what is mood in english literature

what is mood in english literature

Exploring the Concept of Mood in English Literature

1. Introduction to Mood in Literature

In this essay, the student will use the word in a single but richly connoted sense. Mood in poetry is the changing and elusive result of the total effect of all other elements in the poem: it can be understood as the emerge form of two factors, the experimenter and the experience. The active factors of the mood of a poem, then, are its main intelligence and its attitudes while mood emerges from the poem as passive, sensed collective result. This mood complex has its separate elements: atmosphere, tone, feeling, emotion, sensation, effect, and other words that name subtle states or conditions of mind or spirit. A good way to test whether mood is successfully conceived in this way is to bring to consciousness what most are unconscious. We firmly believe that a far more effective and pleasurable experience of poetry is possible when these mood parallels are taught and recognized.

What is the mood of a poem or a story? Most people think they can recognize it when they are asked to describe how something affects them. For example, people say that “Numbness” is a sad poem; “Everyman’s Mother” is a strong and hopeful poem. However, what mood means and how poets and writers produce it in their works is a more difficult and controversial subject. It has been said that mood is a very important but little-studied aspect of literature. One reason for confusion about the meaning of the word mood is that the word is commonly used today in many senses to mean different things, such as atmosphere, temper, frame of mind, emotional condition, emotional tone, feeling, sensation, effect, or impression.

2. Techniques and Elements Used to Create Mood

Menenius and Coriolanus, for example, should be more important in Coriolanus. It is useful for one to discover the precise point in a novel where a character fails to develop; often the discovery of this simple point helps one to perceive the nature of a character or to understand another character, or the significance of an incident. There is also a distinction to be made between the treatment of main characters and minor characters: between the treatment of Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre and Anne Bronte in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; between the treatment of Ernest Pontifex and Theobald Pinch in The Way of All Flesh. It may be pointed out that some long segments within a story do not permit mood to develop. The preparation of food for a Christmas pageant does not help to establish the mood of At Home, although it does help to establish the atmosphere of Christmas time.

All the techniques and elements used in creating mood can be divided, in a broad sense, into the nature of characters, their actions, and the significance of the setting; direct descriptive passages, indirection, or suggestion; and the qualities of the style. Mood can be created through emphasis upon a character or group of characters, such as Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and the witches in Macbeth, and Iago in Othello; through direct statement or suggestion of desirable or undesirable characteristics, as in the case of the Thanes of Ross, Lennox, and Angus in Macbeth; through the portrayal of admirable, or despicable, or insignificant characters by means of events, dialogue, and the like. At times a suggested mood fails to develop as expected because a character is not properly developed.

3. The Impact of Mood on Reader Experience

We are not sure if moody was used exclusively in similar ways. The more common meaning of moody in the most recent millennium is traced to a Latin root established long before English separated itself from other sisterly tongues. A moody person, as we think of it in modern society, is one who exhibits a multitude of changing signs (intentions). The more modern moody takes on the latter meaning, giving the reader a far different mental posture as she approaches the literature. There is a great difference between using an event as a prelude to an emotional range and having actions smothered by the weight of intentions. Sharply visualized pieces of art (not merely the history wraps used as backing for the sentiment) recycle our emotions, making the feelings experienced by others real to the modern recipient. When Hamlet cannot rationalize an answer to the meaning of the ghost of his father, and when he cannot melt into forgetfulness fleeting desire for self-correction, reflection flashes, and the task requires action and passion; life has asylum, and in death troubled minds find peace, he has energized through his own pain, lifted out of his own malaise as if for a moment he has risen above the clouds to set up the real-life experiences described by this long-dead, beseeching Danish father, and has that much less need for tranquility because he has looked into the breast of the man who faced far more frightening fears and lived in a state of turmoil and anxiety. He not only has shared in a moody experience. He has learned about himself in the process. In good literature, moods are more wisely and subtly manipulated by those who purvey them.

The moods created in literature often form an evocative setting that draws the reader in emotionally, ensuring that he becomes invested in the well-being and activities of the characters whom he is invited to observe. Two centuries after the publication of Geats, we can still admire the beauty of the elegy despite the fact that the culture that produced the original work is far removed from modern, technological, electrified civilizations. As the vast majority of people will never find themselves in similar, dark, wind-blown environments, the mood produced in the work will help past experiences of similarly moving events were contained in the words the poet chose. As in the original culture, many of our most dramatic examples of poems that produce specific feelings are poems of loss and ultimate absence, renunciation, or unfeasibility. For the last two millennia, thoughtful aesthetes, composers, playwrights, and novelists have enticed the less emotionally adept to reach beyond their initial comfort zones to encompass wonder and tragedy. Good writers and composers can encourage readers and listeners to face and suffer the same range of feelings, to feel the same passion or pain. Haf is a mood word used for at least a thousand years prior to the writing of the elegy.

4. Analysis of Mood in Select English Literary Works

Death was certainly not the main image that she wished to project. Rich was the theme, all luxurious, all attraction. Harper empowers a shallow, exquisite smoothness, very complicated, very pleasant and sweet like the sound of a bone flute at dusk beside a lagoon without frogs, without toads, and only blood-drinking llama thorned bushes grow in the undergrowth. This passage that Blanch wrote presents a patronizing, admiring, disrespectful tone, showing that the mood of this text would be that she was writing about a person who was dying but didn’t want to be reminded of that. She was writing about a more peaceful, graceful, and sweet place that Cathy wanted to be remembered as. In conclusion, the tone of the text is what sets the mood for a reader, and the mood will create the type of genre that the text being read is classified as. Since mood is what creates literature, then mood is what makes literature.

The key element to understand the mood in a text is the tone used by the writers to write their text. In literature, tone is an expression that authors use to describe something. However, there are different tones that can be received from a text. Teacher Amy Tan illustrates a very strong tone in order to first understand why the author has written a text with the specific tone they choose. Blanch started using short, rather choppy phrases just about the time father started drinking, and the two activities so dovetailed with similar tension that often, no definite boundary could be distinguished neither between him and her nor between these two acts, which together ruled his daily routine. This quotation appears to have a sad tone because it has a very overwhelming amount of tension in the text. It uses many short phrases and even repeats “father drinking,” emphasizing the tension between him, her, and herself. Cathy died like many, we do not know why.

Section 4: Analysis of Mood in Select English Literary Works

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

5.1 Conclusion In conclusion, the present study was an attempt to uncover the description of the English mood system and give it an identity more robust than jargon, jargon that was enforced, no doubt, by its grammatical label. Although functional descriptions of the mood system have been provided, as proposed, a corpus-driven approach was used to conduct a thorough investigation in the form of introspection, as its greatest benefit was observed to have been its nature of inherent projection.

In conclusion, the present study was an attempt to uncover the description of the English mood system and give it an identity more robust than jargon, jargon that was enforced, no doubt, by its grammatical label. Although functional descriptions of the mood system have been provided, as proposed, a corpus-driven approach was used to conduct a thorough investigation in the form of introspection, as its greatest benefit was observed to have been its nature of inherent projection. This was significant because the system of mood was a clear part in the instantiation of clause force and modulation. Nevertheless, the work presented has, in many respects, been limited; it has only laid the groundwork for developing further questions for codifying meaning implied by the mood system’s paradigms, with other topics intended for future research such as the issue of varied compound structures, the occurrences of modal structures within complex and simple structures, and varying verb complementation of mood structures from different sources.