Romanticism, Victorian age, Modernism, Postmodernism

Victorian Novelists and their Works

CHARLES DICKENS

Works: Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1861), David Copperfield (1850), Oliver Twist (1838)

Themes: Dickens focuses on urban society and the negative effects of industrialization. He explores social problems, inequalities, exploitation of children, and the oppressive conditions of London factories, prisons, and boarding schools.

THACKERAY

Work: Vanity Fair (1848)

Themes: Thackeray's novel is centered around the idea of a society without heroes. It portrays the attempt of lower classes to climb the social ladder, highlighting snobbery and vanity as aspirations for a respectable place in society. Characters from the upper social classes are depicted as inept and un-heroic, as they prioritize money and status over values and virtues.

GEORGE ELIOT

Themes: Eliot's focus is on the novel and rural community life, exploring the consequences of the Industrial Revolution and Reform Bills. She examines the impact of these changes on society and individuals.

That the community influences the individual with prejudices, gossips, but it is the individual's responsibility to decide his own destiny.

Middlemarch Work: (1874) => focused on the stories of some couples living in the same provincial community (pre-industrial Coventry). There is complexity of human relationships and need to preserve one's own integrity. Focus on the world of women and their restrictions, also in the field of property.

High Victorian literature: Charles Dickens, Thackeray; George Eliot; The Bronte sisters

THE BRONTE SISTERS

They focused on between novel and romance: truthful representation of everyday life with a focus on social issues + uncommon incidents, intense individuality, sensationalism, gothic elements. They used male pseudonyms (Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell). Each of them published a novel in 1847.

o Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre) => women's independence, education, equality in sentimental relations

o Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights) =>

Passions vs Conventions: passion between soulmates goes beyond time, space, life and social conventions.

Grey) o Anne Bronte (Agnes => based on the figure of the governess and on the negative aspects of Victorian education.

Late Victorian literature: Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Stevenson, Kipling

THOMAS HARDY

He is important because he brings up the attention on rural society. His works contain considerations about life, death, man and universe. Environment is an important feature in Hardy's novels, and we can note the progressive mapping of a semi-fictional region, the South-West corner of England, called "Wessex" by Hardy that is about to be destroyed by the arrival of industrialization. His tragic characters struggle against social circumstances and passions and they are subject to fate and determinism.

Works: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874); Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) => Tess, the daughter of an impoverished family, attractive and innocent, is

sent by his parents to work for the wealthy d'Urbervilles in order to get some advantages. Here she is seduced by their son, Alec d'Urberville, and secretly bears a child, named Sorrow, who dies in infancy. Later working as a dairymaid, she meets and marries Angel Clare, an idealistic gentleman who rejects her after learning of her past on their wedding night. Emotionally bereft and financially impoverished, Tess is trapped by necessity into giving in once again to d'Urberville, but she murders him when Angel returns. She runs away with Angel but is arrested and executed. Late Victorian literature: Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Stevenson, Kipling OSCAR WILDE He accepts the theory "art for art's sake" (he believes that only art as the cult of beauty could prevent the murder of the soul) deriving from European Decadentism that had developed in France in the last decades of the 19th century. He thinks that life is as a work of art, it has to be lived intensely.

In the name of beauty, beyond the limits of morality. The artist has to be the creator of beauty. So, we talk about the "Hedonism" = enjoyment of senses refined with intellect.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Work: (1890) - Late Victorian literature: Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Stevenson, Kipling

STEVENSON

He claims that mankind is "not truly one, but two": all individuals have a good and a bad side, and that each is independent from one another.

The strange case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde

Work: (1886) - Dr. Jeckyll (good side) is a kind and intelligent scientist who is obsessed with the conflict between the good side and the evil side of his personality. He wants to get rid of his negative half. He prepares a potion and drinks it, but the result is exactly the opposite. As a matter of fact, he turns into an evil man, Mr. Hide (bad side).

Late Victorian literature: Thomas Hardy, Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Stevenson

KIPLING

He thought that it was correct to colonize lands and people.

In order to civilize them. He was born in India and educated in England. He was influenced by the experience of British imperialism in India and in his poem "The white man's burden" showcases the imperialist and racist background evident in the western view of the world.

The Jungle Book Plain Tales from the Hills

Works: (1894); (1888)

VICTORIAN POETS

The Victorian poets still had a romantic taste and sensibility, as well as a romantic style. The innovation is their attempt to express their doubts regarding the character of Victorian society, with its emphasis on science, progress and materialism.

There is the sense of "belatedness" (risk of imitating the expressive and thematic models of the romantics) BUT there is the need to go beyond and produce poetry that was related to the different socio-cultural context.

• use heroic, sentimental, nostalgic tone
• use of visual images to represent emotions
• Contrast between private self and public role

Major Victorian

Poets:

• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Algernon Charles Swinburne
• Matthew Arnold
• Robert Browning
• Alfred Lord Tennyson

MODERNISM (1910-1940)

The death of Queen Victoria and the Word War I closed the Victorian Age and determined the beginning of new conceptions. The term "Modernism" defines a set of cultural tendencies and movements which developed at beginning of the 20th century.

Modernist artists were profoundly impacted by the First Word War that determined a break between the old and the new world, shattering the traditional beliefs and values of the Victorian age. Many modernists experimented with literary form and expression, adhering to Ezra Pound's "Make it new".

There are two phases of English Modernism:

• pre-war phase
• culminating in the movement of Vorticism (a movement aimed at destroying the staticity of the past => desire to renew, destroy and deny the old conventions of the Victorian past.
• Post-war phase
• characterized by the need to

Reconstruct on the ruins of the war, recovery of lost order, of the forms and structures of the tradition, but always in a climate of experimentation. It is the phase of the production of two of the most important modernist works: J. Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922).

Modernist authors are of different cultural origins, not strictly English but settled in London: American (H. James, T.S. Eliot, E. Pound), Irish (Yeats, Joyce), Polish (Conrad), German (Ford Madox Ford). They refuse closure and fixity (like Victorian Age) and desire to open up to and dialogue with an international European culture.

The centre of modernist culture and life is London with the birth of new artistic groups, cultural movements, exhibitions, events.

There was the loss of faith in progress, which was central to the Victorian era, and an open society with many cultural impulses gives a sense of dispersion and fragmented reality. There are theories sense of

loss:that reinforce this Einstein’s theories of relativity (everything is relative, nothing isobjective) and Freud’s psychoanalysis (unconsciousness predominates over external reality).

new narrative techniqueA is needed=> they use stream of consciousness (=a method of narrationthat describes happenings in the flow of thoughts in the minds of the characters), interiormonologue, flashbacks, multiple points of view.

BLOOMSBURY GROUP

This group is made up of artists, critics, writers, philosophers who gathered in London between1905-1930s to discuss aesthetic and philosophical questions regarding art and life in a climate offreedom.

They are influenced by the ideas of the Cambridge philosopher George Edward Moore (PrincipiaEthica, 1903) who saw in beauty and personal relationships important values that could bring tosocial progress.

They are against the hypocrisy and conventions of good society even though they belonged to upperclasses.

JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941)

He is the most

inventive and experimental modernist writer. Here the focus of attention shifts from the relationship character-society to the mind of the individual character. He uses stream of consciousness (free association of ideas, flow of thoughts and impressions of a character, often incoherent and unpunctuated), interior monologue (=inner speech going on in the mind of the character). There isn't omniscient narrator to explain what he knows about the story and characters. Works: - Dubliners (1914) - Ulysses (1922) - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1933) - Finnegans Wake (1939) VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) She focused on feminist interest. At that time there were few women writers because they lack their space, economic independence and tradition and they didn't have the right to go to study. Virginia had the possibility to meet highly educated people because her father let her to use him library at home to meet her brothers' friends who attended University in Cambridge. Besides havingfeminist interest, she focused also on psychological interest, so on giving voice to thoughts, impressions, feelings that make up a person's life ("moments of being") Reality is not linear => past and present juxtapose and different perspectives are given Presence of an unobtrusive narrator to record the characters' thoughts. In this way the reader can have a deeper intimacy with characters Jacob's Room Mrs Dalloway A Room of One's Own To the Lighthouse E.M. FORSTER (1879-1970) He is less experimental than other Modernist writers => he believes that a novel should have a structure, a plot and characters with a social and psychological identity. He focuses on characters, distinguishing between flat and round characters.