Novel Lec 1

The Victorian Novel

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  • The Victorian Era (1837-1901) characterized by increase in education, literacy, and questioning of religion and politics

    • Increase in literacy rate led to literature becoming a prevalent social pastime

    • Writers reacted to the negative outcomes of the Industrial Revolution

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  • Victorian society was hierarchically structured, but the rise of the middle class was a significant characteristic

  • Publications like Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto and Darwin's Origin of Species opened up political and religious controversy

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  • Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto (1848) aimed to remove monarchial regimes and create nation states

  • Manifesto analyzed conflicts between social classes, calling for the overthrow of existing social conditions

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  • Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) challenged and threatened the Church of England

  • Darwin proposed the concept of natural selection and evolution through generations

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  • The Victorian era marked a turn from Romantic idealism to a more empirical worldview

  • Industrialization and technological discovery led to writers addressing the troubles of an industrialized society

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  • The novel as a genre was used to unite people, develop a sense of Englishness, and support imperialist discourse

  • The popularity of the novel grew due to its appeal to the reading public and its entertaining nature

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  • The novel focused on individual experience and truth, as opposed to earlier forms of literature

  • Realism became a main criterion of the novel form

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  • The rise of the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries was related to changes in English society, such as the rise of the middle class and changes in the reading public

  • The novel was used to achieve ideological control, embody class conflicts, and reflect society's preoccupations

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  • The genre of the novel reached its peak in the Victorian Age and questioned the relationship between art and reality

  • The Puritan conception of the dignity of labor influenced the novel's premise that daily life is a proper subject of literature

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  • Realism is a literary movement that aims to depict reality as it actually occurs, without idealization or abstraction

  • It represents how things really are and focuses on facts and practicality rather than imagination or vision

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  • The texts to focus on are Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto

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  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte is another text to focus on

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  • The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson