The Victorian Age
The Victorian Age (1837-1901)
The Victorian Age Progress, Expansion, mobility
The Victorian Age Mattew Arnold “the dialogue of the mind with itself
The Victorian Age A Christmas Carol (1843) Charles Dickens
The Victorian Age The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) Robert Louis Stevenson
The Victorian Age Dracula (1897) Bram Stoker
The Victorian Age Science, technology and innovation
The Victorian Age Scientific Activity: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859) Natural selection Survival of the fittest
The Victorian Age H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895); The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) C. Dickens, Great Expectations (1860-1861) Thomas Henry Huxley, On the Physical Basis of Life (1868). “there is some one kind of matter which is common to all living beings, and that their endless diversities are bound together by a physical, as well as an ideal, unity”
The Victorian Age Thomas Henry Huxley, “The Two Cultures Debate” (1880’s): T.H. Huxley, Science and Education (1883) M. Arnold, Discourses in America (1885)
The Victorian Age Herbert Spenser, The Social Organism (1860) Social Darwinism
The Victorian Age The Great Exhibition (1851) Crystal Palace
The Victorian Age Railway, telegraph and telephone
The Victorian Age Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey. The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century Ejzenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and the Film today” (1944) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts1x6uADFtM
The Victorian Age Victorian Imperialism Distinction between Imperialism and Colonialism
The Victorian Age Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks Gayatri Spivak, Can Subaltern Speak? Edward Said, Orientalism; Culture and Imperialism
The Victorian Age Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902) “wanderers on a prehistoric earth”
The Victorian Age Triple-decker volume
The Victorian Age Circulating Libraries
The Victorian Age Serialization
The Victorian Age Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836-7)
The Victorian Age
The Victorian Age Charlotte Brontë, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens ‘Silver fork novels’ (1820 and 1845) William Hazlitt in 1827 Newgate novels
The Victorian Age Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849) Elisabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848) Hungry Forties (1840’s) –famine (Ireland) misery (Britain) “I bethought me how deep might be the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town in which I resided” Elisabeth Gaskell preface to Mary Barton
The Victorian Age Romance vs Novel Characters Romance 1- They are very important members of the society 2- They do magical/spiritual or heroic tasks that are impossible to normal people. 3- They are normally one-dimensional characters that stay the same throughout the story. Novel 1- They are middle class characters 2- They do daily chores 3- Sometimes they might evolve, grow. Setting 1- The setting is often vague, or discarded on the whole. 2- If mentioned, the setting is something magnificent. 3 Castles, Magical and mysterious places Novel 1- It is a very detailed setting 2- It is normally something humble. 3- It is a real place and if not then it sounds like it is.
The Victorian Age Period/Time Romance 1- There is no or a vague sense of time. 2- Does not necessarily stick to chronological order Novel . 1- Time Continuum should either be measured by a clock or calendar. 2- It has to be in chronological order. Plot 1- The plot in itself was like in a dream, smooth unrelated movements with no climax. Novel 1- It had a specific plot with a certain climax. Language 1- The Romances were aimed at the upper class readers 2- There were standard symbolisms. 1- Since it was aimed at middle class readers, the language was simple 2- There was no symbolism or metaphors or similes 3- It was denotative rather than connotative
The Victorian Age Tone Romance 1- One singular type of tone throughout the romance 2- Uses emotions that are Ideal. Novel 1- The tone varies depending on the genre of the Novel 2- Remains realistic. 3- Uses emotions that are realistic but varies depending on situations and different characters
The Victorian Age Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957) " The romancer does not attempt to create “real people” so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes. It is in the romance that we find Jung’s libido, anima, and shadow reflected in the hero, heroine, and villain respectively. That is why romance so often radiates a glow of subjective intensity that the novel lacks, and why a suggestion of allegory is constantly creeping in around its fringes. Certain elements of character are released in the romance which make it naturally a more revolutionary form than the novel. The novelist deals with personality, with characters wearing their personae or social masks. He needs the framework of a stable society, and many of our best novelists have been conventional to the verge of fussiness. The romancer deals with individuality, with characters in vacuo idealized by revery, and, however conservative he may be, something nihilistic and untamable is likely to keep breaking out of his pages. (AC, 304–5)
The Victorian Age Archetypal literary criticism: myths and archetypes (from the Greek archē, or beginning, and typos, or imprint) Social anthropology (with Frazer and his The Golden Bough) and psychoanalysis. Carl Gustav Jung: myths are the “culturally elaborated representations of the contents of the deepest recess of the human psyche: the world of the archetypes”.
The Victorian Age JUNG listed four main forms of archetypes: The Shadow The Anima The Animus The Self
The Victorian Age “usually prefers his material in a plastic, or roughly contemporary state, and feels cramped by a fixed historical pattern” (AC, 306). “most” ‘historical novels’ are romances” (AC, 307).
The Victorian Age