mood definition english literature

mood definition english literature

Exploring the Concept of Mood in English Literature

1. Introduction to Mood in Literature

Another thing that should be said about the laws and criticism of poetry is that, while on this subject of poetry and the emotions, it may all hang together with the suggested appearance of the muse. The reader of poetry often reveals a quick belief in what is told to him. I am not aware to the very slightest degree of how far such influences as these may or may not be necessary in order to induce them sometimes to listen further, or quicker than if they had not been mentioned, just when they are addressed. I have been kept intensely interested by a bald introduction to a few lines of a poem which happened, quite unexpectedly, to catch my ear. The reader does not often find himself kept always on the lookout for what is round the next corner in a discourse of history, or philosophy, or science. He is not infrequently led into a nearly trancelike eagerness to understand what he must presently feel.

Professor Saintsbury has no doubt seen good poems murdered by feeble directors who had the right idea about gently bowling the head, and so conditioning the ball if only he thought he had not done so, after all. But obviously, poetry is capable of goading the reader into a fury if it chooses, or drawing tears if it chooses, or lulling him at first with enough for a tender dream and then moving with mere sound or arrangement into persuasion and contemplation and so into tears and fury.

During the last hundred years, the technique of poetry has been cultivated with great energy, in the train of many fresh-born theories. As a long-established reader of verse, not very curious in new art forms, I incline to believe that emotional suggestion is, of all aspects and phases of poetry, the one which must determine its fate with the composite reader. I have always maintained, in discussion with my personal poet-cicerone, that verse may be inferred as a fine thing intellectually, but the emotions are an eddy that most people want to feel created in themselves when they read it. And insofar as the actual motion of the eddy is a result of form and is intellectually pleasurable, that is not the point.

2. The Role of Mood in Enhancing Literary Works

Mood also serves to emphasize the theme of a composition. It can be irresistibly shaped by a traumatic experience that serves to emphasize the theme of the composer. Mood operates over areas such as love, pathos, tragedy, terror, the unknown, seclusion, grief, bleakness, remorse, anger, joy, apprehension, mystery, and suspense. Every literary piece has a mood and in any given piece, it is possible for it to oscillate and change. In Wordsworth’s poetry, the mood most frequently suggested is that of contemplation, reflection, and reverie, and it is during such semi-meditative states that much of his inspiration comes and a new idea or a novel conception of an old object frequently springs up.

Mood is the conscious and predominant mental effect produced on the reader by a poem or passage. It is a state of mind. This mental state is produced by the writer’s choice of words, descriptions, settings, characters, action, narrator, etc. Mood is closely allied to the ambience of a work of art, fictional events, objects or persons evoked. It differs, however, from the ambience or atmosphere which is limited to the physical aspect. The writer uses the ambience through the senses: vision, scent, hearing, taste, touch and emotion, but the reader feels the mood through realization and observation. It is above the level of the writer’s comparison to shine aura through the use of sensory imagery and it is up to the reader to appreciate the silent aura as something beyond the senses. This is one occasion where less description leads to a greater subconscious understanding.

3. Techniques Used to Create Mood

Invest the place of the story with the attributes which lift the human spirit, avoiding all that can suggest the forbidding and the commonplace. The mood of melancholy, regard blue, the sea in winter, wet sand, long white rollers, cold, everything angry and grey. Marshy, fenny ground, fat marshes filled with snipe, drained marshes under a late sun going down in autumn, resting her tired color in those areas of demanding color. For portent—fog gusts, driving, freezing rain, struggling upon the hearse-like trees. The mood of loneliness; a hard, bright midday sky intonating some qualities still, high-hearted, lushly and diffused with the invigorated breath of saltwater. These are the kinds of settings that can inspire and help create mood.

A few well-known techniques will help you create the right mood: careful consideration to the development of your characters; effective use of tone, word choice, and sentence structure; and the use of details and imagery. Examining the rules and models of classical composition will also give you the power to set and play upon the emotions, not only of the reader but of your own moods as well. From the beginning, mood is developed and maintained through the creation and control of the place that can inspire the character. At the same time, we utterly ignore that environment which lifts us in its presence. It is crucial to create the right setting for the creation and the right manipulation of mood.

4. Impact of Mood on Reader Experience

1) Purpose or effect, for whom is the text written? 2) Appropriateness, consistency. 3) Emotion or sensation elicited, interesting features eliciting such emotion or sensations, author’s intention. 4) Thesis migration. 5) Conclusion, does the mood elicited influence the reader’s experience.

Again, you should consider the following questions when building up macro-themes about the mood of a text:

Mood also has an impact on the reader’s experience. When an author uses a particular word, phrase, or punctuation, it is done so with the aim of evoking a specific meaning as well as an emotional reaction. The mood of a text should stimulate the reader’s emotional response, which shapes their reading experience. Many people report feeling that they are physically present in the story world in a vivid way, or that they become so engaged in the stories they feel they are experiencing the feelings that the characters in the story are experiencing.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

The research of the present study can therefore be used as the raw data for a far larger, but equally systematic, study of the use of mood in the construction of feeling in literary works in English. Data on mood attitudes towards their heroes produce a rather clearer pattern – at least if the number of examples is any criterion – in the genre that appears to be devoted to eliciting the reader’s emotional or indeed sensual involvement.

In relation to literature, an interesting application of our explorations would be to sample texts from differing historical periods and categorize the moods present. It would be important to do this in English literature because we know that different languages have very different associations between words and emotions, so dialectical variations could be large. The mood plot, refined as suggested, would thus allow some illuminating comparisons of Greek, Latin, Old English, Middle English, and early and later modern texts.

So, in extending our work and presenting it more fully as mechanisms, future research should use a variety of tests, including deletion tests, and draw on other disciplines than just literature studies, such as reader response theory, survey studies of reader response, and cognitive studies of reading. Further analyses of linguistic markers for terms of reference would also be productive, as would comparison across a wider range of literary periods.

This Prime framework for mood, in its specific democratic Greek form, provides a useful lens through which we can explore our historical literatures. Literatures contain moods in abundance and can provide exemplification of our ideas. The research ends here, but more could be done. A first step would be to produce more psychological research on mood, complementing the work of Russell and Watson and others on the cognitive aspect. Such research should focus more specifically on mood in readers, or at least those paired mood types that are associated with art’s management of emotions.