British Literature: Romantic, Victorian, Modernist, and Postcolonial Eras

Romantic Era

Roughly 1785-1832; valued emotion and imagination over Enlightenment reason, driven by revolutions.

Olaudah Equiano's "Preface"

Addresses Parliament using irony, praising England's "freedom" while exposing its slave trade horrors.

Shelley, "Ozymandias"

A ruined statue shows that political power fades but art lasts.

Shelley, "England in 1819"

Attacks the decayed monarchy after the Peterloo Massacre, ending with a flicker of hope.

Blake, "London"

Describes a controlled city of misery; "mind-forged manacles" means the worst chains are self-imposed.

Robinson, "London's Summer Morning"

A busy, energetic London that treats ordinary workers as worthy subjects for poetry.

Romantics' political engagement

Writers responded actively to the French Revolution, Peterloo, slavery, and inequality.

Lyrical Ballads

1798 poetry book by Wordsworth and Coleridge; its Preface became the Romantic manifesto.

Wordsworth, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"

Daffodils poem showing how the memory of nature brings joy later in life.

Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much with Us"

Sonnets attacking materialism and humanity's lost closeness to nature.

Wordsworth on poetic language

Argued poetry should use plain, everyday language "really used by men."

"Preface to the Lyrical Ballads"

Wordsworth's essay: write about common life, in common language, from real feeling.

Emotion recollected in tranquility

Wordsworth's idea that poetry starts from strong feeling remembered and reflected on in calm.

Power of nature

Romantic belief that experiencing nature reveals deep truths and connects the poet to humanity.

Effect of industrialization/cities upon men

Wordsworth warned that crowded, repetitive city life dulls the mind and creates cheap cravings.

"Tintern Abbey"

Wordsworth revisits a river scene; contrasts youthful love of nature with mature, human-connected reflection.

Charlotte Smith, "Huge Vapours Brood above the Clifted Shore"

Sublime night-seascape written in debtors' prison; a working counterexample to wealthy male Romantics.

Victorian Era

Mid-to-late 1800s; an era of empire, industry, and strict morality named for Queen Victoria.

Queen Victoria

Long-reigning monarch who modeled proper behavior and became a figurehead for the era's values.

Victorian temperament

Serious, sincere, moral, and proper mood; defined by "earnestness" and matching outside to inside.

Second Industrial Revolution

A new wave of factories, steel, and railways that transformed cities and accelerated social change.

Britain's "Imperial Century"

The period when the British Empire controlled about a quarter of the globe.

The "New Woman"

Late-1800s idea of an independent woman seeking education, work, and voting rights.

Universal education and mass literacy

Expanded the commercial book market, giving rise to popular "trashy" entertainment.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese

Love sonnet sequence notable for a woman writing in a traditionally male form.

Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess"

Dramatic monologue where a Duke bragging about a painting accidentally reveals he murdered his wife.

Dramatic monologue

A poem where a single speaker talks to a silent listener, unintentionally revealing their character.

Christina Rossetti, "Goblin Market"

Narrative poem about forbidden imperial fruit and sisterly salvation, read through empire and gender politics.

Narrative poetry

Poetry that tells a story, distinct from lyric poetry which captures a single feeling.

Fin de siècle

French for "end of the century"; the uneasy, decadent late-Victorian mood.

Fears of degeneration

Post-Darwin worry that humans could evolve backward; fueled late-Victorian horror.

Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

1886 Gothic novella exploring the good/evil double, repression, and the hidden self.

Interior/exterior and allegory in Jekyll and Hyde

Breaks the rule that outside matches inside by showing faces are unreliable masks.

Lombroso and criminal atavism

Theory that criminals evolved backward, echoed in Mr. Hyde's ape-like, racialized description.

Labouchère Amendment

1885 law criminalizing "gross indecency" between men; context for Jekyll and Hyde's forbidden desire.

Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

1895 comedy of manners satirizing the upper class; puns on the Victorian value of "earnest."

Epigrams

Short, witty sentences that flip expectations; Oscar Wilde's signature style.

The dandy

A stylish, cynical man who performs an aristocratic persona and treats style as sacred.

Modernism and beyond

Early-1900s movement reacting to war and rapid change with experimental writing styles.

20th century as a new era in art

Belief that old art forms could not fit modern reality; seen in Cubism and Futurism.

Tenets of modernism

Innovation, formal experimentation, abstraction, difficulty, and "making it new."

Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

1919 essay arguing poets must write with the literary past in mind and remain impersonal.

The "historical sense"

Eliot's idea that all literature exists together and each new work reshapes the tradition.

Poets and "personality"

Eliot's view that poets should erase personal feelings, rejecting Wordsworth's confessional style.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Eliot's dramatic monologue of a shy, indecisive modern man in an alienating city.

Allusion in "Prufrock"

Opens with a Dante Inferno quote, framing modern urban life as a kind of hell.

Prufrock and Hamlet

Prufrock claims "I am not Prince Hamlet"; he is a fumbling, minor antihero.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

1929 essay arguing women need financial independence and a private room to write.

Bohemianism and the Bloomsbury Group

Woolf's circle of London artists and intellectuals who rejected social conventions.

Woolf as "New Woman"

Embodied female independence, though wary of strident, conventional feminism.

Woolf's thesis: money and time

Argues women wrote less due to a lack of material conditions, not talent.

Room as a history of Englishwomen's literature

Traces how history ignored women and how female writers hid behind anonymity.

Imagining Shakespeare's sister

Woolf invents "Judith," showing how a gifted woman is blocked and ruined by society.

Postcolonial literature

Writing about the experience of colonialism, or using a postcolonial lens to re-read the canon.

Adichie, "The Danger of a Single Story"

TED talk arguing that single narratives strip dignity, while multiple stories restore humanity.

Adichie, "Checking Out"

Story of an illegal Nigerian man in London whose identity collapses into being "removed."

Zadie Smith, "Hanwell in Hell"

Epistolary story of two white WWII vets, exploring their blindness to difference.

Is "Hanwell" postcolonial literature?

Debated: it concerns white men, but deals with imperial war, trauma, and difference.

"British Literature" course as colonial legacy

The idea that the literary canon is a tool of power; defining "British" is political.