Download VICTORIAN NOVEL – main features

VICTORIAN ERA
BBL 3102
WEEK 10 & 11
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THE VICTORIAN PERIOD ( THE PRE
RAPHAELITES AND AESTHETICISM)
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THE VICTORIAN PERIOD AND
DECADENCE
VICTORIAN AGE
Historical context
Social context
Literary context
Historical Context
Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901)
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Longest reign in English history
Period of unprecedented material progress
imperial expansion
political and constitutional development
HOME POLICY: Political and Social Reforms
FOREIGN POLICY: colonialism + imperialism
Queen Victoria
worked for the peace and prosperity of her country
was able to keep at bay any conflict over constitutional
matters
reigned constitutionally avoiding the storm of revolutions
played a more active role
became a mediator above political parties
model for her people: exemplary family life, strictly
respectable and decent code of behaviour (Victorianism)
beloved especially by the middle class who shared her
moral and religious views
Historical Context – Home Policy
Britain was a model of industrial success, individual
freedom and constitutional government
Upper and industrial middle-classes believed in a policy
of “laissez-faire” ie. non-interference with industry or with
national economy in order to promote free trade and free
competition (=Liberalism)
triumph of industry (steam engine, steamboats,
shipbuilding, trains, iron industry)
scientific progress (electricity, telegraph, gas-lighting,
stamp+postal system, medicine)
Historical Context – Foreign Policy
THE BRITISH EMPIRE
Imperialism = territorial expansion, colonies abroad
During the Victorian Age the British Empire reached
its largest extension: it was called “the Empire where
the sun never sets”
British Imperial power was sustained by:
• willingness to protect British trade routes and interests
against other nations; to gain new terrotories
• firm belief in the excellence of English culture and
institutions
Socio-cultural Context
Urbanization
Britain became a nation of town dwellers
Extraordinary industrial development
Overcrowding
Poverty – appalling living conditions in slums
(squalor, disease, bad sanitation, crime, high
death rate)
Terrible working conditions
(polluted atmosphere, disatrous effects on health
especially on children)
Socio-cultural Context
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Material progress + wealth emerge from hard work
Appearance is very important
Respectability = a mixture of both morality and hypocrisy,
severity and conformity to social standards
Philanthropy = charitable activity addressed to every kind of
poverty
Victorian family = a patriarchal unit where the husband was
dominant and the wife was the angel in the home
(tha fallen woman)
Patriotism
Private life was separated from public behaviour
Literary Background – VICTORIAN NOVEL
During the Victorian Age for the first time there was a
communion of interests and opinions between writers
and readers
enormous growth of the middle classes
who were avid consumers of literature, they borrowed
books from circulating libraries and read various periodicals.
A great deal of Victorian Literature was first published in
instalments in the pages of periodicals, which allowed the
writer to feel he was in constant contact with his readers.
Literary Background – VICTORIAN NOVEL
The NOVEL became the most popular form of literature
and also the main form of entertainment since thery were
read aloud within the family.
NOVELISTS felt they had a moral and social
responsibility to fulfil:
 they depicted society as they saw it (realism) and
denounced its evils (criticism)
 they aimed at making readers realise social injustices
Literary Background – VICTORIAN NOVEL
WOMEN WRITERS:
a great number of novels were written by women.
This is surprising if we consider the state of subjection of
Victorian women but at the same time they were the
majority of novel-buyers and of readers.
However, it was not easy to publish so some women
writers decided to use male pseudonyms in order to see
their novels in print.
VICTORIAN NOVEL – main features
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The narrator is obtrusive (prominent)and omniscient:
he provides his comments on the plot and he establishes
a rigid barrier between what is right or wrong (judge);
retribution and punishment usually appear in the final
chapter where all the events, adventures, incidents are
explained and justified.
Didactic (informational) aim
Linearity (stories have a beginning, a middle, an end)
Long complicated plots and sub-plots
VICTORIAN NOVEL – main features
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Urban setting: the city was the most common setting the
main symbol of industrial civilisation as well the
expression of anonymous lives and lost identities
Precise creation of characters and deep analysis of
characters’ inner lives (psychology)
Most popular genre = Bildulgsroman (novel of formation)
Main themes: money, wealth, realistic portrait of society
denouncing its injustices and iniquities
VICTORIAN NOVEL
From a structural point of view we can divide Victorian
Novels mainly into three groups:
1) EARLY-VICTORIAN NOVEL (or social-problem novel)
dealing with social and humanitarian themes
realism, criticism of social evils but faith in progress,
general optimism
The main representative was CHARLES DICKENS
VICTORIAN NOVEL
2) MID-VICTORIAN NOVEL (novel of purpose) showing
Romantic and Gothic elements and a psychological
interest. The main representative writers were the
BRONTË sisters and R.L.STEVENSON
3) LATE- VICTORIAN NOVEL (naturalistic novel near to
European Naturalism) showing a scientific look at human
life, objectivity of observation, dissatisfaction with
Victorian values. The main representative writers were
THOMAS HARDY and OSCAR WILDE.
VICTORIAN NOVEL
Other minor forms of novel developed in this period:
4) Novel of Manners
focusing on economic problems of a particular class
(WILLIAM Thackeray)
5) Colonialist Fiction
presenting an exaltation of British imperialistic power
(Rudyard Kipling)
6) Nonsense literature
dealing with fantastic adventures (Lewis Carroll)
•Fiction
•Poetry
•Nonfiction
•Children’s Literature
Fiction
• Sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte—three of the
most popular writers of the Victorian era—published
under the male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
• Writing under a pseudonym in the Victorian era was a
common practice of female writers who wanted their
novels to be taken more seriously by critics as well as the
public.
• The novels by these sisters, most notably Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights, written by Charlotte and Emily
respectively, were not immediately popular—perhaps
because of their inclusion of violence, romance, and the
supernatural, but they eventually earned great success.
• Novelist Charles Dickens is perhaps the
most widely read novelist of the Victorian
era. His novels were extremely popular at
the time they were published, and gained
popularity and cemented Dickens as a
notable author on the literary scene.
• The novel resulted in the sale of
merchandise and spin-off books that
celebrated the book's most popular
characters. Like many Victorian novels,
Dickens's stories criticized social issues of
the time and usually saw the morally
sound characters thrive despite the
extraordinarily difficult circumstances
thrown their way.Most of his novels also
criticized child labour.
• William Makepeace Thackeray also wrote
novels during the Victorian era, although his
stories focused on middle-class characters
rather than those that dealt with poverty.
• Thackeray is most noted for his novel Vanity
Fair, which he published in 1847. The book
focuses on an infinite celebration that
symbolizes human beings' preoccupation with
material objects.
Poetry
• The foremost poet of the Victorian period was
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who served as poet
laureate of the United Kingdom from 1850
until his death in 1892.
• Much of Tennyson's poetry focused on the
retellings of classical myths. He experimented
with meter, but most of his poetry followed
strict formatting—a reflection of the strict
formality of the Victorian era.
• His work often focused on the conflict
between allegiance to religion and the new
discoveries being made in the field of science.
• Husband and wife team Robert and Elizabeth
Barrett Browning became famous for the love
poems they wrote to each other. Elizabeth
was already an accomplished poet when she
met her future husband in 1845. He
influenced her to publish her love poems,
which significantly increased her popularity.
• Also worth mention in a discussion of the Victorian
era is a collection of writers and artists called the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of which Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and his sister Christina were a part.
• In the late 1840s, a group of English artists organized
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with the goal of
replacing the popular academic approach to painting
with the more natural approach taken by artists who
worked before the Italian Renaissance.
• Several writers joined this movement, echoing a
simpler, less formal approach to writing literature.
PRE RAPHAELITE
• Also worth mention in a discussion of the Victorian
era is a collection of writers and artists called the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of which Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and his sister Christina were a part.
• In the late 1840s, a group of English artists organized
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with the goal of
replacing the popular academic approach to painting
with the more natural approach taken by artists who
worked before the Italian Renaissance.
• Several writers joined this movement, echoing a
simpler, less formal approach to writing literature.
2017/5/14
Aestheticism and Decadence
• The Aestheticism and Decadence movement
of English literature grew out of the French
movement of the same name. The authors of
this movement encouraged experimentation
and held the view that art is totally opposed
to "natural" norms of morality. This style of
literature opposed the dominance of scientific
thinking and defied the hostility of society to
any art that was not useful or did not teach
moral values. It was from the movement of
Aestheticism and Decadence that the phrase
art for art's sake emerged.
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Aestheticism
• Aestheticism places greater emphasis on the creation of art
and stresses form over subject matter. Poetry in this vein
often relies on intricate verse forms, which present
demanding technical requirements, including insistent rhyme
and repetition.
• Aesthetic verse also emphasizes visual description and color.
The Aesthetic alienation and retreat from life are
recapitulated in the verse itself, often through exotic setting
or subject matter from the long-distant past that, in turn,
originates more in literature, legend, and myth than in history.
• The purest Aesthetic poems are not really "about" anything.
Form, sound, image, and mood dominate to the extent that
little or no room remains for ideas.
• In England, the Aesthetic impulse found a voice, even before
it had been labeled, in a handful of brilliant seminal poems by
Tennyson, including the archetypal "The Lotos-Eaters" The
dominant notes of Aestheticism are escape, fantasy,
detachment, passivity, reverie, and harmony,
2017/5/14
DECADENCE
• The Decadent, in contrast, wages a guerilla war against the
dominant culture. He defines himself through conflict and
contrast. Having erected, or accepted, the same barriers
against life as the Aesthete, he then attacks.
• This aggressive stance toward society conveys the artist's
alienation. At the same time, however, the attack, often in the
form of intimate self-revelation, suggests both engagement in
one of its most direct forms, and powerful communication,
rather than the silence of separation.
• If society considers sexual relations, even between husband
and wife, a private matter bordering on taboo, the Decadent
may devote a poem to a graphic, intimate description of a
night with a prostitute. But of course the attack itself serves at
very least to underscore the force and dominance of
mainstream morality, if not to concede its validity.
2017/5/14
• The paradox, or self-contradiction, plays throughout
perhaps the greatest English expression of Decadent
thought and art. The Picture of Dorian Gray. In the
"Preface," added after initial publication, Wilde
boldly asserted; "There is no such thing as a moral or
an immoral book.
• Books are either well written, or badly written. That
is all." In this statement of art for art's sake, he
defended his book against moral criticism of its
subject matter, arguing that morality is irrelevant to
art.
• Yet the book he sought to rescue from moral
judgment is itself a moral condemnation of all
aspects of the very tempting, attractive Decadence,
including the effort to view and live life as if it were
art and therefore beyond good and evil.
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Nonfiction
• The Victorian era was a period of great scientific
discovery. People of this time were quite interested
in understanding the natural world.
• Naturalist Charles Darwin published his book On the
Origin of Species in 1859. This landmark scientific
work challenged widely held beliefs about the origin
of man. At the book's publication, many people
considered the work scandalous.
• With time, however, Darwin's theories about
evolution became more accepted. The publication of
On the Origin of Species changed the world's views
on philosophy and religious fundamentalism.
Children’s Literature
• During the Victorian era, children's literature became very
popular. Perhaps due to the introduction of compulsory
education—laws that specified that all children must be
educated until they reach a certain age—young people were
reading more.
• Writers produced work for the growing market of young
readers. Stories about experiences at school were very popular
among readers.
• Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling were two of the leading
children's writers of the Victorian era.
• Current Perception of Victorian Literature Victorian literature is
sometimes viewed in a negative light because of the era's
prudishness, narrow mindedness, and strict conformation to
societal rules.
Later Victorian novelists
• After the middle of the century, the novel, as a form,
becomes
firmly-established:
sensational
or
melodramatic "popular" writing is represented by
Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne (1861), but the best
novelists achieved serious critical acclaim while
reaching a wide public, notable authors being
Anthony Trollope (1815-82), Wilkie Collins (1824-89),
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans; 1819-80) and Thomas
Hardy (1840-1928). Among the best novels are
Collins's The Moonstone, , Eliot's The Mill on the
Floss, Adam Bede and Middlemarch, and Hardy's The
Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of the Native, Tess
of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.