British Literature Unit 4: Chapter 4 Notes

the belief that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God

Agnosticism

coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in reference to Darwin’s ideas and the philosophy of naturalism 

Herbert Spencer

turned to a belief in inner goodness as a substitute for God. He also promoted education and culture as a means to develop that goodness

Matthew Arnold

 a naturalistic writer, created many characters who were forced to make horrible decisions that led to tragedy

Thomas Hardy

pictures God (if there is a God), nature, and society as uncaring toward individuals, humans are animals at the mercy of forces more powerful than they are

Literary Naturalism

a philosophy that venerates art for art’s sake. Art needs no moral value or purpose other than its own beauty. (A philosophy popularized by Keats)

Aestheticism

Two playwrights of the age known for espousing aestheticism?

George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. 

wrote literature about the empire and imperialism 

Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad

• Social consciousness marked both his prose and his poetry 

• Considered one of the best writers of the Victorian era 

• Worked as a government school inspector, putting him into contact with mostly middle class people 

• Advocated for a life of beauty and of the mind

Matthew Arnold

• Author is Matthew Arnold 

• The atmosphere (the mood or emotion pervading a work, especially when it is enhanced by a work’s setting) is important to the theme 

• The setting of the poem is immediately clear as the speaker observed the Strait of Dover: on one side stand the white cliffs and twenty miles on the other side are the lights of Calais

• The speaker uses the settings to describe his feelings. 

• Compare the sea to his faith. 

• “We are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night” - the world is full of violence so he cannot find hope, peace, or joy except in the one he loves.

Dover Beach 

• Fictionalized his hometown of Dorset as Wessex 

• A transitional figure in the movement from the Victorian era to the modern era 

• Last novel, Jude the Obscure, was so dark and controversial that is essentially ended his career as a novelist 

• Influenced great modern poets such as Robert Frost and W.H. Auden 

• Because Hardy was a naturalist, his poems tend to have a darker, pessimistic tone. Despite this, there is some ambiguity to his poetry, leaving room for positive interpretation of his themes and imagery.

Thomas Hardy

• Author is Thomas Hardy 

• Setting is in winter 

• He is comparing the hope of the darkling thrush’s song to the bleak landscape 

• “An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, in blast-buffled plume, had chosen thus to fling his soul upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings of such ecstatic sound was written on terrestrial things afar or nigh around.”

The Darkling Thrush

• Converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest 

• Poetry sought to communicate the essential, specifically created nature of a thing, purposefully designed for the glory of God. 

• Invented sprung rhythm. 

• Also known for playfulness with words, his creation of new and vivid vocabulary, and his invention of the curtal sonnet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

built on strong stresses; rhythm seems to quickly spring over the lesser stresses to reach the next strong one, tending to result in compact lines 

Sprung rhythm

shortens the Italian sonnet’s octave and sestet to 6 and 4.5 lines respectively

Curtal Sonnet

• Author is Gerard Manley Hopkins 

• Praising nature and the creator who made nature 

Pied Beauty

• Author is Gerard Manley Hopkins

• Celebrating the creator for the cycle of nature to renew itself 

• “And for all this, nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things; and though the last lights off the black West went oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—” 

God’s Grandeur

• Involved in the aestheticism movement 

• Emphasized the vale of beauty in art, frequently above any moral, politics, or social message 

• Known best for his play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) 

• Imprisoned in 1895 for two years for of hard labor and never fully recovered from the experience before passing in 1900 due to meningitis

Oscar Wilde

a play that satirizes the social customs (the morals and manners) of a sophisticated society

Comedy of Manners

• Author is Oscar Wilde 

• The irony of the play is when Jack makes his name Ernest instead of his name “Jack” because Gwendolyn wants his name to be “Ernest”. To be Earnest means to be honest except Jack is being the opposite of honest. 

• “To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether handless or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that remind one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.” 

• “I would strongly advise you, Mr. Worthing, to try and acquire some relations as soon as possible, and to make a definite effort to produce at any rate one parent, or either sex, before the season is quite over.” 

The Importance of Being Earnest