British literature - S4

Romantic poetry, Georgian & Victorian Era

What do you know about William Blake?

- also a painter

- believes in the power of imaginative works

- Song of Innocence, “London”

- works on continuity and interconnection in his work

What does William Wordsworth say about the language of his poems in his preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), and how is this important?

- “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”

= in contrary of Plato or Aristotle, poetry must be from the inside and not be about an imitation of classics or nature

What is a ballad?  How are ballads important in Romantic poetry?

- a ballad is a tragic story with supernatural elements and a chorus. It comes from an oral tradition of the Middle Ages.

What do you know about Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan; Or a vision in a dream. A fragment"?

- written in 1798

- highlights the role of the unconscious in the writing (wrote under opium)

> dreams about a Chinese emperor but only remember a fragment of it (no end)

What do you know about Don Juan?

- George Gordon Byron AKA Lord Byron

- Unfinished satirical epic poem = portrays the Spanish folk legend of Don Juan, not as a womaniser as historically portrayed, but as a victim easily seduced by wome

 What is Shelley’s sonnet “England in 1819” about?  What is particular about this sonnet?

- use the form in an irregular way = upside-down

- examines the state of England during the reign of King George III – he comments on the corruption and despair he observed in the country. = poem has a new political function

What is a lyric poem?  Give two definitions.

- a lyric poem is close to music (comes from the instrument lyre)

- expresses the poet’s feelings

What is “To a Nightingale”?

- John Keats

- Ode (comes from the Ancient Greece) = loss of imaginary power

- about a speaker who escapes and joins the bird in a World of pure music

William Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” writes about “the mighty world/ Of eye and ear, — both what they half create/ and half perceive”.  What does this passage show?

- highlights the connection between all living things

- also about religious ideas = link to Nature as spirits and not to a supreme God

What was Lyrical Ballads?  Give the names of the authors, the date of publication, and the aims of the authors.

- It a volume of poetry written by both Wordsworth and Coleridge = anonymous

- 1798

- awakening the mind for the wonders of the world before us by mixing both supernatural elements and the everyday life

 What do you know about Charlotte Smith?

- Charlotte Turner Smith

- helped to make the sonnet popular again

- worked with the Sublime = landscape and madman

How does Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) suggest an image of the Romantic poet?

- key symbol of romanticism

- vastness of the mind = growth of the poet’s mind // climbing a mountain

- focus on one’s emotions and feelings

What happens in "The Lady of Shalott"?

- Alfred Lord Tennyson

• about the conflict between art and life. The Lady, who weaves her magic web and sings her song in a remote tower, can be seen to represent the contemplative artist isolated from the bustle and activity of daily life

What is a dramatic monologue?  Give an example.

- a kind of poem in which a single fictionnal or historical character other than te poet speaks to a silent audience

cf My Last Duchess

What do you know about Gerard Manley Hopkins?

- Scholar = studied at Oxford

- worked about uniqueness of things in Nature and created the “sprung rhythm” (new form)

What do you know about Jane Austen?

- 1775-1817

- Pride and Prejudice, Sense and sensibility or Emma

- mocked the sentimental & Gothic novels = didn’t belong in a movement

> outsider and satirist = witty

- criticism on women’s role and dependence of marriage

- anticipated the realism and novel of education

= domestic novel

What is a historical novel?

- historical novel, a novel that has as its setting a period of history and that attempts to convey the spirit, manners, and social conditions of a past age with realistic detail and fidelity (which is in some cases only apparent fidelity) to historical fact.

What do you know about Elizabeth Gaskell?

- realism = social and political novels

> novel and short stories

- 1^st to writer on Charlotte Brontë

- Mary Barton, North and South, The Life of Charlotte Brontë

- 1810 – 1865

What do you know about The Mysteries of Udolpho?

- one of the first gothic novel

= horror & suspense

- Ann Radcliff

- 1794

What is a sentimental novel?

- late 18^th century

- Pamela, Richardson

// Rousseau, Goethe, MacKenzie

- connection between being virtuous and being sensible = notion of a pure heart

What is literary realism?

- the idea that human affairs are explained to recourse to supernatural and divine explanation

- wider social range – characters & readers

- out of the Enlightenment movement

- Stendhal, Blazac, George Eliott, Charlotte Brontë

What do you know about Charles Dickens?

- Victorian Era

- social and political reform

cf. Oliver Twist – New Poor Law

- innovative way to dsribe childrens

- mixture of genras

What do you know about George Eliot?

- Middlemarch = depicts on the memorable victorian heroines

- Victorian Era

- 1819 – 1880

- pen name George Eliot and real name Mary Ann Evans

- English novelist, poet, journalist, translator,

- Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–1872) etc

- work known for their realism and psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.

What is aestheticism?

- art movement in the late 19th century that valued the appareance of literaturen music, fonts and the arts over their functions

= produces for its own beauty = art for art’s sake

- Oscar Wilde

What do you know about Thomas Hardy?

- a self-made man

- worked on Symbolism and myths

- denounces individuals who are crushed by society = the ste is petty

What do you know about Joseph Conrad?

- 1857 – 1924

- Rejected the victorian novel & attacked the notion of the reality

- Lord Jim, Nostromo

In what ways do novels by Henry James question realism?

- interest in human behaviour and the inner workings of the mind = employes Modernist techniques such as stream-of-consciousness narration to explore the psychology of his characters, focusing in particular on the effect of external events on individual consciousness.

cf. The Turn of the Screw

THEMES to pay attention to in WH - 10

#1 - love and passion

#2 - Windows & eyes

#3 - Nature & assosciated images

#4 - Imprisonment & isolation

#5 - Books

#6 - Childhood & past

#7 - Death

#8 - Folk tale & storytelling

#9 - Narrators

#10 - The outsider & social class

+ revenge