VICTORIAN/LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERARY CRITICISM

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VICTORIAN/LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERARY
CRITICISM

• Literary Criticism
• Sandya Maulana, S.S.

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VICTORIAN/LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERARY
CRITICISM

• The Victorian age in Britain brought about many
  significant changes in many aspects of life,
  including humanities, and more specifically,
  literature. Faster transportation was possible,
  due to the invention of faster steamboats and
  steam train and railway system. British colonies
  had encompassed many parts of the world and paved
  the way for the British Commonwealth. Life in
  Britain had turned both more metropolitan and
  cosmopolitan, and was closer to the current
  definition of modern life. Problems arose, of
  course, due to these changes. Farming areas were
  reduced, more people living in cities and working
  in factories, and the high number of unemployed
  citizens affected the rise in crime and decline
  in welfare. These problems became the main themes
  of the fiction, mainly novels, of the era,
  through the hands of Charles Dickens, Thomas
  Hardy, William Thackeray, and Benjamin Disraeli.
  This marked the rise of realism in the English
  literature.
• The Victorian age also marked the beginning of
  different point views in treating literature. The
  era saw many changes and alternatives in literary
  criticism. In this class, each of the three
  critics chosen here represents a different
  attitude towards literature. Matthew Arnold
  discusses the pedagogic, moralistic, and
  disinterested study of poetry. Henry James sees
  fiction, especially the realistic novel, as the
  dominant genre of literature and proposes a
  variety of expressions and possibilities in its
  creative process. On the other hand, at the end
  of the Victorian era, Oscar Wilde adopts the
  famous art for arts sake, denounces realism,
  and implies that literature should delight and be
  devoid of its social, political, and economical
  burdens.

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MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822 1888)

• In all branches of knowledge the aim of the
  critical power is the same to see the object as
  in itself it really is. Arnold remarks that
  criticism must be disinterested. It must be an
  endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is
  known and thought in the world. The disinterest
  that he preaches has a not too distant
  relationship to the idea of aesthetic disinterest
  in Kants analysis of the readers response to
  the work of art. Arnold is not suggesting a
  withdrawal from effective social criticism but
  instead insisting on measured, intelligent, and
  often necessarily indirect critical activity. In
  an age marked by the emergence of historical
  criticism, Arnold argues in The Study of Poetry
  against historical judgments of poems. Like
  several of his Romantic predecessors, Arnold
  thinks not so much of the quality of a poem as a
  whole as he does of the presence of an
  undefinable poetic quality somewhere in poem.
  Arnold also suggests that critical power grows as
  the result of a liberal education. Sound critical
  judgments are made by educated people, not by
  those who make a mindless application of
  principle or method.
• Notable work The Function of Criticism at the
  Present Time (1864)

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HENRY JAMES

• Beyond his fiction, James was one of the more
  important literary critics in the history of the
  novel. James wrote many valuable critical
  articles on other novelists typical is his
  insightful book-length study of his American
  predecessor Nathaniel Hawthorne. When he
  assembled the New York Edition of his fiction in
  his final years, James wrote a series of prefaces
  that subjected his own work to the same
  searching, occasionally harsh criticism. In his
  classic essay The Art of Fiction (1884), he
  argued against rigid prescriptions on the
  novelist's choice of subject and method of
  treatment. He maintained that the widest possible
  freedom in content and approach would help ensure
  narrative fiction's continued vitality. The essay
  itself is actually an answer to Walter Besants
  pamphlet on the same subject. It criticizes
  Besant's conception on how fiction should be
  written and how "good" fiction should be.
  Contrasted to Besant's view, it is explained here
  that "good" fiction should be returned to readers
  and various critics (i.e. letting them decide
  what is "good"). Later on, the essay criticizes
  (and disagrees with) Besant's laws of fiction
  which tell how fiction should be written. James
  himself expands upon Besants ideas that fiction
  should be written from experience and experience
  only. James implies that experience is not always
  first handed and there are simply no limitations
  to everything that an author can imagine that may
  be defined as experience.
• Notable work The Art of Fiction (1884)

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OSCAR WILDE

• As a critic and a writer, Oscar Wilde was an
  Aesthete, a person who believes that art should
  be enjoyed for its aesthetic purpose only, devoid
  of social and political importance. As an
  Aesthete, Wilde embraced the art for arts sake
  concept. This is evident in his essay defending
  the Aesthetic movement and art for arts sake,
  titled The Decay of Lying. The essay in presented
  in a dialogue between Vivian and Cyril. As
  summarized by Vivian, it contains four doctrines
• Art never expresses anything but itself
• All bad art comes from returning to Life and
  Nature, and elevating them into ideals
• Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life
• Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is
  the proper aim of Art
• Besides defending the Aesthetic movement, the
  essay is also a stab at the realistic tendency of
  English literature at that time.
• Notable work The Decay of Lying (1897)