Literature – lectures

Lecture 1.
Victorian novel – 19th century novel
The Victorian Age is essentially the age of the novel or fiction. During this period, novel made
a rapid progress. This was partly because this middle class form of literary art was bound to
flourish increasingly as the middle class rose in power and importance, partly because of the
steady increase of the reading public with the growth of lending libraries, the development of
publishing in the modern sense and other events which accompanied this increase, and partly
because the novel was the best means to present a picture of life, lived under the stable
background of social moral values by people who were like the people encountered by
readers, and this was the kind of picture of life, the middle class readers wanted to read about.

FIRST GENERATION NOVEL

The early Victorian or first generation novelists comprised of William Thackrey, Charles
Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell etc. Although, there were several more novelists of
the time, only the ones mentioned here have survived the test of time and are considered
representative of the early phase of the Victorian fiction in England.

CHARACTERISTICS
Following are the main characteristics of the early Victorian or the first generation novel.
THEMES: One of the prominent features, that the novel of early Victorian era, had, was the
concern with the “condition of England question”. They chose for their themes the specific
contemporary problems of the Victorian society caused by the predominance of industrialism
and utilitarianism, and wrote about them sometimes as satirists, sometimes as humanists,
sometimes as moralists.
IMAGINATIVE RENDERING OF REALITY: In spite of the fact that they were conscious
of the havoc caused by the industrial revolution, the presence of mass poverty and
accumulation of richer in a few hands, yet they believed like the common Victorians that these
evils would prove to be temporary, that on the whole, England was growing prosperous,
which was evident from the enormous increase in material wealth and there was no reason
why this progress should not continue indefinitely.
CHARACTERISATION: A significant shift in the English Novel in its movement from the
18th to 19th century was the change of emphasis from action to character. They gave primacy
to character as opposed to Neo-classical novelists who gave more importance to action.
LOOSE PLOTS: The early Victorian novel, unlike both the novel of the preceding era as
well as the following novel of the later phase of the Victorian period was rather formless.
One of the reasons was the new reading public (the masses of middle and lower middle class)
for whom they were being written. Like the Elizabethan drama, the novel in the early
Victorian phase was written more for any entertainment then for any artistic purpose. But in
spite, it contained large purpose of offering a picture and criticism of contemporary life.
The second and real cause of the lack of organisation in these novels was that they were
serialised in the monthly and weekly magazines. Quite often, a novel took 25 serials to
complete in the magazine. Now in between the beginning and ending of a novel hundreds of
readers would give their suggestions. Thus the Victorian reader had in a way a share in the
composition of the novel.
FIRST GENERATION NOVELISTS
 CHARLES DICKENS: His famous novels are Oliver Twist, Our Mutual Friend, A
Tale of Two Cities.
 WILLIAM THACKERA: He is famous for Vanity Fail.
 MRS. ELIZABETH GASKELL: She has written novels like Mary Barton and North
South as instrument of social reforms.

2ND GENERATION NOVEL

If the novels of the early Victorians were written in the 40s and 50s, those of the later
Victorians were published in the 60s and 70s. George Eliot, George Meredith and Thomas
Hardy all these major novelists of the period started publishing around the end of the 50s or
later.
CHARACTERISTICS
LACK OF HIGH ARTISTIC STANDARD: The second generation Victorian novelists were
more ‘literary’ and less ‘popular’ than the first generation. They had more academic flavours
in their writings, more poetic imagination. They did not have the breadth and variety (with the
exception of Middlemarch) of the early novelists but they certainly had greater depth of
characterisation and greater intensity of presentation.
THEMES OF THEIR NOVELS: The novelists of later Victorian era, were not entertainers
and reformers, as were their elders. Instead, they were more serious composers with greater
involvement in the deeper passions of life particularly love. Moreover their main concern was
with the rural England , which was being destroyed by industry and commerce rather than the
city working class and its masters, the mill-owners etc. They depicted the tragedy of transition
from the agrarian way of life to the industrial order.
SHIFT FROM INDUSTRIALISM AND UTILITARIANISM: Another change that took
place in the English novel around the year 1860, was the shift in its focus from the city with
its industrialism and utilitarianism to the village with its vision of destruction under the threat
of the new scientific rationalism and evolutionism, which started new ethics and human
relations inspired by the Darwinian concepts of “struggle for existence” and “survival of the
fittest”. These new ideas made the novelists look at human society from a new perspective,
not as a static Biblical model existing between the dynamic tension between good and evil,
but as an evolutionary process of human nature, society and civilization, growing on the
Darwinian principles.
SHIFT TOWARDS INTELLECTUALISM: Another significant change that took place in
this era, was the shift towards intellectualism. Although Dickens and Thackeray were
‘educated’ enough to grasp the crosscurrent of ideas in their time, but were not ‘learned’ in the
sense Meredith and Hardy were. The Novelists of this era were learned a lot.
2ND GENERATION POETS
 THOMAS HARDY: The Desperate Remedies, The Return of the Native, Far From the
Madding Crowd.
 GEORGE ELIOT: Adam Bede, Middlemarch, Romals
 GEORGE MEREDITH: The Egoist, The Shaving of Shagpot

The book market:

Circulating libraries
 The mayor buyers: Maudie’s, WH Smith
 Books were still quite expensive for individual buyers: a new novel cost 31 shillings
and sixpence while a modest middle class family in the 1820s could live on 60 shillings
for a week
 Libraries got them at a discount and with presubscription
 Not everyone could afford a book so people went to libraries -> reader of a circulating
library; lots of books in Victorian era went straight to them – they had the novels first
before anyone
 They benefitted from the development of the railing as when you could borrow a book
at one station & give it back at the next; probably Maudie’s was the first book to do so
 Censorship of “immoral novels
 Triple decker format allowed charging extra for borrowing all three volumes at a
time; normally you could have one -> the pressure on authors to write in triple decker
format so sometimes it seems as the writing of that much is unnecessary when Newby
added Agnes Grey to Wuthering Heights
  Public Libraries Act 1850 establishing free public libraries
 Reading out loud: at homes, in pubs or even sometimes in factories by people hired
especially for the purpose (e.g. in cigar factories) = even if you were poor or illiterate you
could have contact with books

Serialization:
 started with “broadsides”, cheap, mass-produces texts for working-class audience,
usually with sensational content for a penny per piece: ballads, songs, list of crimes,
descriptions of executions etc.
 Dickens as one of the pioneers, adopting this format for high-brow fiction
 Monthly episodes for a shilling or weekly for a sixpence, usually 19 issues, the final
one was a double one for a double price
 Dickens’s most successful novel commercially Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) sold
about 100,000 copies a month, however, broadsides sold in millions
 Whole magazines dedicated to publishing only literary texts, both individual and
serialized, e.g. Bentley’s Miscellany, Dickens’s Household Words and All the year
round
 Thomas Hardy invented the cliff-hanger in A pair of Blue Eyes (1872-73) where the
main character is left at the end of each chapter literally hanging off a cliff.
Cliff-hanger - is a plot device in fiction which features a main character in a
precarious or difficult dilemma, or confronted with a shocking revelation at the end of
an episode[1] of serialized fiction. A cliff-hanger is hoped to ensure the audience will
return to see how the characters resolve the dilemma.
 George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) was published in 8 volumes, one every two
months; her Daniel Deronda (1876) was published in a similar form

Newgate novel
 The Newgate novels (or Old Bailey novels) were novels published in England from
the late 1820s until the 1840s that were thought to glamorise the lives of the criminals
they portrayed.
 Most drew their inspiration from the Newgate Calendar - a biography of famous
criminals published at various times during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but
usually rearranged or embellished the original tale for melodramatic effect.
 The novels caused great controversy and notably drew criticism from William
Makepeace Thackeray, who satirised them in several of his novels and attacked the
authors openly.
 Works portraying true crime or inspired by real0life cases:
 o Edward Bulwer-Lytton Paul Clifford (1830): the opening sentence: It was a
dark and stormy night; it was also the inspiration for The Bulwer-Lytton
Fiction Contest

o Edward Bulwer-Lytton Eugene Aram (1832)

o William Harrison Ainsworth Rookwood (1834)
o Charles Dickens Oliver Twist (1837)
 In 1840 a French valet Benjamin Courvoisier murdered his employer Lord William
Russel and quoted Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839) as the inspiration
 Newgate novel features according to F.S Schwarzbach:
o Set the story back in previous century
o Open the action with spectacularly foul weather
o Introduce a child who is low-born and either an orphan or as good as one
o Have him corrupted into a life of crime; portray several thieves’ dens and if
possible a hideout in a cave
o Sprinkle the dialogue with low-life slang
o Add a plot twist involving shady doings by the high-born (usually unknown to
all, near relation of the protagonist)
o And finish with the central character managing against all odds to display true
gentlemanliness, marry an heiress and reform on or just before the last page

Sensation novel
 Came first in 1860/70 and was focused more on the criminals
 The Victorian sensation novel has been variously defined as a "novel-with-a-secret"
and as the sort of novel that combines "romance and realism" in a way that "strains
both modes to the limit.
 Started with Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White (1859-60)
 Features:
o Melodramatic and gothic elements
o Characters with multiple identities
o Shocking subject matter
o The sensation novelists commonly wrote stories that were allegorical and
abstract; the abstract nature of the stories gave the authors room to explore
scenarios that wrestled with the social anxieties of the Victorian era
 Authors:
o Mary Elizabeth Braddon
 o Mrs Henry Wood
o Dickens’ The mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)
o R.L Stevenson The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
o Wilkie Collins in The moonstone (1868) introduced Sergeant Cuff – a highly
intelligent detective with great powers of observation

Detective novel:
 Started in 1880s and more focused on detective process
 Features:
o the seemingly perfect crime;
o the wrongly accused suspect at whom circumstantial evidence points;
o the bungling of dim-witted police;
o the greater powers of observation and superior mind of the detective;
o the startling and unexpected denouement, in which the detective reveals how
the identity of the culprit was ascertained.
 Detective stories frequently operate on the principle that superficially convincing
evidence is ultimately irrelevant. Usually it is also axiomatic that the clues from which
a logical solution to the problem can be reached be fairly presented to the reader at
exactly the same time that the sleuth receives them and that the sleuth deduce the
solution to the puzzle from a logical interpretation of these clues.
 Authors:
o E.A Poe’s Augustin Dupin
Le Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin is a fictional character created by Edgar Allan
Poe. Dupin made his first appearance in Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue
(1841), widely considered the first detective fiction story. He reappears in The
Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842) and The Purloined Letter (1844).
Dupin is not a professional detective and his motivations for solving the
mysteries change throughout the three stories. Using what Poe termed
"ratiocination", Dupin combines his considerable intellect with creative
imagination, even putting himself in the mind of the criminal. His talents are
strong enough that he appears able to read the mind of his companion, the
unnamed narrator of all three stories.
Poe created the Dupin character before the word detective had been coined.
The character laid the groundwork for fictitious detectives to come, including
Sherlock Holmes, and established most of the common elements of the
detective fiction genre.
o A.C Doyle A study in Scarlet (1887)
 The story marks the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who
would become two of the most famous characters in popular fiction. The
book's title derives from a speech given by Holmes, an amateur detective, to
his friend and chronicler Watson on the nature of his work, in which he
describes the story's murder investigation as his "study in scarlet": "There's the
scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our
duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it."
o R.L. Stevenson The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
It is about a London lawyer named Gabriel John Utterson who investigates
strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and the evil
Edward Hyde. The novella's impact is such that it has become a part of the
language, with the very phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" coming to mean a person
who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next.
o Book of Daniel

sensation fiction vs. detective fiction.

 There are significant differences, despite the fact they include crime and the
punishment of. ‘sensation-fiction implied a world in which every respectable person
had a potentially unrespectable secret life, while crime fiction reassured the reader that
 only one person did, and that she or he would be separated from the respectable at the
end:
 Sensation-fiction was about mystery: crime writing was about certainty’ The Man with
the Dark Beard does manage to straddle both subgenres successfully here as early on
in the novel suspicion is thrown over many of the characters by their curious
behaviour, which entails in a lot of mystery. However, ultimately this mystery is
banished and the assurance of detective fiction that the guilty person has been caught
takes its’ place, although the removal of said person perhaps makes a return back to
the sensational.
 the sensation novel was about buried secrets, and their revelation; the detective novel
about the person doing the revealing’

Historical novel
 recent history is depicted
 critical acclaim did not go along with the genre’s popularity
 characters who encounter historical celebrities appear or stumble across major events
 It is less for the portrayal of the past than for the remedies prescribed for contemporary
problems:
o Eliot drew attention to the constraints and judgments Victorian women were
subject to, attacking hypocrisies thinly disguised in historical costume.
o The redoubtable clerics Kingsley, Newman, and Wiseman conducted their
public struggle over Protestant and Catholic ideologies through novels set in
ancient Egypt and Rome.
Such weighty themes, and the extensive research displayed in these narratives, may be
responsible for the decline of the realist and didactic historical novel in the 1860s. This
was followed by the resurgence of popular historical romance in the 1880s, focusing
on adventures and heroic masculinity and providing a conservative counterbalance to
fin-de-siècle decadence.
 Enjoying enormous prestige since Walter Scott (1771-1832) who is considered to be
the key figure in development of this genre
 Examples:
o Edward Bulwer-Lytton The last Days of Pompeii (1832)
o Harrison Ainsworth The Tower of London (1840)
o Dickens’ Barnaby (1840)
o Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859) with its famous opening sentence: It was
the best of times; it was the worst of times…”
o William Thackeray Vanity Fair (1848)
The Bildungsroman
 Novel of education
 a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist
from youth to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is extremely
important
 focuses on self-development, the development has been described as search for
meaningful existence with society
 To spur the hero or heroine on to their journey, some form of loss or discontent must
jar them at an early stage away from the home or family setting.
 The process of maturity is long, arduous, and gradual, consisting of repeated clashes
between the protagonist's needs and desires and the views and judgments enforced by
an unbending social order.
 Eventually, the spirit and values of the social order become manifest in the
protagonist, who is then accommodated into society. The novel ends with an
assessment by the protagonist of himself and his new place in that society.
 Originated with Geothe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-96)
 Other examples:
o Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre (1847)
o Ch. Dickens David Copperfield (1849-50)
o Ch. Dickens Great Expectations (1861)
o George Eliot The Mill on the Floss (1860)

The provincial novel (regional novel)

 A novel describing people and landscape of an actual locality outside the metropolis.
Sir W. Scott, however, combined a historically informed feeling for local customs with
an aesthetic appreciation of natural scenery. By the mid‐19th cent. the localities
described are often smaller, the focus being partly sociological, e.g. by Eliot the
Midlands. Hardy set his works in a fictive Wessex where an appreciation of both
aesthetic and geological aspects of landscape complements a concern with agricultural
and economic issues.
 For example:
o industrial or urban novels set in a specific town or city,
o other novelists adopted remote locations for romantic,
o other writers adopted fictional counties including
 Examples of authors:
o Anthony Trollope The Baretshire Cycle (1855-1867): six novels set in fictious
cathedral town of Barchester
o Thomas Hardy the Wessex novels
“The Condition of England” novel (the industrial novel)
 refers to a body of narrative fiction, also known as industrial novels, social novels, or
social problem novels, published in Victorian England during and after the period of
the Hungry Forties.
 The term directly relates to the famous “Condition of England Question” raised by
Thomas Carlyle in “Chartism” (1839)
 Condition-of-England novels were about the problems with fast industrialism and
addressed the issues the British society was faced with, such as social unrest and the
growing antagonism between the rich and the poor in England => the social
consequences of the Industrial Revolution in England at the beginning of the
nineteenth century.
 the value of Condition-of-England novels lies primarily not in their fictional plots,
social analyses, and recommended solutions but primarily in first-hand detailed
observations of industrialism, urbanism, class, and gender conflicts.
 Examples of authors:
o Elizabeth Gaskell North and South (1855)
o Ch. Dickens Hard Times (1854)
o Benjamin Disraeli Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845)

Woman and the novel

 Many women writers still felt the need to use male pseudonyms, e.g. Brontes, George
Eliot
 woman novelist, unless she disguised herself with a male pseudonym, had to expect
critics to focus on her femininity and rank her with the other women writers of her
day, no matter how diverse their subjects or styles.
 The ideology of happy family propagated by the Queen Victoria:
o For Victoria's monarchy to become and remain popular had to turn into an
advantage for the monarchy's middle-class imposture which Victoria's early
marriage made possible
o It was possible for her subjects to read her marriage as no different from any
other, as a form of privatization through which women were defined as the
complements and subordinates of men. Her marriage subdued anxieties about
female rule and at the same time made her a model for the middle class
because gender hierarchy was becoming a hallmark specifically of the middle-
class family, like Victoria's, was explicitly in shaping the emerging middle
class, and gender hierarchy in Victoria and Albert's "happy domestic home"
would have helped establish the middle-class nature of that home
o It is worth remembering that Victorians lived in an intensely patriarchal
society, despite the British Empire working under the reign of the most
powerful woman of the century. Queen Victoria was utterly against the idea of
any other women having power. In a furious letter to her friend Theodore
Martin, she wrote that women were a “poor, feeble sex” and that the suffragist
Lady Amberley should be “whipped”.
o Queen Victoria famously sacked her daughters’ governess after discovering
one of the princesses reading a novel

 Dickens’ heroines as the most notorious examples of “angels”

o To a modern reader, many of Dickens’s heroines can seem weak, foolish
figures of fun. Dickens’s novels date from the 1830s to 1870, when women
were legally the property of their husbands, fathers or whichever male relative
called them “head of the family”.
 o His heroines, including Flora Finching, Dora Spenlow and Rosa Budd –
described in The Mystery of Edwin Drood as “wonderfully pretty, wonderfully
childish”, Dickens was emulating a popular impression of what a well-brought
up young lady should be like.
o Dickens’s women were a product of the age he lived in, and of a legal system
that still referred to women as the chattel of their husbands and fathers, keeping
them in that position both in life and in literature.
 Examples:
o William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair contrast the “evil” Becky Sharpe with the
innocent Amelia Sedley
o Thomas Hardy Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) – a pure woman faithfully
presented

“the Madwoman in the Attic” vs. “the Angel in the House”

 Patmore’s poem: the term “Angel in the House” is depicting the Victorian
women as ideal models to emulate. Victorian women were expected to be
submissive, meek, powerless, pious, pure, someone who is confined to the four
walls of their houses. Patmore’s poem clearly expresses the role and status
woman holds in her house, she is someone who is supposed to find her
happiness in her husband’s pleasure, someone who ought to blame her even if
the fault is not hers, in a way Patmore dictates women to succumb to her
husband’s needs and denies her of her individual rights.
 A perfect example of “Angel in the House” cannot be found in Bronte’s Jane
Eyre though in characters like Mrs Reeds, Miss Temple one may find the
Victorian notions of women getting reflected but not completely they take the
position of “Angel in the House”. Mrs Reed in front of her son goes weak and
bears her son’s tantrums and she despite considering Jane as someone ‘lesser
than a servant’ keeps her in the house, this is because of her husband’s
promise. Miss Temple whose physical appearance goes along with Patmore’s
description, but is not someone whom Patmore would call as an ‘ideal’ woman,
for Miss Temple never tells Jane to be a good girl, all she asks Jane to be is ‘act
like a good girl’, by which in a way she don’t let the wilderness in Jane which
the Victorians would never appreciate of get tamed. Even if one look at
Helen Burns, who in a way teaches Jane to hold back, is someone who opposes
the restrictions of society.
  Anger is something which the Victorians never associated with women and so
anger of woman is not something patriarchy could accept and an angry woman
can be called ‘mad’ thus madness becomes a construct of the male to define the
angry woman. Bertha Mason, who is known as the ‘Mad woman in the Attic’
becomes a reflection of an angry rebel who makes attempts to escape from her
imprisoned room. Bertha’s bottled up anger which seems to get manifested as
‘madness’ are against those who are the cause of her imprisonment, Mr
Rochester, Richard Mason. In the novel we find Bertha been described as
someone with ‘savage’ face, ‘discoloured’ face, someone who is not civilised
and monstrous. Bronte’s characterisation of Bertha reveals the Victorian
attitude towards on how they see a ‘fallen’ or ‘mad’ woman. Bertha Mason
stands as a woman who completely defies the social norms of Victorian Age.
 In Jane Eyre rooms, attic, houses and all such closed places symbolises the
Victorian notion of patriarchy from where a woman is not supposed to go, but
in Jane and Bertha Mason you can find a rebel who tries to escape these
confinement. A unique blend of calmness and anger could be felt throughout
the novel, the anger of the oppressed and calmness of the liberated.

The imperial novel

 Some say Victorian novels were implicated in racist representations presenting racially
marked characters as comic stereotypes or figures of monstrosity, e.g. Berth “the
madwoman in the attic” was from Indian culture who was an example of moral
degeneration; Jane Eyre says 2 stereotypes on British Empire:
o Place where great fortunes are made
o Often British minds, souls and bodies are at great risk
 Features: mysticism, degeneracy, barbarism – these are the qualities to describe the
19th cent British “other” people

 Other examples:
o The mystery of Edwin Drood – Dickens possibly wanted to introduce Indian
thugs as the main culprits
o R. Kipling Kim (1900)
o Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
o On the other hand, the adventure novel genre – R.M.. Ballantyne’s The Coral
Island (1858) or R.L. Stevenson Treasure Island (1883)
 

Lecture 2.
Religion in Victorian literature
 The age of great religious revival but also growing scepticism (Darwin, Higher
Criticism)
 At the beginning of 19th cent. in Britain, religious faith and the sciences were generally
seen to be in beautiful accordance. The study of God's Word, in the Bible, and His
Works, in nature, were assumed to be twin facets of the same truth.
 In the 1820s and 1830s, some working-class radicals saw a chance of using certain
versions of the sciences for political ends. Some forms of the sciences, especially
those emanating from France, seemed to suggest a restricted (or even non-existent)
role for God in the universe, and thus to undermine the Anglican politico-religious
establishment. Such materialist forms of science were as abhorred by most respectable
men of science, as they were championed by working-class radicals:
 o French Revolution
o Ch. Darwin
o Evolution: progress and natural laws
 Religious factions within the Church of England and religious conflict outside it – the
growing importance of Roman Catholic Church, the Dissenting Churches
 Examples:
o Ch. Bronte Shirley (1849)

 Rational Dissenters (18th century)

In the 18th century, one group of Dissenters became known as "Rational Dissenters".
In many respects they were closer to the Anglicanism of their day than other
Dissenting sects; however, they believed that state religions impinged on the freedom
of conscience. They were fiercely opposed to the hierarchical structure of the
Established Church and the financial ties between it and the government. Like
moderate Anglicans, they desired an educated ministry and an orderly church, but they
based their opinions on reason and the Bible rather than on appeals to tradition and
authority. They rejected doctrines such as the Trinity and original sin, arguing that they
were irrational. Rational Dissenters believed that Christianity and faith could be
dissected and evaluated using the newly emerging discipline of science, and that a
stronger belief in God would be the result.

Christian Socialist revival in late Victorian Britain

The Christian Socialist movement dissolved in the mid 1850s and re-emerged in the late
1870s in a number of organisations which prompted social concern in the Anglican Church
and other Christian denominations as well as influenced the growing labour movement and
co-operative societies. During the outburst of socialist agitation in the 1880s and 1890s
numerous Christian socialist organisations and groupings were established in Britain. Most of
them were short-lived and small, but some of them exerted a significant influence on social
reforms in Britain.
Some of the late offshoots of mid-Victorian Christian Socialism included the Guild of St.
Matthew as a parish communicants' society which may be regarded as a direct descendant of
mid-Victorian Christian Socialism. Subsequently, the Christian Social Union, founded in
1889, became an offshoot of the Guild of St. Matthew. In the autumn of 1886 the newly-
established Christian Socialist Society began holding public meetings in Bloomsbury,
London, and in 1906, the Church Socialist League was formed.
Christian Socialism in the Victorian era was by no means a homogeneous movement. The
Christian Socialist group, which was formed in mid-Victorian England by Frederick Denison
Maurice, John Ludlow, Charles Kingsley and others, identified socialism with Christianity
and was indebted to the tradition of continental (mostly French) socialism and English
radicalism. Inspired by Chartism, it aimed to provide solutions to social ills through
educational and moral change, and not change in political legislation.
Christian Socialism in the late Victorian period, which came from all backgrounds, Anglican,
Nonconformist, as well as Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic, was never radical or
revolutionary, but conservative, reformist and evolutionary. The Christian Socialists criticised
the notion of the “ invisible hand” of the market, i.e. unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism.
They also emphasised the collective responsibility of society to deal with economic problems,
but they did not want to disestablish the prevailing social order. The Victorian Christian
Socialists contributed to adult education, the co-operative movement, friendly societies and
the labour movement. Christian Socialism lay a greater emphasis upon moral and social
requirements of human life than other strands of Victorian socialism.
The Church of England was in turmoil, with "High-Church" partisans battling "Low-Church"
partisans (the Evangelicals among them), and a small but vocal and influential "Broad-
Church" group opposed to both. The arguments and disagreements raged over a variety of
doctrinal issues, such as what to believe and how the service should be conducted Generally,
members of the Church of England were united in their opposition to Roman Catholicism and
the Protestants outside the church: the many sects of Nonconformists or Dissenters. However,
the questions they asked themselves soon began to extend beyond what to believe and how to
practice their religion to whether they should believe at all and how continued belief could or
might be possible.

High Church Broad Church Low Church

o Catholic ecclesiastical o Liberal in theology o Biblical literalism
tradition o Emphasise the o Conversion experience
o Elaborate liturgy importance of truly o Reaching out to
o Emphasise the role of national establishment dissenters
bishops and necessity o This loosely associated o Private judgement
of submitting to them group of intellectuals in
o Oxford Movement the Church of England
within the Church of in many ways represent
England began as a what has become
High Church liberal twentieth-
movement, following a century Protestantism.
call to action to save o Working under the
the Church of England, direct or indirect
whose position, with influence of German
emancipation of liberal thought, Broad
Roman Catholics and Churchmen
other changes in the emphasized that the
English body politic, Bible, though in some
was perceived as being sense divinely inspired,
in danger was not, as
o High Churchmen Evangelicals and
strove against the Tractarians believed,
erosion of the Church literally true in every
of England's detail, and that
traditionally privileged therefore the scriptures
and legally entrenched should be read
role in English society. metaphorically or even
mythologically.

 The influence of science and biblical research

In addition to the turmoil within the Church, the Victorians were also bombarded by the
advances of science, which seemed to render the Bible's account of creation suspect. They
were faced with advances in scholarship that showed the books of the Bible must have
been written at widely different times. As Fraser noted, for the first time the Bible was
criticized as a work of literature rather than solely religious materil. In addition, the
Victorians were faced with qualms over certain Christian doctrines and the seeming
impossibility of reconciling the concept of a wholly benevolent and all-powerful God with
the doctrine of eternal punishment for sinners. Thus, Wolf concluded, there seem to have
been as many varieties of doubt as there were human beings in Victorian England.
Victorians were convinced they were living in an age of transition. He believes that in an
age that feels itself losing its grip on the traditional and groping hesitantly into the
unknown, apathy about basic human concerns is impossible. Like Wolf, he argues that the
Victorian period was more an age of doubt, than an age of faith.

The Oxford Movement

The Oxford Movement was a movement of High Church members of the Church of
England which eventually developed into Anglo-Catholicism. The movement, whose
original devotees were mostly associated with the University of Oxford, argued for the
reinstatement of some older Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion into Anglican
liturgy and theology. They thought of Anglicanism as one of three branches of the One,
Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
The movement's philosophy was known as Tractarianism after its series of publications,
the Tracts for the Times, published from 1833 to 1841. Tractarians were also
disparagingly referred to as "Newmanites" (before 1845) and "Puseyites" (after 1845)
after two prominent Tractarians, John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey. Other
well-known Tractarians included John Keble, Charles Marriott, Richard Froude, Robert
Wilberforce, Isaac Williams and William Palmer.
 The Oxford Movement – inspired by the Jacobean and Caroline divines; main
representatives: John Henry Newman, Edwar Pusey, John Keble, Isaac Williams
o The use of sacraments – baptismal regeneration, the Real Presence
o Episcopacy and the emphasis on apostolic succession
o Daily prayers and fasting, church decoration, ritual
o Anglican sisterhood, the doctrine of reserve
o Self-imposed celibacy (Canon Chasuble in Wilde’s The Importance of Being
Earnest (1895)
o Keble’s Assize sermon: protesting against Catholic Emancipation of 1829 and
the government’s abolition of 10 high-ranking positions in Church of Ireland
o Over time several of the leading lights of the Oxford Movement became
Roman Catholics, following the path of John Henry Newman, one of the
fathers of the Oxford Movement and, for a time, a High Churchman himself. A
lifelong High Churchman, the Reverend Edward Bouverie Pusey remained the
spiritual father of the Oxford Movement and in holy orders of the Church of
England.
o Conflict over Erastianism
  Named after Thomas Erastus, a Swiss 16th cent. Protestant theologian –
the idea that the state is supreme in church matters
 Victorian England – no separation of the church and state, bishops in
the House of Lords, all university teachers in Oxbridge required to be
ordained priests
Evangelicals and literature
 Evangelicalism originated in the religious revival of the 1730s; the term applied not
only to Anglicans but also Dissenters. Other features: Biblicism, crucicentrism,
conversionism and activism.
 Evangelical characters in literature:
o Mr Brocklehurst (Ch. Bronte Jane Eyre) 1847
o Uriah Heep (Ch. Dickens David Coperfield) 1850
o Mrs Jellyby Ch. Dickens Bleak House) 1853
 Evangelicals in literature:
o Often portrayed satirically, themselves usually distrustful towards fiction and
anything which could be perceived as risqué
o The authors who received Evangelical upbringing (G. Eliot, J.Ruskin, J.H.
Newman) in their later lives drifted away from their roots.

Lecture 3.
Darwinism and its aftermath
 Charles Lyell Principles of Geology 1830-1833 popularised uniformitarianism – the
idea that the Earth was shaped by forces which are still in operation; much older that
6000years
 1844 Robert Chambers publishes anonymously Vestiges of Creation
 1859 Ch. Darwin On the Origin of Species; 1871 The Descent Man – man is not the
apex of creation as the literal reading of the Bible led people to believe
 The Darwinism contested:
o William Paley Natural Theology 1805 – looking for the signs of God’s
providence in nature (the watchmaker analogy)
o The Bridgewater Treatises 1833-40 – a cycle of 8 pamphlets commissioned by
Earl of Bridgewater, exploring “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as
manifested in the Creation
 o The fear of biological degeneration: Francis Galton (1822-1911) Darwin’s half
cousin, the creator of eugenics
 The loss of religious certainties
o Higher Criticism – reading the Bible as critically as any other historical text
o David Friedrich Strauss Das Leben Jesu, translated by young George Eliot in
1846
o Essays and reviews (1860) – a collection of 7 articles by various authors (6 of
them Anglican clergymen) on Christianity – the revelation is ongoing, the
Bible is subject to interpretation, biblical miracles are impossible, questioning
the eternity of damnation etc.

o
Summary:
 Charles Darwin’s revolutionary idea of evolution sparked dramatic debate in the
scientific and, most especially, religious communities, as well as inspiring a new wave
of thought in the minds of the world.
  There was also plenty of controversy, particularly from the many believers of
creationism during the Victorian era. But by denying creationism with his own
theories, Darwin “made room for strictly scientific explanations of all natural
phenomena,” and as a result, initiated a “powerful intellectual and spiritual revolution”
whose effects last to this day
 Darwin was not the first to introduce the idea of evolution, which had been around
long before his birth and was first presented to the public by Robert Chambers in
“Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation”. However, Darwin was the first to carry
out extensive research to back up the theory..
 In this time of the Victorian era, almost all leading scientists and philosophers were
Christian men who believed in creationism and that God had designed creatures to fit
their environment perfectly. These Victorians, especially conservative theologians,
strongly opposed his theories and continued to uphold the Bible’s creationist
teachings.

Fin de siècle
 The term is typically used to refer to the end of the 19th century. This period was
widely thought to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope
for a new beginning. The "spirit" of fin de siècle often refers to the cultural hallmarks
that were recognized as prominent in the 1880s and 1890s, including ennui, cynicism,
pessimism, and "...a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence."
 The adoption of the French term, rather than the use of the English “end of the
century,” helps to trace this particular critical content: it was associated with those
writers and artists whose work displayed a debt to French decadent, symbolist, or
naturalist writers and artists.
 Much of the characteristic literature of the fin de siècle is thus closely interrelated with
the earlier aesthetic movement and coincides with the zenith of decadence. But the fin
de siècle—both at the time and even more so in current critical debate—encompasses
a broader set of concerns, social and political, that often stand in tension with
aestheticism:
o the rising interest in literary naturalism
o the emergence of the New Woman.
 Both the decadent and naturalist influences on literature and art at the fin de siècle led
to vehement debates in the press concerning the moral responsibility of art, with
writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and Arthur Symons arguing for greater
freedom of artistic representation of sexual or subversive content.
  The major political theme of the era was that of revolt against materialism,
rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society, and liberal democracy. The fin-de-siècle
generation supported emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism, and vitalism,
while the mindset of the age saw civilization as being in a crisis that required a
massive and total solution

Culture as alternative religion

 Culture should provide “sweetness and light”
 The state should fulfil the role of Church in a secular way
 Arnold himself contributed to his ideals, working his whole life as an inspector of
schools
 Arnold's famous piece of writing on culture established his High Victorian cultural
agenda which remained dominant in debate from the 1860s until the 1950s.
 According to his view advanced in the book, "Culture [...] is a study of perfection". He
further wrote that: "[Culture] seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has
been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an
atmosphere of sweetness and light [...]".
 His often quoted phrase "[culture is] the best which has been thought and said" comes
from the Preface to Culture and Anarchy:
 The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our
present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of
getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has
been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a
stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we
now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in
following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them
mechanically.
 The book contains most of the terms - culture, sweetness and light, Barbarian,
Philistine, Hebraism, and many others - which are more associated with Arnold's work
influence.

The Aesthetic Movement

 an intellectual and art movement supporting the emphasis of aesthetic values
more than social-political themes for literature, fine art, music and other arts.
 This meant that Art from this particular movement focused more on being beautiful
rather than having a deeper meaning - 'Art for Art's sake'.
 It was particularly prominent in Europe during the 19th century, supported by notable
figures such as Oscar Wilde In the 19th century, it was related to other movements
such as symbolism or decadence represented in France, or decadentism represented in
Italy, and may be considered the British version of the same style.
 Writers of the Decadent movement used the slogan "Art for Art's Sake" (L'art pour
l'art), the origin of which is debated, however, it is generally accepted to have been
promoted by Théophile Gautier in France, who interpreted the phrase to suggest that
there was not any real association between art and morality.
 The artists and writers of Aesthetic style tended to profess that the Arts should
provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental
messages. As a consequence, they did not accept John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and
George MacDonald's conception of art as something moral or useful, "Art for
truth's sake" Instead, they believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it need
only be beautiful. The Aesthetes developed a cult of beauty, which they considered the
basic factor of art. Life should copy Art, they asserted. They considered nature as
crude and lacking in design when compared to art. The main characteristics of the
style were:
o suggestion rather than statement,
o sensuality,
o great use of symbols, and synaesthetic/ Ideasthetic effects—that is,
correspondence between words, colours and music, wchich was used to
establish mood.

 in 1861 William Morris founds a design company which seeks to revive handicraft
and resist the growing popularity of mass-produced cheap and ugly products
 Criticism:
 The Aesthetic Movement quote:
- art for art’s sake
- anti bourgeois
- escapist
- form before content

 The Yellow Book

o A literary and art periodical published in 1894-97
o Contributors:
 Aubrey Beardsley
 Ernest Dowson
 Henry James
 George Gissing
  W.B. Yeats
o the magazine contained a wide range of literary and artistic genres, poetry,
short stories, essays, book illustrations, portraits, and reproductions of
paintings
o Moreover, in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), a major corrupting
influence on Dorian is "the yellow book" which Lord Henry sends over to
amuse him after the suicide of his first love. This "yellow book" is understood
by critics to be À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, a representative work of
Parisian decadence that heavily influenced British aesthetes like Beardsley.
Such books in Paris were wrapped in yellow paper to alert the reader to their
lascivious content. It is not clear, however, whether Dorian Gray is the direct
source for the review's title.
The Dandy

 A dandy (also known as a beau or gallant) is a man who places particular importance
upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the
appearance of nonchalance in a cult of self.
 A dandy was self-made and often strove to imitate an aristocratic lifestyle despite
coming from a middle-class background, especially in late 18th- and early 19th-
century Britain.
  Charles Baudelaire defined the dandy, in the later "metaphysical" phase of dandyism,
as one who elevates æsthetics to a living religion, that the dandy's mere existence
reproaches the responsible citizen of the middle class: "Dandyism in certain respects
comes close to spirituality and to stoicism" and "These beings have no other status, but
that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions,
of feeling and thinking .... Dandyism is a form of Romanticism. Contrary to what
many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in
clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the
symbol of the aristocratic superiority of mind."
 The literary dandy is a familiar figure in the writings, and sometimes the self-
presentation, of Oscar Wilde, H.H. Munro (Clovis and Reginald), P.G. Wodehouse
(Bertie Wooster) and Ronald Firbank, writers linked by their subversive air.

Naturalism
 Naturalism is a literary movement that emphasizes observation and the scientific
method in the fictional portrayal of reality. Novelists writing in the naturalist mode
include Émile Zola (its founder), Thomas Hardy, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane,
and Frank Norris.
 Naturalism began as a branch of literary realism, and realism had favored fact, logic,
and impersonality over the imaginative, symbolic, and supernatural. Although they
considered themselves realists, naturalistic authors selected particular parts of
reality: misery, corruption, vice, disease, poverty, prostitution, racism, and violence.
They were criticized for being pessimistic and for concentrating excessively on the
darker aspects of life.
 The novel would be an experiment where the author could discover and analyze the
forces, or scientific laws, that influenced behaviour, and these included emotion,
heredity, and environment.
 Other characteristics of literary naturalism include: detachment, in which the
author maintains an impersonal tone and disinterested point of view; determinism, the
opposite of free will, in which a character's fate has been decided, even predetermined,
by impersonal forces of nature beyond human control; and a sense that the universe
itself is indifferent to human life.
 The paradox of naturalism is that it holds two contrary or conflicting views: human
behaviour is the result of free will, and yet also determined by natural laws.
  Concerned with characters on the fringes of society, their lives determined by heredity,
environment and chance (Hardy’s Tess)
 George Gissing noted for his novels on the urban working class: Workers in the dawn
(1880), The Unclassed (1884)
 George Moore – the author of a Modern Lover (1883) – the story of a young artist
using his relationships with women to promote his career, banned by Maudie’s and
W.H. Smith
 Literature at Nurse – Moore fighting what perceived to be hypocrisy of circulating
libraries and booksellers

The New Woman

The New Woman was a feminist ideal that emerged in the late nineteenth century and had a
profound influence on feminism well into the twentieth century.
 The term "New Woman" appeared in 1890s
 The term was further popularized by British-American writer Henry James, to
describe the growth in the number of feminist, educated, independent career women in
Europe and the United States.
 Girton (1869) and Newnham (1871) in Cambridge, Lady Margaret Hall (1879) –
Colleges founded to accept women
 Fight for suffrage for women ended with partial victory on 1918 (votes to women over
30) and equal right to vote in 1928
 The emergence of education and career opportunities for women in the late 19th
century, as well as new legal rights to property (although not yet the vote), meant that
they stepped into a new position of freedom and choice when it came to marital and
sexual partners.
 For women in the Victorian era, any sexual activity outside of marriage was judged to
be immoral. Divorce law changes during the late nineteenth century gave rise to a
New Woman who could survive a divorce with her economic independence intact, and
an increasing number of divorced women remarried.
 The figures of New Woman appearing in the works by George Bernard Shaw,
Thomas Hardy and others
 The New Woman undermining the traditional idea of feminine, the dandy undermining
the traditional idea of masculine

Lecture 4.
The Edwardians and the Georgians:
 Edward VII 1901-1910, the Edwardian era usually associated with the more relaxed
and adventurous approach to the form (both in life and literature)
 George V 1910-1936
 Virginia Woolf in her essay groups the contemporary writers into two ‘camps’:
o The Edwardians - Bennett, Wells, Galsworthy
o The Georgians – Forster, Lawrence, Strachey, Joyce, Eliot and Woolf herself
 Georgian poetry came to be associated with formally conservative poetry published
in five anthologies Georgian Poetry (1912-1922) edited by Edward Marsh (e.g. Rupert
Brooke, John Masefield, also included D.H Lawrence)

The Bloomsbury group

It was an influential group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and

artists. This loose collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied together
near Bloomsbury, London, during the first half of the 20th century. Their works and
outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern
attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.
The lives and works of the group members show an overlapping, interconnected similarity of
ideas and attitudes that helped to keep the friends and relatives together, reflecting in large
part the influence of G. E. Moore: "the essence of what Bloomsbury drew from Moore is
contained in his statement that 'one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and
enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge'"
Shared ideas:
 Philosophy and ethics: the philosophical basis of Bloomsbury thought was Moore's
conception of intrinsic worth as distinct from instrumental value. As with the
distinction between love (an intrinsic state) and monogamy (a behaviour), Moore's
differentiation between intrinsic and instrumental value allowed the Bloomsburies to
maintain an ethical high-ground based on intrinsic merit, independent of, and without
reference to, the consequences of their actions; the greatest ethic goods were "the
importance of personal relationships and the private life", as well as aesthetic
appreciation: "art for art's sake"
 Rejection of bourgeois habits: Bloomsbury reacted against current social rituals,
"the bourgeois habits ... the conventions of Victorian life with their emphasis on
public achievement, in favour of a more informal and private focus on personal
relationships and individual pleasure. T shared a sophisticated, civilized, and highly
articulated ideal of pleasure. As Virginia Woolf put it, their "triumph is in having
worked out a view of life which was not by any means corrupt or sinister or merely
intellectual; rather ascetic and austere indeed; which still holds, and keeps them dining
together, and staying together, after 20 years"
 Old Bloomsbury’s development was inevitably impacted on, along with just about
everything else in modernist culture, by the First World War: indeed, "the small
world of Bloomsbury was later said by some on its outskirts to have been irretrievably
shattered", though in fact its friendships "survived the upheavals and dislocations of
war, in many ways were even strengthened by them". Most but not all of them were
conscientious objectors, which of course added to the group’s controversies.
Politically the members of Bloomsbury had liberalism and socialism leanings.
World War I and its literary fallout
It is generally thought to include poems, novels and drama; diaries, letters, and memoirs too.
Many of the works during and about the war were written by men, because of the war's
intense demand on the young men of that generation; however, a number of women
(especially in the British tradition) created literature about the war, often observing the effects
of the war on soldiers, domestic spaces, and the home front more generally.
The War Poets:
On the first day of Battle of the Somme over 19,000 British soldiers were killed – the
bloodiest day in the history of the British army
 Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
 Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
 Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
 Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)
 Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Wilfred Owen was killed in battle; but his poems created at the front did achieve popular
attention after the war's end,.e.g., Dulce Et Decorum Est, Insensibility, Anthem for Doomed
Youth, Futility and Strange Meeting. In preparing for the publication of his collected poems,
Owen tried to explain:
“This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about
deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except
War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The
Poetry is in the pity.”
This brief statement became the basis for a play based on the friendship between Owen and
Siegfried Sassoon in 1917.

Reckoning with WWI

 Robert Graves Goodbye to All That (1929) – provocative and satirical condemnation
of the English social structure, continuity between the school and the army, gives the
impression that almost every official pronouncement during the War was a lie, and that
the soldiers were completely irreligious, unpatriotic, and riddled with veneral disease
 David Jones long poem and verse In Parenthesis (1937) presents the War in positive,
mythically redemptive terms
 An effort to transfigure its soldiers into universal mythic types of self-sacrifice by
employing, in the manner of Eliot’s the Waste Land a framework of allusions

Modernism
It has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North
America, and is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing,
in both poetry and prose fiction. Modernists experimented with literary form and expression,
adhering to Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new".
This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of
representation and express the new sensibilities of their time. The horrors of the First
World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and modernist writers
were influenced by such thinkers as Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, amongst others, who
raised questions about the rationality of the human mind.
Initially, some modernists fostered a utopian spirit, stimulated by innovations in anthropology,
psychology, philosophy, political theory, physics and psychoanalysis. The poets of the
Imagist movement:
o founded by Ezra Pound A Few Don’ts by an Imagist in 1913 as a new poetic style,
gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century,
o were characterized by a poetry that favoured a precision of imagery, brevity and free
verse
o a group of London writers, including Hueffer and Hulme – they did not produce any
significant poetry themselves but inspired others
o against post-Romantic tradition of poetry which they believed to be hopelessly wordy,
vague, sentimental and disconnected from contemporary reality
o Blast (1914-1915) a magazine published by a writer and painter Wyndham Lewis and
Ezra Pound
o Vorticism – a vortex of creative energy both static and dynamic like a whirlpool,
could be located in a place (London) or the individual artist
This idealism, however, ended, with the outbreak of World War I, and writers created more
cynical works that reflected a prevailing sense of disillusionment. Many modernist writers
also shared a mistrust of institutions of power such as government and religion, and rejected
the notion of absolute truths.
Modernist works such as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) were increasingly self-aware,
introspective, and explored the darker aspects of human nature.

The term modernism covers a number of related, and overlapping, artistic and literary
movements, including Imagism, Symbolism, Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism.
Modernists:
 T.S. Eliot
 o 1917 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
o 1922 The Waste Land which was heavily edited by Ezra Pound, to whom the
poem was dedicated
o Four Quartets (1943) inspired by Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism and studies in
Eastern Religios
 William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
o one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, opened in 1904 with
Cathleen in Houlihan (co-written with Lady Gregory)
o 1921 Michael Robartes and the Dancer including “The Second Coming”
o The Tower (1928) including “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Leda and the Swan”
 W.H. Auden (1907-1973)
o one of the three major twentieth-century British poets, Yeats, Eliot, Auden
himself
o Another Time (1940) including “In memory of WB Yeats” and “September 1
1939” – a deliberately deflated tone of prosaic anti-climax, anti-romanticism
and positive poetic realism
o Funeral Blues (1936, changed in 1938)

 D.H. Lawrence

Theatre of Absurd
The term Theatre of the Absurd is applied to plays written by primarily European playwrights,
that express the belief that human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all
communication breaks down. Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and
illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.
While there are significant precursors, including Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), the Theatre of the
Absurd is generally seen as beginning in the 1950s with the plays of Samuel Beckett.

The Absurd in these plays takes the form of man’s reaction to a world apparently without
meaning, and/or man as a puppet controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces. Though
the term is applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in many of the
plays: broad comedy, often similar to Vaudeville, mixed with horrific or tragic images;
characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions;
dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly expansive;
either a parody or dismissal of realism and the concept of the "well-made play".

Playwrights commonly associated with the Theatre of the Absurd include:

 Forerunners Alfred Jarry Ubi Roi (1898) – a play about a puppet-like monstrosity who
becomes king of Poland
 Other French representatives: Eugene Ionesco, Albert Camus, Jean Genet
 Other European writers: Stanisłam Mrożek, Tadeusz Różewicz, Vaclav Havel
 Martin Esslin Theatre of Absurd (1961)

Main features:
 Influence of the existentialist philosophy (Camus, Sartre)
 Anti-theatre
 Language no longer the medium of communication
 Beckett writing in French “to impoverish himself further”

Samuel Becket (1906-1989) and play Waiting for Godot (1952, trans. 1954)
 Premieres: France 1953, England 1955, Poland 1957
 About two couples: Vladimir & Estragon who wait and Lucky & Pozzo – the slave
and his master
 Godot – Gealic forever

Stream of consciousness
 The expression used for the first time by William Jones in Principles of Psychology
(1890):
o “consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits ... it is
nothing joined; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is
most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let's call it the stream of
thought, consciousness, or subjective life.”
 In literary context used for the first time in 1918 by a writer May Sinclair in her view
of Dorothy Richardson’s work
 The author attempting to reproduce the character’s thought process, including
conscious and unconscious processes, memories, sensory perceptions through
fragmentary and often incoherent sentences, lack of punctuation or its idiosyncratic
use etc.
 Stream of consciousness is a narrative device that attempts to give the written
equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue
or in connection to his or her actions. Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually
regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative
leaps in thought and lack of some or all punctuation.
 Stream of consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic
monologue and soliloquy, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third
person, which are chiefly used in poetry or drama. In stream of consciousness the
speaker's thought processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or
addressed to oneself); it is primarily a fictional device.
 Examples:
o Found in Molly Bloom’s monologue from Joyce’s Ulysses
o Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927)
o A crime novel by Dorothy L. Sayers The Nine Tailors (1934)

Lecture 5.
Angry Young Men
 The title from Leslie Paul’s autobiography Angry Young Man (1951)
 The "angry young men" were a group of mostly working and middle class British
playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s.
  The group's leading members included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis. The phrase
was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre's press officer to promote John
Osborne's 1956 play Look Back in Anger.
 Following the success of the Osborne play, the label "angry young men" was later
applied by British media to describe young writers who were characterised by
disillusionment with traditional British society.
 Their political views were usually seen as identifying with the left, sometimes
anarchistic, and they described social alienation of different kinds. They also often
expressed their critical views on society as a whole, criticising certain behaviours or
groups in different ways.
 Outside of these subgroupings, the "Angries" included writers mostly of lower-class
origin concerned with their political and economic aspirations:
o John Osborne Look Back in Anger 1956
o Harold Pinter (1930-2008)
 Actor, playwright, screenwriter
 The Birthday Party 1959, The Dumb Waiter 1959, The Caretaker 1960
 “comedies of menace”, “pinteresque”, repetition, repartree, physical
humour, class issue
o Shelagh Delaney A Taste of Honey 1958
o Joe Orton Entering Mr Sloane 1964
Novels:
o Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim 1954
o Colin Wilson Outsider 1957
o Alan Sillitoe Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner 1959
The 1950s
Friendships, rivalries, and acknowledgments of common literary aims within each of these
groups could be intense (the relationship between Amis and Larkin is considered one of the
great literary friendships of the 20th century). But the writers in each group tended to view the
other groups with bewilderment and incomprehension. Observers and critics could find no
common thread between them all. They were contemporaries by age. They were not of the
upper-class establishment, nor were they protégés of existing literary circles. It was essentially
a male "movement". Shelagh Delaney, author of A Taste of Honey (1958), was described as an
"angry young woman".

The perception of them as "angry" outsiders was the one point of coherence. It all had
something to do with English "provincialism" asserting itself, in a world where James Joyce
(an Irishman) and Dylan Thomas (a Welshman) had taken the literary high ground. Feelings
of frustration and exclusion from the centre and the Establishment were taken up, as common
sense surrogates for the Freud and Sartre of the highbrows. In a negative description, they
tended to avoid radical experimentalism in their literary style; they were not modernists by
technique.

English drama:
 The theatre critic Kenneth Tynan made a distinction between “the hairy men” -
heated, embattled, socially committed playwrights” (Osborne, John Arden, Arnold
Wesker” and “the smooth men – cool apolitical stylists like Harold Pinter, the late Joe
Orton, Christopher Hampton, Alan Ayckbourn, Simon Gray and Tom Stoppard
Kitchen sink drama
 is a term coined to describe a British cultural movement that developed in the late
1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art, novels, film and television plays, whose
protagonists usually could be described as "angry young men" who were disillusioned
with modern society. It used a style of social realism, which depicted the domestic
situations of working class Britons, living in cramped rented accommodation and
spending their off-hours drinking in grimy pubs, to explore controversial social and
political issues ranging from abortion to homelessness. The harsh, realistic style
 contrasted sharply with the escapism of the previous generation's so-called "well-made
plays".

1950-60s
Before the 1950s, the United Kingdom's working class were often depicted stereotypically in
Noël Coward's drawing room comedies and British films. Kitchen sink realism was also seen
as being in opposition to the "well-made play", the kind which theatre critic Kenneth Tynan
once denounced as being set in "Loamshire", of dramatists like Terence Rattigan.
Kitchen sink works were created with the intention of changing all that. Their political views
were initially labeled as radical, sometimes even anarchic.

John Osborne's play Look Back In Anger (1956) depicted young men in a way that is similar
to the then-contemporary "Angry Young Men" movement of film and theatre directors. The
"angry young men" were a group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights and
novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. Following the success of the Osborne play, the
label "angry young men" was later applied by British media to describe young writers who
were characterised by a disillusionment with traditional British society. The hero of Look
Back In Anger is a graduate, but he is working in a manual occupation. It dealt with social
alienation, the claustrophobia and frustrations of a provincial life on low incomes.

The impact of this work inspired Arnold Wesker and Shelagh Delaney, among numerous
others, to write plays of their own. The English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre,
headed by George Devine and Theatre Workshop organised by Joan Littlewood were
particularly prominent in bringing these plays to the public's attention. Critic John Heilpern
wrote that Look Back in Anger expressed such "immensity of feeling and class hatred" that it
altered the course of English theatre
This was all part of the British New Wave—a transposition of the concurrent nouvelle vague
film movement in France, some of whose works, such as The 400 Blows of 1959, also
emphasised the lives of the urban proletariat. British filmmakers such as Tony Richardson and
Lindsay Anderson channelled their vitriolic anger into film making. Confrontational films
such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and A Taste of Honey (1962) were
noteworthy movies in the genre. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is about a young
machinist who spends his wages at weekends on drinking and having a good time, until his
affair with a married woman leads to her getting pregnant and him being beaten by her
husband to the point of hospitalization. A Taste of Honey is about a 17-year old schoolgirl
with an abusive, alcoholic mother. The schoolgirl starts a relationship with a black sailor and
gets pregnant. After the sailor leaves on his ship, Jo moves in with a homosexual
acquaintance, Geoffrey, who assumes the role of surrogate father. A Taste of Honey raises the
issues of class, race, gender and sexual orientation.
Kitchen sink realism was also used in the novels of Stan Barstow, John Braine, Alan
Sillitoe and others.

Lecture 6.
Postmodernism
 the term appearing with reference to literature in the US in the late 1940s, gaining
popularity in the 1960s
 used to describe the work of such American writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Donald
Barthelme, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon
Modernism Postmodernism
 subjectivity  follows to a large degree the same
 blurring distinctions between precepts
genres, e.g. TheWaste Land, Ulysses  parody/pastiche
 fragmented form  intertextuality
 self-consciousness  irony
 self-reflexivity  self-reflexivity
 blurring distinctions between “high”  mise en abyme
and “low” culture  metafiction
 “high” modernism laments the  treats art as a game and celebrates
fragmentation of modern culture the provinsionality ornincoherence
 and tries to put art and the artist in  the architechture was rebelling
the centre against austere forms of modern
architechture

While encompassing a broad range of ideas and projects, postmodernism is typically defined
by an attitude of skepticism or distrust toward grand narratives, ideologies, and various
tenets of Enlightenment rationality, including the existence of objective reality and
absolute truth, as well as notions of rationality, human nature, and progress. Instead, it
asserts that knowledge and truth are the product of unique systems of social, historical, or
political discourse and interpretation, and are therefore contextual and constructed to varying
degrees. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to
epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, self-referentiality, and irony.
The term postmodernism has been applied both to the era following modernity, and to a
host of movements within that era (mainly in art, music, and literature) that reacted
against tendencies in modernism.Postmodernism includes skeptical critical interpretations
of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, linguistics, economics, architecture, fiction,
and literary criticism. Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such as
deconstruction and post-structuralism, as well as philosophers such as Jacques Derrida,
Jean Baudrillard, and Frederic Jameson.

1. Intertextuality - is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text. Intertextual figures

include: allusion, quotation, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche and parody.
Intertextuality is a literary device that creates an 'interrelationship between texts' and
 generates related understanding in separate works. These references are made to
influence the reader and add layers of depth to a text, based on the readers' prior
knowledge and understanding. Intertextuality is a literary discourse strategy utilised by
writers in novels, poetry, theatre and even in non-written texts
2. Mise-en-abyme - occurs within a text when there is a reduplication of images or
concepts referring to the textual whole. Mise-en-abîme is a play of signifiers within a
text, of sub-texts mirroring each other. This mirroring can get to the point where
meaning may be rendered unstable and, in this respect, may be seen as part of the
process of deconstruction. In literary criticism, "mise en abyme" is a type of frame
story, in which the core narrative may be used to illuminate some aspect of the
framing story. The term is used in deconstruction and deconstructive literary criticism
as a paradigm of the intertextual nature of language—that is, of the way language
never quite reaches the foundation of reality because it refers in a frame-within-a-
frame way, to other language, which refers to other language, and so forth.
3. Metafiction - is a literary device used self-consciously and systematically to draw
attention to a work's status as a work of imagination, rather than reality. It poses
questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using irony and
self-reflection. It can be compared to presentational theatre, which does not let the
audience forget it is viewing a play; metafiction forces readers to be aware that they
are reading a fictional work.
 Fiction that plays with the nature and process of fiction
 Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy (1759-1767)
 John Fowles The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)
 Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

4. The use of pastiche and parody

Postmodern literature’s celebratory mode of experimentation found new impetus with
the usage of parody and pastiche. While a parody imitates the manner, style or
characteristics of a particular literary work/ genre/ author, and deflates the
original by applying the imitation to a lowly or inappropriate subject, pastiche
literally means to combine, or “paste” together, multiple elements.
Pastiche, thus, can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or
information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. Both pastiche and parody
are intertextual in nature; Pastiche, in postmodern literature, is a homage to or a
parody of past styles.
 Pastiche can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to
comment on situations in postmodernity. In novels, William S. Burroughs combines
science fiction, detective fiction and westerns; Margaret Atwood combines science
fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco combine’s detective fiction, fairy tales, and
science fiction; Derek Pell relies on collage and noir detective, erotica, travel guides,
and how-to manuals, and so on.
Though pastiche commonly refers to the mixing of genres, the work may include
elements like metafiction and temporal distortion. Thomas Pynchon includes in his
novels elements from detective fiction, science fiction, and war fiction; songs; pop
culture references; well-known, obscure, and fictional history mixed together; real
contemporary and historical figures (Mickey Rooney and Wernher Von Braun for
example); a wide variety of welt-known, obscure and fictional cultures and concepts.
Modernity:
 associated with the values of the 18th c. and the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution
 stable, knowable self , reason the highest form of mental functioning
 science produces universal truths about the world, language rational and transparent
 French political narrative of freedom, German narrative of knowledge
The Golden Notebook
 A writer Anna Wulf tries to tie together into a coherent narrative her four
notebooks:
o Black notebook – her childhood in Africa
o Red notebook – her time in the Communist party
o Yellow – the novel she’s writing based on her love affair
o Blue – the running record of her dreams and memories
o The golden notebook of the title is the 5th one

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

  Begins like a pastiche of a Victorian novel: the respectably engaged Charles
Smithson, while on holidays in Lyme Regis, falls in love with the local “fallen
woman” Sarah Woodruff
 Imitating the Victorian novel: theme, epigraphs, like in Eliot’s novels, style
imitating Hardy or Collins
 famous chapter 13 beginning: “I do not know. This story I am telling is all
imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I
have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost
thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the
vocabulary and “voice” of) a convention universally accepted at the time of
my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he
tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and
Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of
the word.”
 The author abdicating their responsibility – the influence of French noveau
roman – objective reporting of facts and images, with no authorial
interpretation
 Existentialism, Freudianism
 Double or triple ending

Lecture 7.
Colonial literarure
 Adventure for young readers: R.M. Ballantyne, Frederick Marryat etc.
 Engagement of mainstream literature with the issues of colonialism (Jane Austen
Mansfield Park, Ch. Bronte Jane Eyre)
 Rudyard Kipling – both the main bard of British Empire but also questioning the
imperial ideology (“The Man who would be King”)
"The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands" (1899), by
Rudyard Kipling, is a poem about the Philippine–American War (1899–1902), which
invites the U.S. to assume colonial control of that country;
The poem "The White Man's Burden" addresses the American colonization of the
Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago conquered from Imperial Spain, in the
three-month Spanish–American War (1898); the birth of the American Empire.
  The poem exhorts the reader and the listener to embark upon the enterprise of
empire, yet gives somber warning about the costs involved; nonetheless, American
imperialists understood the phrase The white man's burden to justify imperialism
as a noble enterprise of civilization, conceptually related to the American
philosophy of Manifest Destiny.
 The title and themes of "The White Man's Burden" ostensibly make the poem
about Eurocentric racism and about the belief of the Western world that
industrialisation is the way to civilise the Third World.
 The imperialist interpretation of "The White Man's Burden" (1899) proposes that
the white man has a moral obligation to rule the non-white peoples of the Earth,
whilst encouraging their economic, cultural, and social progress through
colonialism.
 In the later 20th century, in the context of decolonisation and the Developing
World, the phrase "the white man's burden" was emblematic of the "well-
intentioned" aspects of Western colonialism and "Eurocentrism"
The disintegration of the empires:
 the 1950s – the end of France’s involvement in Indochina, the Algerian war, the Mau
Mau uprising in Kenya, the Suez crisis
 1952 - a Martinique born Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon
publishes White Skin, Black Masks and Faber & Faber publishes The Palm Wine
Drinkard, a novel by a Nigerian author Amos Tutuola, the first African novel in
English published outside Africa
 In 1952 the French demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term “Third World

Postcolonial criticism:
 1978 – a Palestinian-American critic Edward Said publishes Orientalism, one of the
key texts of postcolonial studies
 The East is the invention of the West in order to subjugate it not only politically but
also culturally
 1983 – an Indian-American critic Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak publishes an essay “Can
the Subaltern Speak?” (subaltern – a middle-rank officer in the British army)

Postcolonial writing and terms:

 a painful process of fighting one’s way back into European-made history
  postcolonial defined as “all the cultures affected by the imperial process from the
moment of colonization to the present day” (Bill Ashcroft, Garret Griffiths and Helen
Tiffin The Empire Writes Back [1989])
 Self/Other
 metropolis – the colonizing country
 hegemony – not only in the political but also cultural sense, power perceived as the
prerogative of a group or class as a ‘natural’ or otherwise justified right (used in this
sense for the first time in the 1920s by an Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci)
 subaltern - In critical theory and postcolonialism, the term subaltern designates the
populations which are socially, politically and geographically outside of
the hegemonic power structure of the colony and of the colonial homeland. In
describing "history told from below", subaltern was coined by Antonio Gramsci,
notably through his work on cultural hegemony, which identified the groups that are
excluded from a society's established institutions and thus denied the means by which
people have a voice in their society.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness (1899) an Chinua Achebe’s critique of it

 the narrator, Capitan Marlow is sent on a mission up an African river in a nameless
colony (easily identifiable as the Belgian Congo) to find Kurtz, formerly the best agent
of an ivory-trading company
 Kurtz turns out to become a mad tyrant who dies on the board of Marlow’s ship with
the famous final word “Horror! Horror!”
 Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) – a Nigerian writer; in 1975 he gives a lecture titles An
image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”
o According to Achebe, Conrad refuses to bestow "human expression" on
Africans, even depriving them of language. Africa itself is rendered as "a foil
to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in
comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest".
Conrad, he says, portrays Africa as " 'the other world', the antithesis of Europe
and therefore of civilization", which Achebe attributes to Conrad's "residue of
antipathy to black people".
 o Achebe concludes that "...Conrad had a problem with niggers. His inordinate
love of that word itself should be of interest to psychoanalysts. Sometimes his
fixation on blackness is equally interesting..."
o Achebe asserts that while Conrad was not himself responsible for the
xenophobic "image of Africa" that appears in Heart of Darkness, his novel
continues to perpetuate the damaging stereotypes of black peoples by its
inclusion in the literary canon of the modern Western world. His searing
critique is sometimes taught side-by-side with Conrad's work, and is regularly
included in critical editions of the text.
Postcolonial literature:
 The Commonwealth literature
 But other European countries also had colonies and have colonial heritage
 Latin American magical realism (represented by such writers as Cuban Alejo
Carpentier, Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chilean Isabel Allende and others)
absorbed also by English-language literature

Examples:
1. Wole Soyinka (1934-)
 A Nigerian playwright and poet
 1986 awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first African writer
 Death and the King's Horseman (1975), a tragedy which focuses on Elesin, the
'king's horseman': shortly after the death of his master, the King ofOye, he is
prevented from committing ritual suicide by the colonial District Officer, a
disastrous humiliation for both himself and his society. The situation is ultimately
redeemed by the courageous self-sacrifice of his son. The play fuses both ancient
Greek and Yoruba concepts of tragedy
2. Derek Walcott (1930-)
 a Saint Lucia poet and playwright
 1990 Omeros, a poem in seven books in an edition of 325 pages
 'Omeros' is the Greek for Homer, whose Iliad is echoed in the names of the
poem's chief protagonists, the St Lucian fishermen Achille and Hector; their
rivalry for the love of Helen, the beautiful servant girl emblematically identified
with the island, is central to the poem's development.
 1992 Nobel Prize
3. Jean Rhys (1890-1979)
  A Creole novelist born and raised in Dominica
 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea, the story of Bertha Rochester from Charlotte Bronte’s
Jane Eyre
4. Zadie Smith (1975-)
 an English novelist, daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father
 2000 White Teeth, her debut novel on the experiences of several immigrant and
mixed-race families living in London