Engelse Literatuur vanaf: Victorian Period

The Victorian Period (1830-1900)
1837 > Queen Victoria > throne
1800 > population was 10 mln
1900 > population was 37 mln

Characteristics of the Victorian Period:
- Gouverment:
- You hat to work very hard
- Let people decide, no interference
- There was a crisis in faith, because of the industrial revolution, Darwin and the hard work
- Industrial revolution & Grow of English empire
- Cheap labor > especially children
- Children had to work as/in Chimney sweapers (Mary Poppins) Cole mines.

- They had to work 16h a day.
- 1870 > Children had to go to school.
- People traveled to lots of countries
- > Start of the Penny Post (buy a stamp & write a letter)
- 1854 > 1856 – Crimean War
- Florence nightingale became a nurse
- Literature was very important (no radio or tv), novel became very important.
- Taboo on everything with the body (sex, toilets, illness)
- 3 M’s were the subjects of most novels
- Money
- Mariage
- Manors (and sometimes morals)

Poetry:
- Much feeling, often of the sentimental kind.
- Little interest in the real world.
- The poets ar content to create atmospheres of longing and regret, of noble defeat and heroically borne unhappiness.
- Nothing is sharp and clear in the poems, everything is hazy and slightly unreal.
- Return to medieval romances > Lady of Shalott


Novels:
- The Victorian novel begin with the novels of Jane Austen.
- The novels handled of the real world and its workings.
- At the end of the century the novel began to lose its dominant position. The theatre made it’s comeback. (this was the end of the Victorian period.)

The lady of Shalott - Tennyson
- It brings to mind: authorian > King arthur
- It isn’t one of the original stories, because he made it up himself.
- It’s invented by Tennyson

The lady of Shallott – Stencil 1
1. She lives in a castle surrounded by big walls. She’s forbidden to look through the window, she only sees the outside world through her mirror.
2. She realizes there’s an outside world as well.  l. 70 & l. 106
3. He is pictured handsome, brave, shining with color.  l. 78
4. He lives in the reality and is free. She is always inside, has a lonely life, contaplation (..) and she is living in a dream world.
5. She paints her name on a boat, lies on it, goes to Camelot, when she arrives there, she’s dead.

6. a- Stillness (grey & stone) <-> movement (waves & breezes)
b- Slow heavy barges <-> light swifty swelops
c- morning <-> night
d- prisoner; web <-> freedom
e- bright & sunny weather <-> storm
f- mary song <-> sad song
7. When the curse comes upon her the nature becomes stormy.
8. L. 10, 19, 124 & 142  it creates a mood of sadness, willows represent dead.
9. Nature (outside, sir lancelot) & magic mirror (weaving an imgae in a web = art)
10. The web and mirror are destroyed when she is faced by reality.
11. Arthurian because lancelot and Camelot are important.
- Romantic sotry of medieval period
- About the position of women
- Division between art and reality

Jane Austen (1775 - 1817)
- The most important theme was the life of the landed gentry and of people connected with the Church in rural England.

- She never used politics and battles in her novels.
- She plays an important role in the feminism:
- The last 3 decades feminism tend to regard Jane Austen as one of the first professional women of letters, who treasured her financial & intellectual independence in a society which was still very much dominated by men.
- Pride and Prejudice:
- Novel of manners = She develops her characters in a specific social environment. They live by an excepted social code. It gives a picture of how people behave, or ought to behave in their own special circle.
- Flat-round characters
- If you can describe a character in 1 word
- Plot: Affaire/relationship of:
1. Darcy & Elizabeth
2. Jane & Bingly
3. Wickham & Lydia
- Theme = marriage

Pride & Prejudice – Movie
1. What is important when you want to turn a book into a film?
- He wrote the conversations down in a script.
2. The advantage of tv/film over a novel?
- Images tell things faster. When you write something down in 20 pages, you can put it in 3 minutes of film.
3. What problems did the actors face?
- The old-fashioned language.

4. What is the role of the dance in the film?
- It’s very important for the film. It’s a reflection of the relationship of Mr Darcy and Elizabeth.

Pride & Prejudice – Stencil 2
1. Explain the irony in the first sentence of the book. (p. 77)
- Jane Austen didn’t need a man, so she didn’t live according that rule.
2. How does Charlott Lucas’ case illustrates the state of women in the 18th century? (p. 106)
- She marries for money, like lots of women did.
3. How do Mr & Mrs Bennet rate as parents (what kind of parents were they)?
- They don’t really have the same ideas.
4. Can you explain what Jane Austen thought of education?
- She thought it was important, because lots of the important characters read a lot.

Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870)
- Often seen as the greatest Victorian novelist.
- He used his own experiences in his novels.
- David Copperfield:
- Lots of biographic parts

- In stolement
- 800 pages
- Characterization:
- Flat & round characters are important
- Good are rewarded
- Bad are punished
- Theme & genre:
- Bildungsroman = it’s a story of a young man on his pilgrim voyage to marriage and the lessons he has to learn by being stupid.
- Gothic elements = it’s as if he is pleased by what he hears.
- Point of view to women:
- Mother = beautiful & Doll like, but can’t make right decisions
- Peggotty = unglamorous, she is more the real mother
- It has a good ending

David Copperfield – Charles Dickens - Stencil 3
1. Crocodile is a vegetable  she doesn’t really listen

2. No, not according to his mother. He considers her of another school of beauty, because he is still a child. She is fat (l.52) and red faced (l. 29).
3. She wasn’t married herself. She doesn’t want to speak bad about his mother
4. He notices her lack of interest & she wants to talk about something else.
5. Because his mother kisses him, he is jealous and it’s a compliment for his mother.
6. He means that Davids mother is worthy of devotion and he is devoted to her.
7. She is happy and in love.
8. L. 3, 75 & 98

W.M. Tackeray (1811 – 1863)
- He belonged to the upper middle class
- He studied law, but ended up in journalism.
- He wrote about life as it was, without heroes.
- He had a double idea about women:
- Backy Sharp – Orphan, pennyless, wants to improve her position, she’ll do anything.
- Amilia Sedly – heart without intellect, calm, good girl.
- Vanity Fair(1847): > Stencil 4
- Why the title Vanity Fair?
- He wanted to disproof the middle class idea, that mean is innately good (men=born good). He said that a novel has to be wicked and he wanted to leave everybody unsatisfied and unhappy.

- Intrusive narrator = he comments his own work (l.5 van onderen).
- He asks us our opinion.
- Mermaid = symbol of evil seductiveness.
- Seductives men.

Comparation: Dickens & Thackery:
- Both humorous
- Both opserve the social class in which they were born
- Both realists
- Characters:
- Dickens: flat
- Thackery: round > satire was important
- Thackery > intellectual joyment
- Dickens > sensitive, romantic

Charlotte Brontë (1816 – 1855)
- 1820 her mother died.
- Patrick Brontë was her father, he was a clergyman.
- Elisabeth Branwell was her ant.
- She helped raising the children.
- She told stories with hell, doom and eternal punishment (= gothic elements)
- Tabitha was her servant

- She told stories with fairytale elements.
- Jane Eyre
- Autobiographical
 She was also educated at home
 She was an orphan
- Wish fulfilment
 The man she fancies is going to be her husband.
- Marriage = intellectual companionship
- Round Characters
 Jane = very strong
• Mixture of passion and intelligence
 Mr Rochester
• Bionic hero
• Young
• Noble
• Wealthy
• Sexually attractive
• Unhappy love affaire
- She says: ‘Reader I married him.’
 Narration
- It contains gothic elements
 Rochester character & past:
 He was already married
 Madness of his wife
• Bertha was the wife of Rochester
 The call: “Jane, Jane”

• Rochester called Jane when he was wounded by Bertha in the fire. Jane heard him (she was very far away) and came to him.
 Demonic laughter = the laughter of Bertha
- Jane was a governess (all orphans were thought to be governesses). She thought the daughter of Rochester. Rochester and Jane fell in love and Jane marries him, but he was already married to Bertha. Jane goes away, but Bertha burns the house.
 Wide Sargasso Sea
• Writing back about Bertha.
o Book about a person in a famous book, but who isn’t a head character.

George Eliot (1819 – 1890)
- Her real name was Mary Ann Evans
- Strong independent woman
- Grew up in Warwickshire, in an orthodox Christian environment.
- She never disliked her background
- She often gave sympathetic portraits of clergymen in her novels
- She emphasizes Christian virtues as a strong sense of duty and an equally strong sense of morality.
- In 1849 she moved to London
- She became the assistant editor of a literary magazine.
- In 1854 she moved in with a married man, who lived separate from his wife.

- This was a huge scandal in the Victorian period.

Lord Tennyson (1880 – 1892)
- He was a laureate (= Hofdichter)
- He had lost his faith, because he lost a dear friend of him.
- Crossing bar (a poem of him)
- Pilot = god (whe brings him back home)
 So after 20 years he got his faith back.
- The charge of the light brigade.

Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888)
- Poet
- Wanted to improve the schools
- His poetry is his comfort
- Dover beach
- Someone is present, but isn’t really at the same time.
 Dramatic monologue = long speech by a person who need not the be the poet. (we call this a persona) We know of the listeners presence and what they say from clues in the discourse (conversation) of the speaker.

Robert Browning (1812 – 1889)
- Poet

- Was not really interested in feeling and sentiment, the thoughts of people were more interesting.
- He lets people present themselves with commentary.
- He was an intellectual poet and his language was not very easy. But he became really popular.

My last Duchess – Robert Browning (1812 – 1889)
1. The whole poem is about the painting of the duchess, with the painting he shows what he had and he was not happy with her, so he wants a new wife.
2. She liked the compliments of other men, but the duke didn’t like these compliments.
- He thinks she was a fool (l. 19 – 20)
3. I do not like the compliments, he is a man of action (l. 35)
4. The jewellery he gave and his name (which he also gave). She didn’t flatter his ego.
5. He is a man of few words. He would think it a degradation to reason (talk) with her.
6. She refused to be lessened by him (l. 40 – 41)
7. He had her killed
8. It ends with a statue and it begins with a painting. These two things are both art. We call this circulair.
9. He’s selfish & cruel(l. 13, 14, 43-47), arrogant, proud(l. 11, 25, 33-35, 42 & 43), big ego, greedy(l. 50-51). He despises everybody who is not of a Nobel birth(l. 19, 20, 27, 42 & 43). He claims to be an art lover and a polished gentleman(beginning & end).

10. He is making clear he wants an obedient woman and he wants someone who is respectfull.

The Pre-Raphaelites
- Want to go back to the time before Raphael.
- They turned away completely from the world of rapidly expanding industries and overcrowded cities in which they lived.
- Dante Gabriel Rosseti (1828 – 1882)
- Was a painter and a poet
- When his wife died (probably suicide) he buried the manuscripts of his poems with her. He later changed his mind and dug them up again.
- Details in his work belonged to an unreal, dream-like world. A world of exaggerated sentiment that is presented in very old-fashioned language.
- Christina Rosseti (1830 – 1894)
- Sister of Dante
- Fascinated by sadness and death (even more than her brother).
- Devoted Christian.
- William Morris (1834 – 1896)
- Painter and poet
- Art Nouveau comes from this style

G.M. Hopkins (1844 – 1889)
- 2 influences
- Victorian influence

 He had a difficult relationship with god. He didn’t doubt, but felt humble.
- Modern influence
 Uses the sounds and words with a different meaning.
- Poems came out in 1919, after his dead.
- Spring and Fall
- Sad > the girl is sad because someone died
- Theme = death

Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928)
- His work was about: faith, chance and hap.
- His novels end bad, but the readers didn’t like it anymore, so he turned to poetry.
- Are you digging on my grave? – Stencil 9
- The Convergence of the twain – Stencil 9

Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)
- Background:
- Education  protestant boarding school
- Married Constance Lloyd in 1884
- Had an affair with Ross (homosexual).
- Work:

- He wrote novels and plays
 They are about his life and experiences
- In what way his privatelife influenced his writing career:
- His wife left him and he couldn’t see his children because he was in prison. After he got free he went to Paris.
- They started to accuse him and wanted to stop publishing his books.

G.B. Shaw (1856 – 1950)
- Born and raised in Dublin and left for England when he was young
- His plays are very witty and entertaining, but have little emotional depth.
- Pygmalion.
o Pygmalion is a king of Cyrus who fell in love with his own statue, it comes to life.
o This text is about a girl who is thought proper English.

Comparation: Oscar Wilde & G.B. Shaw:
- Wilde:
o Is known for his different expressions
o Was known for his comedy of manners (making fun of the higher class)
- Shaw:
o Spelling and pronunciation
o Simplification of punctionation and spelling


American Literature (1620-1914)
Differences between (around 1900):
American literature
- Not interested in relationships
- One man against the cosmos
o Moby Dick
- Theme:
o Buddy (friend)
 Of mice & men – huckleberry finn
- Place:
o Great outdoors
- Author:
o Innovative authors, each one was differend and experimenting
-->New and innovative<--

British literature
- Focussed on relationships
- Class system, finding ones proper place.
- Theme:
o Carreer/succes
o Morels & Manners
• David Copperfield
- Place:
o Parlours (living room)
- Author:
o Conventional
-->Boring<--

Before 1850
- Sermonize (preken)

- Dairies, journals & letters
- Political writings
o Declaration of independence

J.F. Cooper (1789-1851)
- His characters went to the west
- Friendship between a white man & an Indian
- Idealization of the American wilderness
o Indians were: strong, graceful and noble.
o If they were otherwise, it was because of the white people.
- Against the westward movement of the American civilization.
o Worried about the destruction of the natural environment
- Anti-democratic

W. Irving (1783 – 1859)
- History of New York (1809)
o Comical chronicle of Nieuw Amsterdam
o Indirect attack to Thomas Jefferson (the president)
- The sketch book (1819)
o Sketches of English life

 For his American readers
o And sketches of American life
 For his English readers
- The legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle
o About a man who falls asleep for 20 years
o The serene life in the Dutch villages was interrupted by the aggressive, materialistic and uscrupulous Yankees.

E.A. Poe (1809 – 1849)
- He married his cousin in 1835, who died in 1848
o Comes back in his literature.
- He went to military school but was kicked out because of his gambeling.
- First American:
o Critic
o Detective stories
o Horror stories
o Science fiction
- Invented short stories as a genre.
- The Raven

R.W. Emerson (1803 – 1888)
- Believed that you can’t trust anyone, but yourself
- Self reliance
- Individualism
o He lived in the wood
- If a law is morally wrong, you should not have to abbay it

o He didn’t believe in the Mexican-amarican war, so he didn’t pay taxes  beginning of the civil disobedience.
- Preached by Ghandy & M.L. King

H.D. Thoreau (1817 – 1862)
- Took the extreme individualism of Emerson the its limit.
- He built a log cabin (blokhut) and lived here all by himself, relying completely on his own inner voice.
W. Whitman (1812 – 1892)
- Journalist
- Schoolmaster (weren’t payed)
- Nurse
- Carpenter
- Openly homosexual
- 3 themes:
o Great self (wrote about himself)
o Civil war (1860 – 1865)
o Philosophical
- Free verse = no end rhyme, no rhythm and irregular length of the sentences.

N. Hawthorne (1804 – 1864)
- Writer of the first American novel (1850)
o Scarlet letter = historical novel
 Reference to the Salem witch trails
 Theme = guilt (open <-> closed way)
 About a woman who gets a child while her husband is in England (so it is from someone else). When her husband arrives, he is furious and seeks out the lover of his woman. The lover is saved, because he publically confesses his sins (but he dies in the end of the book) and the husband becomes obsessed by his need to revenge so he becomes totally inhumain and he dies spiritually.

- Obsessed with sin
- He was friends with Herman Melville

H. Melville (1819 – 1891)
- His father died when he was 12, so he had to go working.
- He became a whaler and jumped of a ship to stay a full month on an island with cannibals, and got picked up by another whaler.
- Moby Dick – Stencil 14
o Writing about the struggle between good and evil

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)
- Writer of: the adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

English literature (1900-1939)
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
- Representative of post-colonisation style
- Polish (polen) – Russian – English
- Narrator agent or dramatize rnarratore
o Not a main character or writer telling the story, but an unimportant person.
- 3 important elements:
o Man y of his books contain elements of the evil consequences of colonialism and exploitation and the evil within an individual.
o The heroes fight a bitter struggle against their environment and their own weakness.

o His books are very pessimistic. It is impossible to mix races.
- Conrad uses a German name (Kurz).
o He accuses Germany of the colonisation

R. Kipling (1865 – 1936)
- Wrote Jungle books
- & the man who would be king.
o Is about getting native.
- First author to get a Nobel prize (1907)

The War poets
- During the first WW.
- Influences:
o Patriotic (first poems)
 Great to be killed for you country.
 Ex: The Soldier (p. 121)
o Despair, pity and compassion (later)
 They saw the fighting wasn’t that nice.

D.H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930)
- Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover was forbidden to be sold in Britain because it was pornographic(until 1960).

Bloomsbury Group

- The literary centre was formed by:
o Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941)
 Sister of Venessa Bell (also member of the BG)
 Was involved with Vita Sackville-West, the wife of Harold Nicolson (writer and diplomat).
• She used this in her novel
 She also wrote about the position of women
• A Room of One’s Own & Three Guineas
 Mrs Delloway
• 250 pages about 1 day of her life.
• The hourse = the film about the book
 She commited suicide
o E.M. Forster (1879 – 1970)
 Wrote about homosexuality
• Maurice
- The attitudes of the group’s members to: homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality and free love attracted lots of public attention.

W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1939)
- 3 different influences
o Myths and legends of Ireland
 Old keltic mythology (±200 n.Chr.)

o Maud Gonne, a woman he loved for many years
 She was an Irish revolutionairy
 She married another man
• because of this he got a less romantic view of life and love
o Georgie Hyde-Lees, his wife
 Was a psychicmedium
 She could write in a trans  automatic writing
• He started writing about supernatural, mystic and occult (verborgene)

James Joyce (1882 – 1941)
- The stream of consciousness writers
- Lived in Dublin
- He went away from Ireland to live in Paris (1902)
o He came back to his mother’s deathbed, but went back to Paris to never come back.
- He kept writing about Dublin, and because of that he is a very important Irish writer, who is still very famous in Ireland.

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
- American who came to Europe at the time of the war(1927).

o He lived in London
- Wrote poems and plays
- Friends with Pound > influenced by Pound.
- Studied classical languages, philosophy, literature & Sanskrit at Harvard > influenced him
o All these elements were used in the poem the waste land.
- The Waste Land > most famous poem
o Written in 1922
o He wanted to show that all the inhabitants although physically alive were spiritually dead because of the war.
o Wants to show the disillusionment and disgust after the 1st WW
o Free verse  wanted to show it as normal speech
o 2 themes:
 Death & rebirth
 Different sexual encounters who are meaningless and lack of love and feeling.
o It ends hopefully

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
- American who lived in London
o Than went to Paris, and settled in Italy.

- He translated poems and wrote essays about them.
- He also wrote poems himself, in which he incorporated quotations from earlier authors.
- He acted as literary adviser to many other poets (for example Eliot)
- Imagism  present poetic images as simply and directly as possible. Relation between the images had to be provided by the reader, not the poem.
- Bradcasted for Italy during the second world war.  imprisoned by the Americans

Post-war English literature
Background:
- The absurd applies to charrat plose (?? kon het niet lezen..) which have in common the sense that the human condition is essentially absurd and this condition can be adequately represented only in works of literature that are themselves absurd.
- Influences:
o World War 1
o The experience of Nazi totalitarianism & mass extermination
o The threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb
o The progressive devastation of ht enatural environment
o The ominous fact of overpopulation

o Treat of starvation
- Human beings are seen as isolated existents who are cast into an alien universe that possesses no value or meaning.
o Backett represents human life as it moves from the nothingness from which it cam towards the nothingness where it must end.
o His characters show alienation and disintegration
o Chaos and meaninglessness ware key words.
o His characters all have stories to tell and as long as they can keep talking, they need not despair of their being.
- René Descartes = (..thcent????) French thinker
o Cogito ergo sum = I think, therefor I am
 Beckett> I speak therefore I am

The angry Young men
- Mid-1950s
- Most of the authors were of lower or lower middle-class origins.
o Benefited from easier access to higher education and from greater social mobility that the post-war changes had wrought.
- Kingsley Amis (1922)
o Educated at Oxford.
o Lucky Jim (1954) was his first novel, from which he is most famous.
 University novel > located at an university

 About Jim Dixon, who teaches on a university. He is sexually involved with a colleague, but he doesn’t want to marry her. He feels trapped professionally, sexually and socially. In the end he ends up with the prettiest girl and the best job.
- John Osborne (1922)
o Look Back in Anger (1956)
 Starred a university graduate who preferred the life of an unskilled labourer.
 It was a play.
- Alan Sillitoe (1928)
o Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
 A tale about a young factory-worker.
- John Braine (1922)
o Room at the Top (1957)
 About the loves and ambitions of a smart lower-class boy working his way yp in the English Midlands.
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
- Irishman  Moved to France
- He wrote in French and then translated it back to English.
- Was stabbed in France
o The offender didn’t know why he did it.
- He wrote plays
o Non-sensical dialogues, unrealistic settings, illogical and often disjointed plots and schematic characters.
o Atmosphere is threatening and the characters have little or no grip on what is happening to them.

- Waiting for Godot(1952(French)&1954(English))
o 2 tramps wait for the arrival of a mysterious and powerful person. But Godot never comes and the tramps go on waiting, endlessly.
o Godot’s name has caused much speculation: does it stand for God or for a real person?
o Pozzo cries furiously. They give birth astride of a grave.