by the creative artist, which forces the linguistic norms of the target language to accommodate the source culture and language. In this way a deviation from the norms of the target language is inevitable. The whole exercise makes the African writer a creative artist, who, at the end, has passed along the message to his African reading public using a means of communication different from his own and satisfying his audience. In the case of Kourouma and like-minded African writers, their reading public is continuously increasing, with their writing style becoming a novelty. Adebayo (2000: 76) rightly wrote about the style of Kourouma:

What he has done is an acrobatic linguistic display that remains relatively new in translation practice. Since writing in another language, other than one's own is basically an exercise in translation, it is difficult to agree completely with Kourouma that he has not translated.

The mental activity and acrobatic display of the second batch of African writers such as Ahmadou Kourouma in making waves for their reading public have moved beyond the African reading public. The creativity should be welcome if not for the fact that the target reader is passionately drawn closer to the message and amused by the style. The approach could be used to the benefit of translation. Still, Adebayo (2000:80) also conclusively remarks:

It is a welcome development that more writers are exploiting to full advantage their cultural hybridity at the linguistic level. The exercise could not have been simple. If the writer had not been careful, he could have degenerated into pure babelism or linguistic irregularity...The French language will definitely have to bear the burden of linguistic hybridity in the third millennium as each Francophone community seeks to assert its individuality within the "Francophone."

Conclusion

African writers should be viewed and addressed as creative artists, their creativity resulting from the fact that they have the proven skill to marry African culture and language structures with the structures of European languages, even if they deviate from the norms of the latter. It is all about an acrobatic mixture of different strategies ranging from transposition, transcription, deviation, and translation. It is the combination of more than one approach that makes African creative artists different. Although some traces of translation are found in their work, there is not enough evidence to refer to them as translators, despite the fact that they think in African languages and write in the European language, which makes them seem to be translators. They are not trained translators, yet their methods could be seen as a modest approach to handling translation activities. No matter how creative is the African artist; it is not possible to have an accurate (that is without loss of information) transposition, transcription, or translation. The Africanization of European languages leads to a suggestion of adopting an African language for African literature. Phanuel Akubueze Egujuru cautions on the possibility of suggesting a local language as a national language because, he said, Africans are familiar with the European language which unifies them (Egujuru,1980: 9). Réné Richard is rather of the contrary opinion. He thinks that the foreign language deepens the distance between African elite and the African masses that constitute his target public. For him, the coming on board of an African language as the language of the African literature is inevitable and justifiable (Richard,1970: 83). Baum-Rudischhauser disagrees with Egujuru and does not support Richard. She encourages the Ahmadou Kourouma style of novel writing where various European languages are Africanized. In this form, African writers are gradually creating an independent language for African literature (Baum-Rudischhauser,1991: 89).

Notes

1. Alex Gross (2001) refers us to the god of translators and interpreters in search for a cogent definition of translation and interpretation which he equates to the Greek word Hermêneus, the god Hermes, which means, interpret foreign tongues, put into words, express, describe, clarify, and write about. Gross also wants to take us back far in the history to a Latin word Interpres, which also means a translator, an interpreter, a middleman, a mediator, a broker, and a negotiator.

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This article was originally published at Translation Journal (http://accurapid.com/journal).

English literature
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term English literature refers to literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; Joseph Conrad was Polish, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, Salman Rushdie is Indian, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, Vladimir Nabokov was Russian. In other words, English literature is as diverse as the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world. In academia, the term often labels departments and programmes practising English studies in secondary and tertiary educational systems.
This article primarily deals with literature from Britain written in English. For literature from specific English-speaking regions, see the see also section at the bottom of the page.
Old English
Main article: Anglo-Saxon literature
The first works in English, written in Old English, appeared in the early Middle Ages (the oldest surviving text is Cædmon's Hymn). The oral tradition was very strong in early British culture and most literary works were written to be performed. Epic poems were thus very popular and many, including Beowulf, have survived to the present day in the rich corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature that closely resemble today's Norwegian or, better yet, Icelandic. Much Anglo-Saxon verse in the extant manuscripts is probably a "milder" adaptation of the earlier Viking and German war poems from the continent. When such poetry was brought to England it was still being handed down orally from one generation to another, and the constant presence of alliterative verse, or consonant rhyme (today's newspaper headlines and marketing abundantly use this technique such as in Big is Better) helped the Anglo-Saxon peoples remember it. Such rhyme is a feature of Germanic languages and is opposed to vocalic or end-rhyme of Romance languages. But the first written literature dates to the early Christian monasteries founded by St. Augustine of Canterbury and his disciples and it is reasonable to believe that it was somehow adapted to suit to needs of Christian readers. Even without their crudest lines, Viking war poems still smell of blood feuds and their consonant rhymes sound like the smashing of swords under the gloomy northern sky: there is always a sense of imminent danger in the narratives. Sooner or later, all things must come to an end, as Beowulf eventually dies at the hands of the monsters he spends the tale fighting. The feelings of Beowulf that nothing lasts, that youth and joy will turn to death and sorrow entered Christianity and were to dominate the future landscape of English fiction.
Renaissance literature
English Renaissance
Following the introduction of a printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476, vernacular literature flourished. The Reformation inspired the production of vernacular liturgy which led to the Book of Common Prayer, a lasting influence on literary English language. The poetry, drama, and prose produced under both Queen Elizabeth I and King James I constitute what is today labelled as Early modern (or Renaissance)




Early Modern period
Further information: Early Modern English and Early Modern Britain
Elizabethan era
Main article: Elizabethan literature
The Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the field of drama. The Italian Renaissance had rediscovered the ancient Greek and Roman theatre, and this was instrumental in the development of the new drama, which was then beginning to evolve apart from the old mystery and miracle plays of the Middle Ages. The Italians were particularly inspired by Seneca (a major tragic playwright and philosopher, the tutor of Nero) and Plautus (its comic clichés, especially that of the boasting soldier had a powerful influence on the Renaissance and after). However, the Italian tragedies embraced a principle contrary to Seneca's ethics: showing blood and violence on the stage. In Seneca's plays such scenes were only acted by the characters. But the English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model: a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London and Giovanni Florio had brought much of the Italian language and culture to England. It is also true that the Elizabethan Era was a very violent age and that the high incidence of political assassinations in Renaissance Italy (embodied by Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince) did little to calm fears of popish plots. As a result, representing that kind of violence on the stage was probably more cathartic for the Elizabethan spectator. Following earlier Elizabethan plays such as Gorboduc by Sackville & Norton and The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd that was to provide much material for Hamlet, William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed. Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably had only some grammar school education. He was neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat as the "university wits" that had monopolised the English stage when he started writing. But he was very gifted and incredibly versatile, and he surpassed "professionals" as Robert Greene who mocked this "shake-scene" of low origins. Though most dramas met with great success, it is in his later years (marked by the early reign of James I) that he wrote what have been considered his greatest plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, a tragicomedy that inscribes within the main drama a brilliant pageant to the new king. This 'play within a play' takes the form of a masque, an interlude with music and dance coloured by the novel special effects of the new indoor theatres. Critics have shown that this masterpiece, which can be considered a dramatic work in its own right, was written for James's court, if not for the monarch himself. The magic arts of Prospero, on which depend the outcome of the plot, hint at the fine relationship between art and nature in poetry. Significantly for those times (the arrival of the first colonists in America), The Tempest is (though not apparently) set on a Bermudan island, as research on the Bermuda Pamphlets (1609) has shown, linking Shakespeare to the Virginia Company itself. The "News from the New World", as Frank Kermode points out, were already out and Shakespeare's interest in this respect is remarkable. Shakespeare also popularized the English sonnet which made significant changes to Petrarch's model.
The sonnet was introduced into English by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century. Poems intended to be set to music as songs, such as by Thomas Campion, became popular as printed literature was disseminated more widely in households. See English Madrigal School. Other important figures in Elizabethan theatre include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont. Had Marlowe (1564-1593) not been stabbed at twenty-nine in a tavern brawl, says Anthony Burgess, he might have rivalled, if not equalled Shakespeare himself for his poetic gifts. Remarkably, he was born only a few weeks before Shakespeare and must have known him well. Marlowe's subject matter, though, is different: it focuses more on the moral drama of the renaissance man than any other thing. Marlowe was fascinated and terrified by the new frontiers opened by modern science. Drawing on German lore, he introduced Dr. Faustus to England, a scientist and magician who is obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man's technological power to its limits. He acquires supernatural gifts that even allow him to go back in time and wed Helen of Troy, but at the end of his twenty-four years' covenant with the devil he has to surrender his soul to him. His dark heroes may have something of Marlowe himself, whose untimely death remains a mystery. He was known for being an atheist, leading a lawless life, keeping many mistresses, consorting with ruffians: living the 'high life' of London's underworld. But many suspect that this might have been a cover-up for his activities as a secret agent for Elizabeth I, hinting that the 'accidental stabbing' might have been a premeditated assassination by the enemies of The Crown. Beaumont and Fletcher are less-known, but it is almost sure that they helped Shakespeare write some of his best dramas, and were quite popular at the time. It is also at this time that the city comedy genre develops. In the later 16th century English poetry was characterised by elaboration of language and extensive allusion to classical myths. The most important poets of this era include Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. Elizabeth herself, a product of Renaissance humanism, produced occasional poems such as On Monsieur’s Departure.
Canons of Renaissance poetry
Jacobean literature
After Shakespeare's death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era (The reign of James I). However, Jonson's aesthetics hark back to the Middle Ages rather than to the Tudor Era: his characters embody the theory of humours. According to this contemporary medical theory, behavioral differences result from a prevalence of one of the body's four "humours" (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) over the other three; these humours correspond with the four elements of the universe: air, water, fire, and earth. This leads Jonson to exemplify such differences to the point of creating types, or clichés.
Jonson is a master of style, and a brilliant satirist. His Volpone shows how a group of scammers are fooled by a top con-artist, vice being punished by vice, virtue meting out its reward.
Others who followed Jonson's style include Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote the brilliant comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a mockery of the rising middle class and especially of those nouveaux riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much literature at all. In the story, a couple of grocers wrangle with professional actors to have their illiterate son play a leading role in a drama. He becomes a knight-errant wearing, appropriately, a burning pestle on his shield. Seeking to win a princess' heart, the young man is ridiculed much in the way Don Quixote was. One of Beaumont and Fletcher's chief merits was that of realising how feudalism and chivalry had turned into snobbery and make-believe and that new social classes were on the rise.
Another popular style of theatre during Jacobean times was the revenge play, popularized by John Webster and Thomas Kyd. George Chapman wrote a couple of subtle revenge tragedies, but must be remembered chiefly on account of his famous translation of Homer, one that had a profound influence on all future English literature, even inspiring John Keats to write one of his best sonnets.
The King James Bible, one of the most massive translation projects in the history of English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. It represents the culmination of a tradition of Bible translation into English that began with the work of William Tyndale. It became the standard Bible of the Church of England, and some consider it one of the greatest literary works of all time. This project was headed by James I himself, who supervised the work of forty-seven scholars. Although many other translations into English have been made, some of which are widely considered more accurate, many aesthetically prefer the King James Bible, whose meter is made to mimic the original Hebrew verse.
Besides Shakespeare, whose figure towers over the early 1600s, the major poets of the early 17th century included John Donne and the other Metaphysical poets. Influenced by continental Baroque, and taking as his subject matter both Christian mysticism and eroticism, metaphysical poetry uses unconventional or "unpoetic" figures, such as a compass or a mosquito, to reach surprise effects. For example, in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", one of Donne's Songs and Sonnets, the points of a compass represent two lovers, the woman who is home, waiting, being the centre, the farther point being her lover sailing away from her. But the larger the distance, the more the hands of the compass lean to each other: separation makes love grow fonder. The paradox or the oxymoron is a constant in this poetry whose fears and anxieties also speak of a world of spiritual certainties shaken by the modern discoveries of geography and science, one that is no longer the centre of the universe. Apart from the metaphysical poetry of Donne, the 17th century is also celebrated for its Baroque poetry. Baroque poetry served the same ends as the art of the period; the Baroque style is lofty, sweeping, epic, and religious. Many of these poets have an overtly Catholic sensibility (namely Richard Crashaw) and wrote poetry for the Catholic counter-Reformation in order to establish a feeling of supremacy and mysticism that would ideally persuade newly emerging Protestant groups back toward Catholicism.
Caroline and Cromwellian literature
The turbulent years of the mid-17th century, during the reign of Charles I and the subsequent Commonwealth and Protectorate, saw a flourishing of political literature in English. Pamphlets written by sympathisers of every faction in the English civil war ran from vicious personal attacks and polemics, through many forms of propaganda, to high-minded schemes to reform the nation. Of the latter type, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes would prove to be one of the most important works of British political philosophy. Hobbes's writings are some of the few political works from the era which are still regularly published while John Bramhall, who was Hobbes's chief critic, is largely forgotten. The period also saw a flourishing of news books, the precursors to the British newspaper, with journalists such as Henry Muddiman, Marchamont Needham, and John Birkenhead representing the views and activities of the contending parties. The frequent arrests of authors and the suppression of their works, with the consequence of foreign or underground printing, led to the proposal of a licensing system. The Areopagitica, a political pamphlet by John Milton, was written in opposition to licensing and is regarded as one of the most eloquent defenses of press freedom ever written.
Specifically in the reign of Charles I (1625 – 42), English Renaissance theatre experienced its concluding efflorescence. The last works of Ben Jonson appeared on stage and in print, along with the final generation of major voices in the drama of the age: John Ford, Philip Massinger, James Shirley, and Richard Brome. With the closure of the theatres at the start of the English Civil War in 1642, drama was suppressed for a generation, to resume only in the altered society of the English Restoration in 1660.
Other forms of literature written during this period are usually ascribed political subtexts, or their authors are grouped along political lines. The cavalier poets, active mainly before the civil war, owed much to the earlier school of metaphysical poets. The forced retirement of royalist officials after the execution of Charles I was a good thing in the case of Izaak Walton, as it gave him time to work on his book The Compleat Angler. Published in 1653, the book, ostensibly a guide to fishing, is much more: a meditation on life, leisure, and contentment. The two most important poets of Oliver Cromwell's England were Andrew Marvell and John Milton, with both producing works praising the new government; such as Marvell's An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland. Despite their republican beliefs they escaped punishment upon the Restoration of Charles II, after which Milton wrote some of his greatest poetical works (with any possible political message hidden under allegory). Thomas Browne was another writer of the period; a learned man with an extensive library, he wrote prolifically on science, religion, medicine and the esoteric.
Restoration literature
Main article: Restoration Literature
Restoration literature includes both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises on Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments of Robert Boyle and the holy meditations of Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, the pioneering of literary criticism from Dryden, and the first newspapers. The official break in literary culture caused by censorship and radically moralist standards under Cromwell's Puritan regime created a gap in literary tradition, allowing a seemingly fresh start for all forms of literature after the Restoration. During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to the court of Charles I went into exile with the twenty-year old Charles II. The nobility who travelled with Charles II were therefore lodged for over a decade in the midst of the continent's literary scene. Charles spent his time attending plays in France, and he developed a taste for Spanish plays. Those nobles living in Holland began to learn about mercantile exchange as well as the tolerant, rationalist prose debates that circulated in that officially tolerant nation.
The largest and most important poetic form of the era was satire. In general, publication of satire was done anonymously. There were great dangers in being associated with a satire. On the one hand, defamation law was a wide net, and it was difficult for a satirist to avoid prosecution if he were proven to have written a piece that seemed to criticize a noble. On the other hand, wealthy individuals would respond to satire as often as not by having the suspected poet physically attacked by ruffians. John Dryden was set upon for being merely suspected of having written the Satire on Mankind. A consequence of this anonymity is that a great many poems, some of them of merit, are unpublished and largely unknown.
Prose in the Restoration period is dominated by Christian religious writing, but the Restoration also saw the beginnings of two genres that would dominate later periods: fiction and journalism. Religious writing often strayed into political and economic writing, just as political and economic writing implied or directly addressed religion. The Restoration was also the time when John Locke wrote many of his philosophical works. Locke's empiricism was an attempt at understanding the basis of human understanding itself and thereby devising a proper manner for making sound decisions. These same scientific methods led Locke to his three Treatises on Government, which later inspired the thinkers in the American Revolution. As with his work on understanding, Locke moves from the most basic units of society toward the more elaborate, and, like Thomas Hobbes, he emphasizes the plastic nature of the social contract. For an age that had seen absolute monarchy overthrown, democracy attempted, democracy corrupted, and limited monarchy restored, only a flexible basis for government could be satisfying. The Restoration moderated most of the more strident sectarian writing, but radicalism persisted after the Restoration. Puritan authors such as John Milton were forced to retire from public life or adapt, and those Digger, Fifth Monarchist, Leveller, Quaker, and Anabaptist authors who had preached against monarchy and who had participated directly in the regicide of Charles I were partially suppressed. Consequently, violent writings were forced underground, and many of those who had served in the Interregnum attenuated their positions in the Restoration. John Bunyan stands out beyond other religious authors of the period. Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of personal salvation and a guide to the Christian life. Instead of any focus on eschatology or divine retribution, Bunyan instead writes about how the individual saint can prevail against the temptations of mind and body that threaten damnation. The book is written in a straightforward narrative and shows influence from both drama and biography, and yet it also shows an awareness of the grand allegorical tradition found in Edmund Spenser. During the Restoration period, the most common manner of getting news would have been a broadsheet publication. A single, large sheet of paper might have a written, usually partisan, account of an event. However, the period saw the beginnings of the first professional and periodical (meaning that the publication was regular) journalism in England. Journalism develops late, generally around the time of William of Orange's claiming the throne in 1689. Coincidentally or by design, England began to have newspapers just when William came to court from Amsterdam, where there were already newspapers being published.
It is impossible to satisfactorily date the beginning of the novel in English. However, long fiction and fictional biographies began to distinguish themselves from other forms in England during the Restoration period. An existing tradition of Romance fiction in France and Spain was popular in England. The "Romance" was considered a feminine form, and women were taxed with reading "novels" as a vice. One of the most significant figures in the rise of the novel in the Restoration period is Aphra Behn. She was not only the first professional female novelist, but she may be among the first professional novelists of either sex in England. Behn's most famous novel was Oroonoko in 1688. This was a biography of an entirely fictional African king who had been enslaved in Suriname. Behn's novels show the influence of tragedy and her experiences as a dramatist.
As soon as the previous Puritan regime's ban on public stage representations was lifted, the drama recreated itself quickly and abundantly. The most famous plays of the early Restoration period are the unsentimental or "hard" comedies of John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Etherege, which reflect the atmosphere at Court, and celebrate an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and conquest. After a sharp drop in both quality and quantity in the 1680s, the mid-90s saw a brief second flowering of the drama, especially comedy. Comedies like William Congreve's Love For Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700), and John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697) were "softer" and more middle-class in ethos, very different from the aristocratic extravaganza twenty years earlier, and aimed at a wider audience. The playwrights of the 1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with a strong middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of marriage. The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells.
Diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys depicted everyday London life and the cultural scene of the times.
Augustan literature
Main article: Augustan literature
The term Augustan literature derives from authors of the 1720s and 1730's themselves, who responded to a term that George I of England preferred for himself. While George I meant the title to reflect his might, they instead saw in it a reflection of Ancient Rome's transition from rough and ready literature to highly political and highly polished literature. Because of the aptness of the metaphor, the period from 1689 - 1750 was called "the Augustan Age" by critics throughout the 18th century (including Voltaire and Oliver Goldsmith). The literature of the period is overtly political and thoroughly aware of critical dictates for literature. It is an age of exuberance and scandal, of enormous energy and inventiveness and outrage, that reflected an era when English, Scottish, and Irish people found themselves in the midst of an expanding economy, lowering barriers to education, and the stirrings of the Industrial Revolution.
The most outstanding poet of the age is Alexander Pope, but Pope's excellence is partially in his constant battle with other poets, and his serene, seemingly neo-Classical approach to poetry is in competition with highly idiosyncratic verse and strong competition from such poets as Ambrose Philips. It was during this time that James Thomson produced his melancholy The Seasons and Edward Young wrote Night Thoughts. It is also the era that saw a serious competition over the proper model for the pastoral. In criticism, poets struggled with a doctrine of decorum, of matching proper words with proper sense and of achieving a diction that matched the gravity of a subject. At the same time, the mock-heroic was at its zenith. Pope's Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad are still the greatest mock-heroic poems ever written.
In prose, the earlier part of the period was overshadowed by the development of the English essay. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Spectator established the form of the British periodical essay, inventing the pose of the detached observer of human life who can meditate upon the world without advocating any specific changes in it. However, this was also the time when the English novel, first emerging in the Restoration, developed into a major artform. Daniel Defoe turned from journalism and writing criminal lives for the press to writing fictional criminal lives with Roxana and Moll Flanders. He also wrote a fictional treatment of the travels of Alexander Selkirk called Robinson Crusoe (1719). The novel would benefit indirectly from a tragedy of the stage, and in mid-century many more authors would begin to write novels.
If Addison and Steele overawed one type of prose, then Jonathan Swift did another. Swift's prose style is unmannered and direct, with a clarity that few contemporaries matched. He was a profound skeptic about the modern world, but he was similarly profoundly distrustful of nostalgia. He saw in history a record of lies and vanity, and he saw in the present a madness of vanity and lies. Core Christian values were essential, but these values had to be muscular and assertive and developed by constant rejection of the games of confidence men and their gullies. Swift's A Tale of a Tub announced his skeptical analysis of the claims of the modern world, and his later prose works, such as his war with Patridge the astrologer, and most of all his derision of pride in Gulliver's Travels left only the individual in constant fear and humility safe. After his "exile" to Ireland, Swift reluctantly began defending the Irish people from the predations of colonialism. His A Modest Proposal and the Drapier Letters provoked riots and arrests, but Swift, who had no love of Irish Roman Catholics, was outraged by the abuses and barbarity he saw around him.
Drama in the early part of the period featured the last plays of John Vanbrugh and William Congreve, both of whom carried on the Restoration comedy with some alterations. However, the majority of stagings were of lower farces and much more serious and domestic tragedies. George Lillo and Richard Steele both produced highly moral forms of tragedy, where the characters and the concerns of the characters were wholly middle class or working class. This reflected a marked change in the audience for plays, as royal patronage was no longer the important part of theatrical success. Additionally, Colley Cibber and John Rich began to battle each other for greater and greater spectacles to present on stage. The figure of Harlequin was introduced, and pantomime theatre began to be staged. This "low" comedy was quite popular, and the plays became tertiary to the staging. Opera also began to be popular in London, and there was significant literary resistance to this Italian incursion. This trend was broken only by a few attempts at a new type of comedy. Pope and John Arbuthnot and John Gay attempted a play entitled Three Hours After Marriage that failed. In 1728, however, John Gay returned to the playhouse with The Beggar's Opera. Gay's opera was in English and retold the story of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. However, it seemed to be an allegory for Robert Walpole and the directors of the South Sea Company, and so Gay's follow up opera was banned without performance. The licensing act of 1737 brought an abrupt halt to much of the period's drama, as the theatres were once again brought under state control.
An effect of the Licensing Act was to cause more than one aspiring playwright to switch over to writing novels. Henry Fielding began to write prose satire and novels after his plays could not pass the censors. Henry Brooke also turned to novels. In the interim, Samuel Richardson had produced a novel intended to counter the deleterious effects of novels in Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1749). Henry Fielding attacked the absurdity of this novel with two of his own works, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, and then countered Richardson's Clarissa with Tom Jones. Brooke wrote The Man of Feeling and indirectly began the sentimental novel. Laurence Sterne attempted a Swiftian novel with a unique perspective on the impossibility of biography (the model for most novels up to that point) and understanding with Tristram Shandy, even as his detractor Tobias Smollett elevated the picaresque novel with his works. Each of these novels represents a formal and thematic divergence from the others. Each novelist was in dialogue and competition with the others, and, in a sense, the novel established itself as a diverse and open-formed genre in this explosion of creativity. The most lasting effects of the experimentation would be the psychological realism of Richardson, the bemused narrative voice of Fielding, and the sentimentality of Brooke.
18th century
Further information: 18th century literature
During the Age of Sensibility, literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) – a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility. Led by the philosophers who were inspired by the discoveries of the previous century (Newton) and the writings of Descartes, Locke and Bacon. They sought to discover and to act upon universally valid principles governing humanity, nature, and society. They variously attacked spiritual and scientific authority, dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and economic and social restraints. They considered the state the proper and rational instrument of progress. The extreme rationalism and skepticism of the age led naturally to deism; the same qualities played a part in bringing the later reaction of romanticism.
The Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot epitomized the spirit of the age.
Increased emphasis on instinct and feeling, rather than judgment and restraint. A growing sympathy for the Middle Ages during the Age of Sensibility sparked an interest in medieval ballads and folk literature.
Romanticism
The changing landscape of Britain brought about by the steam engine has two major outcomes: the boom of industrialism with the expansion of the city, and the consequent depopulation of the countryside as a result of the enclosures, or privatisation of pastures. Most peasants poured into the city to work in the new factories.
This abrupt change is revealed by the change of meaning in five key words: industry (once meaning "creativity"), democracy (once disparagingly used as "mob rule"), class (from now also used with a social connotation), art (once just meaning "craft"), culture (once only belonging to farming).
But the poor condition of workers, the new class-conflicts and the pollution of the environment causes a reaction to urbanism and industrialisation prompting poets to rediscover the beauty and value of nature. Mother earth is seen as the only source of wisdom, the only solution to the ugliness caused by machines.
The superiority of nature and instinct over civilisation had been preached by Jean Jacques Rousseau and his message was picked by almost all European poets. The first in England were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These early Romantic Poets brought a new emotionalism and introspection, and their emergence is marked by the first romantic Manifesto in English literature, the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads". This collection was mostly contributed by Wordsworth, although Coleridge must be credited for his long and impressive Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a tragic ballad about the survival of one sailor through a series of supernatural events on his voyage through the south seas which involves the slaying of an albatross, the death of the rest of the crew, a visit from Death and his mate, Life-in-Death, and the eventual redemption of the Mariner.
Coleridge and Wordsworth, however, understood romanticism in two entirely different ways: while Coleridge sought to make the supernatural "real" (much like sci-fi movies use special effects to make unlikely plots believable), Wordsworth sought to stir the imagination of readers through his down-to-earth characters taken from real life (for eg. in "The Idiot Boy"), or the beauty of the Lake District that largely inspired his production (as in "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey").
The "Second generation" of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Keats. Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least 'romantic' of the three. His amours with a number of prominent but married ladies was also a way to voice his dissent on the hypocrisy of a high society that was only apparently religious but in fact largely libertine, the same that had derided him for being physically impaired. His first trip to Europe resulted in the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a mock-heroic epic of a young man's adventures in Europe but also a sharp satire against London society. Despite Childe Harold's success on his return to England, accompanied by the publication of The Giaour and The Corsair his alleged incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh in 1816 actually forced him to leave England for good and seek asylum on the continent. Here he joined Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, with his secretary Dr. John Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva during the 'year without a summer' of 1816.
Although his is just a short story, Polidori must be credited for introducing The Vampyre, conceived from the same competition which spawned Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to English literature. Percy, like Mary, had much in common with Byron: he was an aristocrat from a famous and ancient family, had embraced atheism and free-thinking and, like him, was fleeing from scandal in England.
Shelley had been expelled from college for openly declaring his atheism. He had married a 16-year-old girl, Harriet Westbrook whom he had abandoned soon after for Mary (Harriet took her own life after that). Harriet did not embrace his ideals of free love and anarchism, and was not as educated as to contribute to literary debate. Mary was different: the daughter of philosopher and revolutionary William Godwin, she was intellectually more of an equal, shared some of his ideals and was a feminist like her late mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Women.
One of Percy Shelley's most prominent works is the Ode to the West Wind. Despite his apparent refusal to believe in God, this poem is considered a homage to pantheism, the recognition of a spiritual presence in nature.
Mary Shelley did not go down in history for her poetry, but for giving birth to science fiction: the plot for the novel is said to have come from a nightmare during stormy nights on Lake Geneva in the company of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. Her idea of making a body with human parts stolen from different corpses and then animating it with electricity was perhaps influenced by Alessandro Volta's invention and Luigi Galvani's experiments with dead frogs. Frankenstein's chilling tale also suggests modern organ transplants, tissue regeneration, reminding us of the moral issues raised by today's medicine. But the creature of Frankenstein is incredibly romantic as well. Although "the monster" is intelligent, good and loving, he is shunned by everyone because of his ugliness and deformity, and the desperation and envy that result from social exclusion turn him against the very man who created him.
John Keats did not share Byron's and Shelley's extremely revolutionary ideals, but his cult of pantheism is as important as Shelley's. Keats was in love with the ancient stones of the Parthenon that Lord Elgin had brought to England from Greece, also known as the Elgin Marbles). He celebrates ancient Greece: the beauty of free, youthful love couples here with that of classical art. Keats's great attention to art, especially in his Ode on a Grecian Urn is quite new in romanticism, and it will inspire Walter Pater's and then Oscar Wilde's belief in the absolute value of art as independent from aesthetics.
The most popular novelist of the era was Sir Walter Scott, whose grand historical romances inspired a generation of painters, composers, and writers throughout Europe. By contrast, Jane Austen wrote novels about the life of the landed gentry, seen from a woman's point of view, and wryly focused on practical social issues, especially marriage and money.
Poet, painter and printmaker William Blake is usually included among the English Romanticists, though his visionary work is much different from that of the others discussed in this section.
Victorian literature
Main article: Victorian literature







Charles Dickens
It was in the Victorian era (1837-1901) that the novel became the leading form of literature in English. Most writers were now more concerned to meet the tastes of a large middle class reading public than to please aristocratic patrons. The best known works of the era include the emotionally powerful works of the Brontë sisters; the satire Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray; the realist novels of George Eliot; and Anthony Trollope's insightful portrayals of the lives of the landowning and professional classes.
Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s, confirming the trend for serial publication. Dickens wrote vividly about London life and the struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion which was acceptable to readers of all classes. His early works such as the Pickwick Papers are masterpieces of comedy. Later his works became darker, without losing his genius for caricature.
An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside may be seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, and others.
Leading poetic figures included Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Christina Rossetti.
Literature for children developed as a separate genre. Some works become globally well-known, such as those of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, both of whom used nonsense verse. Adventure novels, such as those of Anthony Hope and Robert Louis Stevenson, were written for adults but are now generally classified as for children.

Modernism
Main article: Modernist literature
The movement known as English literary modernism grew out of a general sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and objective truth. The movement was greatly influenced by the ideas of Romanticism, Karl Marx's political writings, and the psychoanalytic theories of subconscious - Sigmund Freud. The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers.
Although literary modernism reached its peak between the First and Second World Wars, the earliest examples of the movement's attitudes appeared in the mid to late nineteenth century. Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, and the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy represented a few of the major early modernists writing in England during the Victorian period.
The first decades of the twentieth century saw several major works of modernism published, including the seminal short story collection Dubliners by James Joyce, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the poetry and drama of William Butler Yeats.
Important novelists between the World Wars included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse and D. H. Lawrence. T. S. Eliot was the preeminent English poet of the period. Across the Atlantic writers like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and the poets Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost developed a more American take on the modernist aesthetic in their work.
Perhaps the most contentiously important figure in the development of the modernist movement was the American poet Ezra Pound. Credited with "discovering" both T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, whose stream of consciousness novel Ulysses is considered to be one of the century's greatest literary achievements, Pound also advanced the cause of imagism and free verse, forms which would dominate English poetry into the twenty-first century.
Gertrude Stein, an American expat, was also an enormous literary force during this time period, famous for her line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."
Other notable writers of this period included H.D., Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas and Graham Greene. However, some of these writers are more closely associated with what has become known as post-modernism, a term often used to encompass the diverse range of writers who succeeded the modernists.
Taken from Wikipedia.com

Language Access Centre (LAC)

UNIPDU PP Darul Ulum

Jombang

By :

Trikaloka Handayani Putri S.S

Kepala Language Access Centre

Pondok Pesantren Darul Ulum tidak pernah sepi dari inovasi baru terhadap dunia keilmuan. Mulai dengan berdirinya AKPER, AKBID SMU Unggulan, SMK Telkom, STIBA, STAIDU, UNIPDU sampai RSBI. . Kini hadir lagi dengan adanya fasilitas baru yang bernama Language Access Centre.

Language Access Centre didirikan akhir tahun 1998 dengan nama Self Access Centre, seiring dengan adanya STIBA Darul Ulum. Tempat ini dijadikan sebagai sarana pendukung bagi mahasiswa STIBA. Namun pada saat itu hanya ada sedikit sarana pendukung.

Seiring dengan kedatangan volunteer dari Inggris pada bulan November 1999 yang bernama Jane Flood, pihak yayasan melalui volunteer tersebut berusaha melengkapi sarana yang ada di Self Access Centre. Beberapa buku didatangkan langsung dari Inggris begitu juga kaset, tape dan sarana pendukung pembelajaran bahasa Inggris lainnya. Dengan semakin bertambahnya fasilitas di Self Access Centre, pengaruhnya pun mulai tampak. Pengunjung mulai berdatangan. Tidak hanya dikalangan mahasiswa sendiri, tetapi juga dari kalangan siswa, guru bahasa Inggris dan mahasiswa diluar PP Darul Ulum.

Tahun 2004 melalui program, volunteer baru dari Australia yang bernama Amber Earles dan Benjamin Liu datang untuk menggantikan volunteer yang lama. Kedatangan volunteer dari Australia tersebut membawa banyak keberuntungan bagi Self Access Centre. Banyak buku pembelajaran bahasa Inggris yang didonasikan ke tempat ini. Puncaknya sekitar awal tahun 2006, Self Access Centre mendapat bantuan Direct Aid Project (DAP) dari kedutaan besar Australia.

Dengan Bantuan DAP tersebut, Self Access Centre mengalami perombakan total, mulai dari fasilitas buku, fasilitas elektronika sampai meja kursi dan sarana pendukung lainnya. Self Access Centrepun mulai dilengkapi dengan Computer celeron, TV dan DVD player serta. Musik pengiring belajar bisa diperdengarkan setiap saat karena ruangan telah difasilitasi dengan speaker. Reading area dan discussion areapun telah dipersiapkan untuk menambah kenyamanan para pengguna.

Untuk menunjukkan komitmen kami yang baru, Self Access Centre berubah nama menjadi Language Access Centre. Tanggal 20 Mei 2006 Language Access Centre diresmikan oleh Bapak Drs Gatot Kartonoadi MPd selaku Kepala Diknas kabupaten Jombang, serta Alan Foulkes perwakilan dari kedutaan besar Australia, serta dihadiri oleh guru-guru bahasa Inggris, siswa SMA dan kalangan akademisi. Semenjak saat itu Language Access Centre menjadi begitu dikenal di masyarakat terutama di kalangan mahasiswa bahasa Inggris dikota santri Jombang, karena fasilitas dirasa cukup lengkap, serta design interiornya yang sangat mendukung untuk belajar. Perlu diketahui bahwa hanya ada dua tempat yang seperti ini di Jawa Timur yaitu di PP Darul Ulum Jombang dan juga di PP An – Nuqoyyah Guluk – Guluk Sumenep Madura.

Antusiasme mahasiswa, siswa dan guru-guru bahasa Inggris di area PP Darul Ulum dan kota Jombang akan LAC cukup besar. Hal ini dengan ditandai dengan semakin banyaknya anggota LAC. Tercatat, sekarang ada sekitar 370 orang yang telah menjadi terdaftar sebagai member di Language Access Centre. Dengan jumlah koleksi buku yang sampai saat ini mencapai 1240 judul buku, LAC menjadi tempat acuan referensi yang bermutu. Setiap hari LAC selalu ramai dikunjungi oleh para member, yang datang untuk memanfaatkan segala fasilitas yang ada di LAC, mulai dari membaca dan meminjam buku, belajar bahasa Inggris, dll.

Inilah profile tentang Language Access Centre UNIPDU PP Darul Ulum Jombang. Kami selalu berusaha untuk memajukan LAC karena “Meningkatkan kualitas dan mutu pelayanan” adalah komitmen kami selaku pengelola Language Access Centre. Semoga informasi ini bermanfaat dan terima kasih kepada semua pihak yang telah mendukung kami selama ini.

Language Access Centre dibuka secara resmi pada tanggal 20 Mei 2006 oleh kepala Diknas Jombang dan perwakilan dari Kedutaan besar Australia . Acara launching dihadiri oleh pelajar dan mahasiswa internal PPDU dan beberapa perwakilan Lembaga kursus dari Jombang dan sekitarnya

Sebagai seorang muslim kita wajib untuk selalu mencari ilmu. Mencari ilmu hukumnya wajib. Karena dengan mencari ilmu berarti kita melaksanakan perintah-Nya sekaligus sebagai suatu bentuk ibadah.
Dengan Ilmu yang kita kuasai kita bisa melakukan apa saja untuk menunjang ibadah kita kepada Allah SWT.