mood english literature definition

mood english literature definition

Exploring the Concept of Mood in English Literature

1. Introduction to Mood in Literature

Despite the common-sense (or so they have erroneously been labeled) statements just made, mood is not restricted to literature. Nor is the adjective that describes it restricted to the members of a particular group of philosophers separated from everyone else in their respect. Mood is as English a word as anyone could hope for; as for its meaning, no member of the English-speaking (or any other) community could plead ignorance and hope to receive a sympathetic hearing. Little wonder, for of all the feelings that all the people have, mood is one of the few that the English language has all to itself. In its single syllable, we inherit a great treasure, a word excising consonants and sounds out of which the essence of something in space and time may be distilled to be held up before our understanding.

There can be no disputing the fact that the very essence of literature is mood, mood before all else. No other art, not even music, so directly and powerfully evokes this response as literature. In other arts, the meaning and purpose tend to wear the veil of the form; one must go through what is presented in order to arrive at the cause or reason of the presentation. This is not the case in literature, for literature is nothing without meaning. It is this intimate, direct, and complete merging of the form with the subject matter that invests mood with its peculiar importance in literature. (Unarguable as this may be, it’s an assertion one can see not only in the literature of all times and places but also in the simple fact that literature tends toward the vivid presentation of “what it feels like to be alive” and that all the more abstract qualities we might think of—truth, beauty, goodness—can be shown to us only through some sort of grounding in the concrete details of life. And when we attempt to define literature, we find that we’re able to do so only by reference to some sort of description along these lines).

Introduction

2. The Importance of Mood in English Literature

Some writers make of their moods a means to control their material, to give it a special interest, to relieve the strain of emotional or intellectual attention that might prove too great. When the whole period is looked at through the eyes of the poet, the mood must emerge as clearly as when the whole period is shown in terms of the life of its enemies and friends. Proud of their ability to catch peculiar moments and strange characters, writers trained a special kind of observation on the mood of town, mountains, or sea. Whether charged with an apparently inextinguishable joy, poignantly dramatic, phlegmatically contemplative, or cold as the scientific passion for a dead butterfly, the moods remain one of the self-conscious moods either in the sense that they themselves are the Self or that the event happened to the Self.

The moods of English literature have been created equally with its subject matter, plot, or characters. ‘Mood’ may be technically defined as the development of feeling by language and action or as the atmosphere of the work of literature. It is a psychic fuse or tone, a residuary product of successive modifications of a combination of various elements of form which contribute to its completion. Unlike theme or plot, mood is internal, capable of subtler modulations. For the poet or dramatist, it is an interpretation of life, significant for the imagination it reveals, the power of independent existence.

3. Techniques for Creating Mood in Writing

The psychology of color can also play a part in the creation of mood within a narrative, as well as implications from the actual word choice of an author. English is a rich language, full of many synonyms and shades of meaning, so the choice of word can provide support or emphasis for both the emotion of a character or a setting as a whole. Emotion and mood can also be amplified through the pacing of a scene; slower, more detailed narrative might easily build suspense or terror in a reader, whereas faster, more action-oriented narrative might work better at creating excitement. Writers often use these techniques in conjunction with one another to offset the negatives of one against the benefits of another as they try to bring forth the emotional response they are aiming for. Upsetting your reader in a particular way, after all, is just as much of an art as creating a pie, a novel, or a vase, and often involves very similar rules.

In writing, an author can create mood using various techniques, which act upon a reader’s emotional responses. An author might do this through an exploration of a character’s shifting emotions, physical symbolism, or by including a variety of sensory experiences, for example, to draw a reader into a scene more deeply. The choice of setting in a particular time period can also evoke certain preconceptions of mood within the reader; for example, if the setting is a gothic castle, the reader may anticipate a setting filled with darkness, foreboding, and monsters. Certain systems of symbolism are also immediately recognizable to readers; if an author inserts a narrative about a character walking through darkness for an extended period of time, we as readers might interpret that to imply emotional alienation, physical danger, or changes in the disposition of our character unless the writer adds to the sensory experience of the darkness movement.

4. Analyzing Mood in Selected Literary Works

Starting, then, with the works of English literature selected as source material, references in the Oxford English Dictionary provide literature-based explanations of the abstraction of mood that reflect universal meaning. To establish arbitrary boundaries in the development of a definition congruent with the result of the conceptual investigation undertaken in the first part of this project, the mood facility, functionality, element, result, and literary expressive type were subsequently determined before secondary descriptors placed consistent values of traditional scope for them in square brackets. Character references presented requisite terms arranged under: Coordinating, Functioning, Organizing, Presenting, Modifying, Connecting, Descriptive, and Qualifying as aids to facilitate a classification of the literary works, to demonstrate the mood source, to relate individual characters in the same work and across the same works, to manifest pertinent and encompassing literary expression, and to indicate the mood purpose within the literary expression placing them.

Mood in selected works of literature is analyzed for the purpose of this study to elaborate on the abstraction of mood in instances of its expression. The abstractionist acknowledges the effectiveness of literary language as a tool for manifesting the perceiver’s private life, known to be the organism’s subjective activity and responses, as responses of human nature, universal human experiences, and the unique life of a moment that may give the impression of arguing against universal human responses when appropriating the universality of literary engagement. Hence, the universality as regards human nature, experiences, or life of a moment, notwithstanding possible similarities with external patterns of thought and feeling, is the hypothesis informing this article’s conceptual approach.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

While answering the question for semgrowth of its organization and some of the experiments, we also hope to have shown some value of annotational querying of English texts according to the weight of moods as an issue of linguistic philosophy. An undergraduate grammar of English we did not aim at, and we feel that a textbook in which mood becomes a “crystallizing” element requires not only ample space but also a leading internal structure of its own. We admit to having been inspired by guiding ourselves along the very much undermotivated practical, as exemplified in the directive “Accord the pre-eminent status of mood to the paralinguistic indicators as defense of the Thesis”.

The next time research is undertaken on moods in English, such paralinguistic adverbs as, for example, only, even, and just should be taken more into account. Also, intonation, voice timbre, volume, pause, and silence seem relevant to any attempt to describe the answer to the wider question “Can moods also be a capital-letter feature in English annotated texts as, for example, “What he told me is true” or “[It] might just explain that”. In the end, it is the promise of increasing the sensitivity of the portrayal of moods which research activities into paralinguistic features of English may hold and from which there will be further gains to be had. The wider picture seems to be that textual adjustment to express moods in a more sensitive manner can achieve added tangible gains in language processing and understanding.