Transcript Western Literature

History and
Anthology of English
Literature
Mickey Xu
The Victorian age: English Critical
Realism
Background
The Novels of Critical Realism
The Poetry of the Victorian Age
The Prose of the Victorian Age
Background:
Social and Cultural Background
1. Victorian Literature: all the writings
produced during the period from 1837—1901
when Queen Victoria ruled over England.
2. The Early Victorian Period(1832--1848), a time of
troubles.
The Mid-Victorian Period(1841--1870), a time of
economic prosperity and religious controversy.
The Last Period (1870--1901), a time in which the
Victorian values decay.
3. Social background
4. Cultural background
5. The Women Question
Literary Characteristics:
1. The Victorian novelists were
primarily concerned with people in
society and with their relation to
other people.
2. Prose was also an important literary
form in this age. Famous historians, critics
and essayists abounded. Thomas Carlyle,
Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin.
►
3. Great Poetry were also produced.
Lord Alfred Tennyson and Robert
Browning.
Critical Realism
Term: In Victorian period appeared a new literary
trend-critical realism. English critical realism of the
19th century flourished in the forties and in the
early fifties. It found its expression in the form of
novel. The critical realists, most of whom were
novelists, described with much vividness and artistic
skill the chief traits of the English society and
criticized the capitalist system from a democratic
viewpoint. The greatest realist of the time was
Charles Dickens. Other novelists who adhered to
critical realism were Charlotte and Emily Bronte,
Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.
Charles Dickens
►
►
►
►
Charles Dickens
Life: ﹡Dickens was bron in 1812 at Portsmouth, where his
father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. At four, his family
moved to Chatham, where he studied in a day-school.
﹡In 1821, the family bankrupted and they moved into the
Marshalsea Prison, London. At 12, Dickens had to work twelve
hours a day in an underground cellar at a blacking factory in
London. The miserable life there left an everlasting, painful
brand on the boy’s mind.
﹡When he was 15, he became a lawyer’s clerk. He visited the
British Museum Library, filling up the gaps in his education by
reading. The work at the lawyer’s office afforded him the basis
of a confirmed opinion of the law of England. Then he became a
Parliamentary reporter for newspapers. Thus Dickens got a firsthand knowledge of the parliamentary government of it as an
instrument for wielding and disguising the power of the upper
classes.
﹡The rest of his life is a story of writing. In 1870, he died
suddenly.
► Works:
Dicken’s Novels:
---The First Period(1836--1841):
fun, high spirit, and a tendency
even to literary boisterous play----alternating sometimes with spells
of sentimentality. Naïve optimism.
---The Second Period (1842-1850)-----a transitional period
when his naïve optimism about
capitalist society was thus
profoundly shaken.
---The Third Period (1851---1870):
novels in this period are much darker
in content which showed the novelist’s
loss for English bourgeois society.
Distinct features of his
novels:
1. Character sketches and
exaggeration
2. Broad humor and
penetrating satire.
3. Complicated and
Fascinating Plot
4. The power of exposure
Analysis of Major Characters
Oliver Twist
He is a saintlike figure. As the child
hero of a melodramatic novel of social
protest, Oliver Twist is meant to appeal
more to our sentiments than to our literary
sensibilities.
Nancy
As a child of the streets, Nancy has been a
thief and drinks to excess. The narrator’s
reference to her “free and agreeable . . .
manners” indicates that she is a prostitute.
Nancy’s moral complexity is unique
among the major characters in Oliver Twist.
In much of Oliver Twist, morality and nobility
are black-and-white issues, but Nancy’s
character suggests that the boundary
between virtue and vice is not always
clearly drawn.
Fagin
He is ugly, simpering, miserly,
and avaricious. Constant references
to him as “the Jew” seem to indicate
that his negative traits are intimately
connected to his ethnic identity.
However, Fagin is more than a
statement of ethnic prejudice.
Themes
The Failure of Charity
Purity in a Corrupt City
Thackeray, William Makepeace(1811–
63)
﹡ English novelist, b. Calcutta, India. He is
important not only as a great novelist but
also as a brilliant satirist.
In 1830, Thackeray left Cambridge without
a degree and later entered the Middle Temple
to study law. In 1833 he became editor of a
periodical, the National Standard, but the
following year he settled in Paris to study art.
There he met Isabella Shawe, whom he
married in 1836.
﹡ ﹡ Thackeray’s eldest daughter, Anne, Lady
Works
--Vanity Fair, a masterpiece, published in
1847-48 in monthly parts. The sub-title of the book,
“A Novel Without a Hero”, emphasizes the fact
that the writer’s intention was not to portray
individuals, but the bourgeois and aristocratic society
as a whole.
The title was taken from Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s
Progress”. In this novel Thackeray describes
the life of the ruling classes of England in the
early decades of the 19th century, and attacks the
social relationship of the bourgeois world
by satirizing the individuals in the different strata of the
upper society.
--Pendennis (1849-1850)
--Henry Esmond (1852) and The Virginians (1859),
both are historical novels.
The comparison between Dickens
and Thackeray:
►Thackeray portrayed the upper
half, whose parasites, snobbery,
greed and cruelty formed his
chief theme, and the pictures in
his novels are accurate and true
to life. Both of them are moralists.
► Thackeray
is also a satirist.
►Thackeray
is inferior to Dickens
Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855)
Charlotte Brontë
► English
novelist
► Birth April 21, 1816
► Death March 31, 1855
► Place of Birth Thornton, Yorkshire,
England
► 1847
►
►
Published the novel Jane Eyre
1849 Published the novel Shirley, a
story set during anti-industrial riots that
took place in the final years of the
Napoleonic Wars
Brontë's first novel, The Professor,
was turned down by numerous
publishers, and she eventually withdrew
the book. It was finally published after
her death in 1857.
Analysis of Major Characters
Jane Eyre
The protagonist and narrator of the
novel, Jane is an intelligent,
honest, plain-featured young
girl forced to contend with
oppression, inequality, and
hardship.
► Edward
Rochester
Jane’s employer and the master of
Thornfield, Rochester is a wealthy,
passionate man with a dark secret
that provides much of the novel’s suspense.
St. John Rivers
St. John Rivers is a foil to Edward
Rochester. Whereas Rochester is
passionate, St. John is austere and
ambitious.
Theme
Love versus Autonomy
Emily Bronte (1818-1848)
Emily Brontë lived an eccentric, closely
guarded life. She was born in 1818, two years
after Charlotte and a year and a half before
her sister Anne, who also became an author.
Her father worked as a church rector, and her
aunt, who raised the Brontë children after their
mother died, was deeply religious. According to
Charlotte Bronte’s description, Emily was clever,
benevolent, but very stubborn: “Stronger than
a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood
alone.”
Analysis of Major
Characters
Heathcliff - An orphan brought
to live at Wuthering Heights by Mr.
Earnshaw, Heathcliff falls into an
intense, unbreakable love with Mr.
Catherine is free-spirited,
beautiful, spoiled, and often
arrogant.
Edgar--Edgar is born and raised a
gentleman. He is graceful, wellmannered, and instilled with
civilized virtues.
Themes
The Destructiveness of a Love
that Never Changes
Goerge Eliot
► Scenes
of Clerical Life: her first three stories.
► Adam Bede: her first full length novel, Eliot's
first experiment with the type of new fiction
that she pioneered
► The Mill on the Floss: rural life
► Silas Marner: rural life
► Romala: a historical novel
► Felix Holt: English politics
► Middlemarch: her masterpiece
► Daniel Deronda: the best work in Eliot’s
opinion.
Major Themes
► Honor
► Love
Eliot's realism stems from her tendency
to avoid caricature and stereotype,
instead creating complex and
ambiguous characters whose
faithful representation makes them
not only believable, but difficult to
pigeonhole. Her novels are attempts to
analyze the subtleties of the
human mind, rather than just plot
structures (like many of her
contemporaries). This allows Eliot to present
human situations as they really occur,
reproducing the mental and physical aspects
of people's actions.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), English
poet often regarded as the chief
representative of the Victorian age in
poetry. Tennyson succeeded Wordsworth as
Poet Laureate in 1850.
Among Tennyson's major poetic
achievements is the elegy mourning
the death of his friend Arthur Hallam,
"In Memoriam" (1850).
The patriotic poem "Charge of the
Light Brigade", published in Maud (1855),
is one of Tennyson's best known
works
In the 1870s Tennyson wrote several plays,
among them the poetic dramas Queen
Mary (1875) and Harold (1876). In
1884 he was created a baron.
Tennyson died at Aldwort on October 6, 1892
and was buried in the Poets' Corner
in Westminster Abbey.
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
► Robert
Browning was born in
Camberwell, a suburb of London. Young
Robert spent much of his time in his
father's private library of 6000 volumes
in several languages. The chief source
of his education
► Robert did not become recognized as a
poet, until after Elizabeth's death in
1861. After which, he was honored for
the rest of his life as a literary figure.
► Below is a picture of Robert Browning's
grave. He is buried in Westminster
Abbey, in Poet's Corner.
Works and Achievement
--The Ring and the Book, the longest
and perhaps the greatest work of Browning.
--He and Tennyson were the two
most important poets of the
Victorian Period.
-- He introduced a new form to English
poetry, the dramatic monologue.
--praised as a “gallant, courageous
and high-hearted figure”, wellknown for buoyant optimism.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1806-1861)
► Elizabeth
Barrett was born at Coxhoe Hall,
Durham, England. Elizabeth's father
disapproved of the courtship and engagement.
In 1846, Elizabeth and Robert were secretly
wed. Soon the couple ran off to Italy where
Elizabeth's health improved. She continued to
live in the villa of Casa Guidi for the
remainder of her life.
► In 1861, Elizabeth Barrett Browning died at
the age of 55. Her son, born 1849, and
husband returned to England after her death.
Works:
The Battle of Marathon
translation of the Greek tragedy
“Prometheus Unbound”
The Cry of the Children
Sonnet from the Portuguese