critics for prelims 3

Charlotte bronte - letter - reverence

claims she felt ‘in [her] heart a deep reverence for religion’

Maria Larmonaca - jane eyre - religious

views the novel as one of spiritual self discovery

Emily Greisinger - Bronte - religion

bronte was obsessed with religion and spirituality

T. J. Christine - Lowood

Lowood was based off of Bronte’s own experiences at the Clergy Daughter’s school

Maria Larmonica - evangelism and Jane refusing to marry St John

By refusing to marry St John, Jane rejects both women submitting to men and the importance of missionaries, defying evangelical principles as a whole

Robin Gilmour - victorian non conformist attitudes

Victorian non-conformist attitudes were inherently individualistic

Andrew Bennet - Jane Eyre - propensity

throughout the novel, Jane constantly tries to balance ‘propensity with principle’ (her emotional desires with what she thinks is morally correct)

Elaine Showalter - Jane Eyre - ending

Jane’s ending is complex because she is both more free (gains personal voice and agency) but her marriage ultimately absorbs much of her independence and subjugates her to traditional femininity

Tim Dolin - Jane Eyre and Villette

Like Jane Eyre… Lucy is torn by a contradictory need to be independent and mastered (comes in the form of love)

Sheridan Gilley - anti-catholic sentiment

anti-catholic sentiments brewed because ‘Protestantism was patriotism… popery was tyranny and Protestantism was liberty

Micael Clarke - Villette - Romantic love

the romantic love between Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel … is inseparable from the religious tension that keeps them always at odds

Heather Glen - Villette - isolation

Villette’s is a narrative of isolation. The voice that speaks at the end of the novel is that of one who survives in a disenchanted world

Ronald Thomas - Moonstone - detective

The Moonstone did in fact become the prototypical English Detective novel

Anne Marie Beller - sensation lit - otherness

Sensation literature is fascinated with otherness

Lilian Nayder - Collins - Empire

Mixture of critique and support Collins shows the empire in The Moonstone highlights Collins’ own ‘ambivalence’ towards empire and willingness to both defend and critique it

Carolyn Diver - Woman in White - illegitimate children

Collins emphasises the mental instability of illegitimate children to highlight the stability and sympathy for Laura, the legitimate child

Lynn Pyckett - Woman in white- gothic

WiW ‘domesticate the gothic and made use of the natural supernatural

Laurence Talairach-Vielmas - Woman in White - cardiac disease

Anne Catherick’s cardiac disease is symbolic of the secrets she hides

Gilbert and Gubar - The Yellow Wallpaper - madness

Madness is a language of protest when speech is denied

Paula Treichler - The Yellow Wallpaper - text

the wallpaper functions as a text which symbolises patriarchal discourse

robert shelton - The Time Machine - religion

The text transforms science into a form of religion

Nicholas Ruddick - The Time Machine - narrow mindedness

the novel presents an expose of the narrow-mindedness, complacency and scientific ignorance of supposedly well educated men in 1894

Shearer West - Fin De Sciele - overdeveloped

literature reflected and catalysed a sense of queasy excess and amorality - “the last throes of an overdeveloped civilisation on the verge of collapse

Michael Sayeau - late 19th century - sexuality

the end of the nineteenth century was marked by a preoccupation with what we might call the potentially disruptive everydayness of sexuality. Embroidered intricately within the “woman question” of the period

Charles Pettit - Tess of the d’Ubervilles - chastity

to victorian mortality … sexual chastity was an essential prerequisite for purity

nina auerbach - Tess of the d’Ubervilles - fallen woman

Tess is exempt from the shame and guilt of a fallen woman by her narrator BUT this does not save her from the natural fate

Jane Thomas - Tess of the d’Ubervilles - antagonistic

Hardy’s novels present society as antagonistic to the natural system of desire. This antagonistic relationship is what leads to the “hardy-esque tragic outcome”

G. K. Chesterton - Lear - father

Lear is the father of nonsense

G. K. Chesterton - nonsense - faith

The well-meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of thongs has decided that ‘faith is nonsense’ does not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back to hi in the form that nonsense is faith

Martin Dubois - nonsense - common

While nonsense came into its own in the Victorian period, it was not out on its own in the literary culture of the time - parody, nursery rhymes and baby talk

Martin Dubois - Carroll’s nonsense - parodic

Carrols nonsense is also parodic in the broader sense that it mocks social and institutional conventions and attitudes

Martin Dubois - Lear’s limericks - plot

lear’s limericks have fun with our desire to see a story go somewhere

James Williams - lear - children and adults

Lear’s way of playing the fool in poetry is to write for children, being a grown up who takes the side of the children, playing up for laughs the grown ups who were his patrons, but caught preposterously between the two groups

Sarah Grand - The New Woman - definition

a woman who recognised the issues with her domestic position and chose to remedy through independent search for radical change - a revision to the institute to marriage

Seamus Perry - Refrain in Mariana

the refrain in mariana is turned into a mounting nightmare of incapacity

Herbert Tucker - Tennyson - formative event

this blunt early encounter with the random hand of death, brutally close yet a continent away, was the formative event of tennyson’s maturity

Seamus Perry - Tennyson - indecisiveness

Tennyson’s poetry often dwells contrarily on indecisiveness and decisions deferred lingeringly, uneasingly

Seamus Perry - Tennyson - echoes

Echoes catch a tennysonian genius so comprehensively because they embody both reiteration (an echo repeats its original) and changefulness (an echo decays away)

Seamus Perry - Tennyson - politics

Tennyson’s politics revolve around an indecisiveness about change → stagnation viewed as more dangerous than change but sudden change means a house on sand

Seamus Perry - Tennyson - death

tennyson imagines death as a life change like the ones he has experienced

henry james - tennyson

Tennyson was not Tennysonian

Tucker - Tennyson - aftermath

Tennyson’s poetry is the poetry of aftermath