convention meaning in english literature

convention meaning in english literature

The Evolution and Significance of Convention in English Literature

1. Introduction to Conventions in English Literature

This study will explore the evolution and significance of conventions in English literature from a set of broader and narrower perspectives. Almost every effective piece of art within their appreciation of the complexities of their own tradition is in so implicit dialogue with the concept or screen of the conventional; and language because it is the medium and the message of this dialogue as both single instance and central artifact, at least to the extent that we can say some art works are at crucial moments broadly and deeply symptomatic of their time and place. The literary or, for that matter, Brechtian dialogue with the conventional is, however, a form of dialogue with the self. Because expression always exists within a language system that is at once internal and external to the self, always as form and subsequently structure that can never be disentangled from the specific conditions of its existence, literature and art are deeply concerned outsiders within. The very fact of effective dialogue is a way of probing the often not easily applicable boundaries of what it is to be or not be an outsider.

The subject of “convention” is common in the study of literature, particularly in literary history. The more interesting this kind of convention – “political convention,” “emotional convention,” “style as convention” – the more one questions the relevance of the concept to the study of literature. While literary historians as a group tend not to question the appropriateness of applying the term “convention” to specific areas of literary form and content, a significant number of aesthetic philosophers do. As far as they are concerned, the realm of conventional responses is alien to the realm of literature or at least of good literature. In the sense of the predetermined shape of, manner of doing, and commentary on, most arts can conveniently fall under our concept. It is one of the overt concerns of writers, from the last quarter of the eighteenth century forward, to rethink art as well as the related ideas of cultural capital and property, that opens up the range of applicable terms.

2. Historical Development of Literary Conventions

The genesis of a dramatic culture is also a somewhat ingenious process, in itself involving much that is vaguely symbolical in character; but this phase of development rushes up boldly from a lower stage, which has to be described first. From religion, we know, crept the play; but when the play had been accepted – with condescension – by the Church, holy conventions began to grow up around it until it became long since a symbol of the moral virtues necessary to go out. As the simpler dramatic motive necessarily died a natural death, the conventional condition of the public taste has had the gravest reactionary effect on the literary drama, impelling the playwright, in his struggles with a capricious clientele, to amplify the remaining motive until it has arrived again at a truly bear-garden standard of significance. This, our literary drama in general, possesses no life-giving force, no progress.

Such, for example, are the Homeric epithets: “Their victorious King”; “the swift-footed Achilles”; “fair-haired Phoebus”; “crafty Ulysses”; “wine-faced Dionysus”; “golden-throned Hera.” These, when they first appeared, would be actual descriptions applied to a god or warrior, but very soon, by a process amounting to “conventional” use, they conveyed nothing more than general ideas of power, fleetness, beauty, and so forth. In particular, the epithet became more and more degraded, until in the Elizabethan Drama we find characters such as The Black Prince, The First Murderer, The Ghost; the hero offering bread and wine should, in the first case, be represented as a humble servant of Dunstan, while in the second he must apparently be no less a person than Pharaoh! As to the impersonation of the Holy Ghost, he was often a masked figure, the concealed player occasionally giving forth falsetto tones, with accompaniment of echo and clouds of incense.

3. Key Literary Conventions in English Literature

In poetry, the elegy is a form to which poets have returned repeatedly throughout the centuries, even though, in being lament about a loss, it may seem to express what is basically the same state of mind or emotion. But the many different ways they choose to express this same emotion can add to our understanding of the individual poet and of human nature. Perhaps it is this variation that has kept the formula fresh. With the ode, its meaning has varied; either a poem of praise or a more general lyric, it has attracted writers as different as Ben Jonson, Keats, and Neruda. While all the various rhetorical devices and figures of speech come readily to mind as central conventions of poetry, the extended metaphor is equally a firm part of poetry’s heart. The very concept of poetry helps define what it is in dramatic works, both in use of language and in a particular kind of language.

The primary key literary conventions in English literature concern the representation of the human experience in writing. Some are more general; others are specific. Some are in constant use; others appear only at specific times or in specific genres. In the novel, for example, the devices of letter-writing and the epistolary novel as a whole were particularly useful both in the early development of the form and also with the rise in the 18th century in tales of intrigue. Although the picaresque has its roots in the German literature of the 16th century, it is best represented in English literature by two such very different books as Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

4. The Role of Conventions in Shaping Literary Movements

It is not unusual to begin and end a day with references to the conventions of an ancient culture such as classical Greece and Rome, but the word has become enigmatic and elitist when it defines the world in which we presently live. All of us find convention boring and oppressive except when it suggests a connection with the elite, then convention is laced with fashionable associations. Just what are those conventions that have exerted such power of life and death and opened the sources of continuity from which art and culture derive? They have never been the product of reasoned inquiry; no laws secure them. Those stable combinations have been the work of chance and habit. Inherent interest in them is the secure product of the recognition of significant concepts embodied in the most commonplace scenes. They seize upon us and fascinate us as we enter that commonplace in literature, so that once read or experienced they call us back, insisting upon reconsideration. Once recognized, convention seems to prove a source of inspiration and resources surpassed by none other: the task is to penetrate its deceptive familiarity to the broad range of concepts which reveal its inherent, creative potential. The evolving theory of the structure of generative literature has made the formulation of such concepts possible.

The surprising fact about all of these conventions is their power to become the organic form of Western art, breaking out from time to time with loud insistence. Conventions create the form of both tradition and innovation; they tell the artist what to do, and the vernacular form in which to say it. They work under the surface of art, where they are at odds with revolutionary rhetoric, but what is more radical than saying once again and for the first time in a long time what everyone always accepts? That is the crux of modern art: to stumble upon the lost, waiting to be found at the thresholds of convention. The major movements in every age from classicism to modernism all bear the marks of the conventions which they modify, elaborate, or deny.

5. Contemporary Perspectives on Conventions in English Literature

1.1 In periods when diachrony has been the dominant framework of the literary scholar’s perception of literary relationships—such as the Romantic era or our own—notions of convention, if they have appeared at all, have usually been consigned to the pejorative categories of neoclassical ideology, the “tyranny of styles,” and similar manifestations of juvenile sophomoric thought. At these times, it has been the presentation of self as originating, experimental, and different, rather than the expression of shared, sustaining relationships, that has enjoyed the attractions of originality, exploration, or even—as originated and valued—as a scholarly connoisseurship. As the New Critics were at length to demonstrate, these tyrannies and factions of style are far from being creative traditions of poetic craft or of aesthetic response to a shared cultural dilemma, forged and nurtured, and altered through time in response to complex and often paradoxically remote social changes.

It is often said that concepts have, in recent years, become unfashionable in literary studies. According to Raman Selden, this is a major mistake, for “what is distinctively literary in literature is the codes by which literary writing is made and read and perceived to have value.” And it is the recurrent use of specific devices or conventions that makes the relationship between writer and reader an intense and enduring one. Such disagreement among contemporary critics about the importance of the concept of literary conventions is nothing new. As Battestin observed, “how we proceed in critical activity, what categories we employ, and what definitions we give those categories all depend on the dimensions of literature we have in mind.” Thus, changes in attitude toward literary conventions which occur from time to time are usually intellectual responses to reshufflings, within some larger framework, of critical categories and their supporting assumptions.