19th Century literature (authors)

William Blake

1757-1827
British Romantic poetry
poet, painter, engraver
"infernal method"
french revolution supporter
personal mythilogy (bible)

"songs of innocence" (The Lamb)
"songs of experience" (The Tyger, London)

Anna Laetitia Barbauld

1743-1825
British Romantic poetry
dissenter, teacher, writer, editor
children's literature
poetry: nature, personal meditations, self-awareness, transformation
political pamphlets and essays
celebrity in own lifetime
late arrival in the canon ("Britain's forgotten poet")

"The rights of Woman"

William Wordsworth

1770-1850
British Romantic poetry
"lake poet"
sister Dorothy and Samuel taylor coleridge
poet laureate (1843-50)
"Lyrical Ballads: preface"
"lines written in Early Spring"
"Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey"
"Ode: Intimations of immortality"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1772-1834
British Romantic Poetry
lake poet
"lyrical ballads" (The rime of the ancient mariner)
Biographia Literaria (autobiography, own views on poetry)
troubled life, troubled mind

"dejection: an ode"
"Kubla Kahn"

Lord Byron

1788-1824
British Romantic poetry (the gothic)
George Gordon
celebrity writer
travel, adventure, passion, exoticism, sensation
aristocrat
"byronic hero"

"Childe Harold's pilgrimage"
"So, we'll go no more a roving"

John Keats

1795-1821
British Romantic poetry (the gothic)
extreme emotion, mortality, human suffering, darkness
relation inner and outer world
very negative reviews
early death

"La Belle dame sans merci"
"Ode to a nightingale"

Percy Byssche Shelley

1792-1822
British Romantic Poetry (the gothic)
radical ideas
short, passionate, tragic life
poetry for social change

"to wordsworth"
"to a skylark"
"a defence of poetry"
"mutability"

Mary Shelley

1797-1851
British Romantic poetry (the gothic)
doughter, wife, mother, author
lake Geneva
"the year without summer" (1816)
gothic novel = popular genre

Jane Austen

1775-1817
The romantic novel
romantic novels/psychological realism/commedies of manner/sentimental realism
South of England, lower gentry (rural professional middle class
six novels published as "a Lady"
juvenilia (humour, wit and sarcasm, badly behaving girls, action without inner life)

"love and friendship"

Charles Dickens

1812-1870
realist novel
journalist, self-made man
magazines (Household Works, All the Year round)
literary celebrity
everyday life in London
"ordinary characters" (or caricatures?)
social problems
ethical realism, with comical and symbolic aspects

"Hard Times"

George Eliot

1819-1880
Realist Novel
Mary Anne Evans
George Henry Lewes
journalism, translations, non-fiction
ethics and human psychology
secular perspective
rural life in province towns

"Middlemarch"

Elizabeth B. Browning

1806-1861
Victorian Poetry
one of the most popular poets in the 19th century, but rejected later
country life, London, Florence
married Robert Browning
erudition, experiment and innovation
social issues, women, abolitionism, italian risorgimento = literature = tool for social protest

"the cry of the children"

Christina Rossetti

Victorian Poetry
Italian family in London
Pre-Raphaelites (sincerity, beauty, symbolism, revival medieval art)
formal experimentation
gender consciousness
stern religious vision
charity work (house for fallen women)

"goblin market"

Gerard Manley Hopkins

1844-1889
Victorian Poetry
1st publication 29 years after death
"modern" poet: influence 20th C
Jesuit priest (Catholicism)
religious poetry, celebrating the divine & nature (wonders of God's creation)
formal experimentation
inscape and instress

"the windhover"

Edgar Allan Poe

1809-1840
American Romanticism
tortured genius (short, tumultous life, alcoholism, depression, death)
strong desire to be a writer -> constant financial difficulties
autonomy of literature
struggling writer, but influential

"the Raven"
"the fall of house Usher"

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1803-1882
American Romanticism
"the sage of concord"
essayist, poet, philosopher, charismatic lecturer
founder of the "transcendental club"
pivotal publication: "nature"

"nature"

Henry David Thoreau

1817-1862
American Romanticism
writer, philosopher, naturalist
Concord, Massachusetts
enduring legacy
self-reliance, non-comformism, environmentalism, rugged individualism

"civil Disobedience"
"Walden"

Herman Melville

1819-1891
American Romanticism
New York - and Pittsfield, Massachusetts
left school at twelve, became sailor at fourteen
financial instability; bank clerk, teacher, sailor, cust inspector

"Bartleby, the scrivener"

Nathaniel Hawthorne

1804-1864
Romance (transcendentalism)
Worked at Salem Custom House
Massachusetts
tragic, dark, existential dimension
deliberate ambiguity
puritans: national history, moral and spiritual complexity, sin, guilt, moral corruption, family history: Salem, John Hathorne

"The Scarlet Letter"

Frederick Douglass

1818-1895
American Renaissance, Literature of Slavery
born into slavery, escaped in 1838
bought his freedom in Great Britain
writer, orator, politician, diplomat, publisher
African Americans "must be our own representatives and advocates"
human rights: 1848 Seneca Falls: suffragette convention

"Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass"

Walt Whitman

1819-1892
American Renaissance
poet, carpenter, newspaperman, editor, teacher
as a poet, he claims to speak for all Americans
transcendentalism, egalistarianism, individualism
subject matter: daily life, democracy, America, controversial content (he gay)
style: free verse, sensuous language, rich vocabulary, metaphors, "catalogues", grammatical experiments

"Leaves of Grass (Song of Myself)"
"Beat! Beat! Drums!"
"the wound-dresser"
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

Emily Dickinson

1830-1886
American renaissance
Amherst, Massachusetts
posthumous publication of 1800 poems, with great significance for modern poetry
solitary recluse, but part of larger world
personal and artistic autonomy
style: rebellious, formal experimentation
influence: British poets, transcendentalism
subject matter: full range of human emotions and experience, religious skepticism, nature, death

"There's a certain slant of light"
"because I could not stop for Death"

Mark Twain

1835-1910
American Realism
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Missouri
travelled widely
"father of American literature"
humorist, lecturer, journalist, travel writer, popular author; critical of American values and ideals

"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"
"The adventures of Huckleberry FInn"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1860-1935
American Realism
public speaker, poet, publisher, author, sociologist
short stories
non-fiction
feminist "world-server" with progressive ideas: women's economic independence, communal living, public kitchens, gender fluidity, right to die
utopian science fiction novel "herland"
female community, parthenogenesis, eugenics (racism)

"The Yellow Wallpaper"