The Victorian Age

1
The Victorian Age

• It is the phase of the Reign of Queen Victoria
  (1837 1901), in which the novel becomes the
  leading form of literature in England.
• significant Novelists
• Charles Dickens
• William Thackeray
• Anna, Charlotte and Emily Brontë
• George Eliot

2
MEAN FEATURES OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE

• omniscient third person narrator
• most of the times the protagonist speaks with
  the same voice of the author
• narrator is always visible both in third person
  and in first person narrations
• complicate and long story line
• linear time
• narrative structure
• Educational purpose

3
THE MODERN AGE
Modernism is an aesthetics movements that goes
from 1890 to 1930.
It may be considered a rejection against the
Victorian Age because there is a radical
transformation in the way in which people see the
World, so there is a different concept of life.

• IMPORTANT WRITERS OF MODERN AGE
• James Joyce
• T. S. Eliot
• Ezra Pound
• Virginia Woolf
• Ford Madox Ford
• Francis Scott Fitzgerald
• Ernest Hemingway
• Henry Roth
• Wyndham Lewis
• Laura Riding
• Hilda Doolittle
• Gertrude Stein

4
MODERNISM
Cultural movement during the first three decades
of the 20th century
Rejected the old Victorian standards
In LITERATURE

• How say things (form)
• Minimum plot
• The eclipse of the narrator
• The shift of the point of view
• The stream of consciousness technique
• Focus on the psychology
• Simultaneous concept of time
• Poetical language

The reader is free to make his personal idea
5
Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway

• It is a suitable example of Modern fiction, in
  which V.Woolf adopts some interesting narrative
  techniques
• The Interior Monologue, in which the reader has
  got the feeling to be inside characters mind. He
  can know everything about characters present,
  past and future.
• Moment of Being is a moment when an individual is
  totally conscious of his experience. In her
  moments of being Woolf uses a language that comes
  near poetry.
• In the novel there is a simultaneous concept of
  time, however exist a relation between the time
  of narration and the chronological time.

6
JAMES JOYCE(1882-1941)
One of the most important Modernist writers
Ulysses (1922)
Dublin, 16 June 1904 (a single day) Three
characters (Leopold and Molly Bloom, Stephen) 18
chapters have titles derived from the episodes in
the Odyssey by Homer Leopold Ulysses Molly
Penelope Details of everyday life and the inner
life of the characters

• Formal aspect is very important
• First person narrator
• Stream of consciousness technique
• No logical connectors
• No punctuation
• Anaphoric construction
• Simultaneous time
• Demands a lot to the reader
• Joyce is extremely realistic