History and Anthology of English Literature

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History and Anthology of English Literature

• Mickey Xu

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• The Victorian age English Critical Realism
• Background
• The Novels of Critical Realism
• The Poetry of the Victorian AgeThe Prose of
  the Victorian Age

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• Background Social and Cultural
  Background 1. Victorian Literature all the
  writings produced during the period from
  18371901 when Queen Victoria ruled over England.
  2. The Early Victorian Period(1832--1848), a
  time of troubles. The Mid-Victorian
  Period(1841--1870), a time of economic prosperity
  and religious controversy. The Last Period
  (1870--1901), a time in which the Victorian
  values decay. 3. Social background
• 4. Cultural background5. The Women Question
  

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• Literary Characteristics
• 1. The Victorian novelists were primarily
  concerned with people in society and with their
  relation to other people.
• 2. Prose was also an important literary form
  in this age. Famous historians, critics and
  essayists abounded. Thomas Carlyle, Matthew
  Arnold, John Ruskin.
• 3. Great Poetry were also produced. Lord Alfred
  Tennyson and Robert Browning.

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• Critical Realism
• Term In Victorian period appeared a new
  literary trend-critical realism. English critical
  realism of the 19th century flourished in the
  forties and in the early fifties. It found its
  expression in the form of novel. The critical
  realists, most of whom were novelists, described
  with much vividness and artistic skill the chief
  traits of the English society and criticized the
  capitalist system from a democratic viewpoint.
  The greatest realist of the time was Charles
  Dickens. Other novelists who adhered to critical
  realism were Charlotte and Emily Bronte,
  Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.
  

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Charles Dickens
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• Charles Dickens
• Life ?Dickens was bron in 1812 at Portsmouth,
  where his father was a clerk in the Navy Pay
  Office. At four, his family moved to Chatham,
  where he studied in a day-school.
• ?In 1821, the family bankrupted and they moved
  into the Marshalsea Prison, London. At 12,
  Dickens had to work twelve hours a day in an
  underground cellar at a blacking factory in
  London. The miserable life there left an
  everlasting, painful brand on the boys mind.
• ?When he was 15, he became a lawyers clerk. He
  visited the British Museum Library, filling up
  the gaps in his education by reading. The work at
  the lawyers office afforded him the basis of a
  confirmed opinion of the law of England. Then he
  became a Parliamentary reporter for newspapers.
  Thus Dickens got a first-hand knowledge of the
  parliamentary government of it as an instrument
  for wielding and disguising the power of the
  upper classes.
• ?The rest of his life is a story of writing. In
  1870, he died suddenly.

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• WorksDickens Novels---The First
  Period(1836--1841) fun, high spirit, and a
  tendency even to literary boisterous
  play-----alternating sometimes with spells of
  sentimentality. Naïve optimism.---The Second
  Period (1842--1850)-----a transitional period
  when his naïve optimism about capitalist society
  was thus profoundly shaken.

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• ---The Third Period (1851---1870) novels in
  this period are much darker in content which
  showed the novelists loss for English bourgeois
  society.

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• Distinct features of his novels 1. Character
  sketches and exaggeration2. Broad humor and
  penetrating satire.
• 3. Complicated and Fascinating Plot 4. The
  power of exposure

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• Analysis of Major Characters
• Oliver Twist
• He is a saintlike figure. As the child hero
  of a melodramatic novel of social protest, Oliver
  Twist is meant to appeal more to our sentiments
  than to our literary sensibilities.

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• Nancy
• As a child of the streets, Nancy has been a
  thief and drinks to excess. The narrators
  reference to her free and agreeable . . .
  manners indicates that she is a prostitute.
  Nancys moral complexity is unique among the
  major characters in Oliver Twist.
• In much of Oliver Twist, morality and
  nobility are black-and-white issues, but Nancys
  character suggests that the boundary between
  virtue and vice is not always clearly drawn.

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• Fagin
• He is ugly, simpering, miserly, and
  avaricious. Constant references to him as the
  Jew seem to indicate that his negative traits
  are intimately connected to his ethnic identity.
  However, Fagin is more than a statement of ethnic
  prejudice.

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• Themes
• The Failure of Charity
• Purity in a Corrupt City

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• Thackeray, William Makepeace(181163)
• ? English novelist, b. Calcutta, India. He is
  important not only as a great novelist but also
  as a brilliant satirist.
• In 1830, Thackeray left Cambridge without a
  degree and later entered the Middle Temple to
  study law. In 1833 he became editor of a
  periodical, the National Standard, but the
  following year he settled in Paris to study art.
  There he met Isabella Shawe, whom he married in
  1836.
• ? ? Thackerays eldest daughter, Anne, Lady
  Ritchie, was also an author
• ? He died in 1863.

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• Works
• --Vanity Fair, a masterpiece, published in
  1847-48 in monthly parts. The sub-title of the
  book, A Novel Without a Hero, emphasizes the
  fact that the writers intention was not to
  portray individuals, but the bourgeois and
  aristocratic society as a whole.
• The title was taken from Bunyans Pilgrims
  Progress. In this novel Thackeray describes the
  life of the ruling classes of England in the
  early decades of the 19th century, and attacks
  the social relationship of the bourgeois world by
  satirizing the individuals in the different
  strata of the upper society.
• --Pendennis (1849-1850)
• --Henry Esmond (1852) and The Virginians
  (1859), both are historical novels.

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• The comparison between Dickens and Thackeray
• Thackeray portrayed the upper half, whose
  parasites, snobbery, greed and cruelty formed his
  chief theme, and the pictures in his novels are
  accurate and true to life. Both of them are
  moralists.
• Thackeray is also a satirist.
• Thackeray is inferior to Dickens in imaginative
  and creative power.

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Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855)
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• Charlotte Brontë
• English novelist
• Birth April 21, 1816
• Death March 31, 1855
• Place of Birth Thornton, Yorkshire, England

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• 1847 Published the novel Jane Eyre
• 1849 Published the novel Shirley, a story set
  during anti-industrial riots that took place in
  the final years of the Napoleonic Wars
• Brontë's first novel, The Professor, was turned
  down by numerous publishers, and she eventually
  withdrew the book. It was finally published after
  her death in 1857.

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• Analysis of Major Characters
• Jane Eyre
• The protagonist and narrator of the novel,
  Jane is an intelligent, honest, plain-featured
  young girl forced to contend with oppression,
  inequality, and hardship.

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• Edward Rochester
• Janes employer and the master of Thornfield,
  Rochester is a wealthy, passionate man with a
  dark secret that provides much of the novels
  suspense.

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• St. John Rivers
• St. John Rivers is a foil to Edward
  Rochester. Whereas Rochester is passionate, St.
  John is austere and ambitious.

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• Theme
• Love versus Autonomy

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• Emily Bronte (1818-1848)
• Emily Brontë lived an eccentric, closely
  guarded life. She was born in 1818, two years
  after Charlotte and a year and a half before her
  sister Anne, who also became an author. Her
  father worked as a church rector, and her aunt,
  who raised the Brontë children after their mother
  died, was deeply religious. According to
  Charlotte Brontes description, Emily was clever,
  benevolent, but very stubborn Stronger than a
  man, simpler than a child, her nature stood
  alone.

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• Analysis of Major Characters
• Heathcliff -  An orphan brought to live at
  Wuthering Heights by Mr. Earnshaw, Heathcliff
  falls into an intense, unbreakable love with Mr.

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• Catherine is free-spirited, beautiful,
  spoiled, and often arrogant.
• Edgar--Edgar is born and raised a gentleman.
  He is graceful, well-mannered, and instilled with
  civilized virtues.

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• Themes
• The Destructiveness of a Love that Never
  Changes

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• Goerge Eliot
• Scenes of Clerical Life her first three stories.
• Adam Bede her first full length novel, Eliot's
  first experiment with the type of new fiction
  that she pioneered
• The Mill on the Floss rural life
• Silas Marner rural life
• Romala a historical novel
• Felix Holt English politics
• Middlemarch her masterpiece
• Daniel Deronda the best work in Eliots opinion.
• Major Themes
• Honor
• Love

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• Eliot's realism stems from her tendency to
  avoid caricature and stereotype, instead creating
  complex and ambiguous characters whose faithful
  representation makes them not only believable,
  but difficult to pigeonhole. Her novels are
  attempts to analyze the subtleties of the human
  mind, rather than just plot structures (like many
  of her contemporaries). This allows Eliot to
  present human situations as they really occur,
  reproducing the mental and physical aspects of
  people's actions.

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• Lord Alfred Tennyson
• Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), English poet
  often regarded as the chief representative of the
  Victorian age in poetry. Tennyson succeeded
  Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850.
• Among Tennyson's major poetic achievements is
  the elegy mourning the death of his friend Arthur
  Hallam, "In Memoriam" (1850).

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• The patriotic poem "Charge of the Light
  Brigade", published in Maud (1855), is one of
  Tennyson's best known worksIn the 1870s Tennyson
  wrote several plays, among them the poetic dramas
  Queen Mary (1875) and Harold (1876). In 1884 he
  was created a baron. Tennyson died at Aldwort
  on October 6, 1892 and was buried in the Poets'
  Corner in Westminster Abbey.

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Robert Browning (1812-1889)
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• Robert Browning (1812-1889)
• Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, a suburb
  of London. Young Robert spent much of his time in
  his father's private library of 6000 volumes in
  several languages. The chief source of his
  education
• Robert did not become recognized as a poet, until
  after Elizabeth's death in 1861. After which, he
  was honored for the rest of his life as a
  literary figure.
• Below is a picture of Robert Browning's grave. He
  is buried in Westminster Abbey, in Poet's Corner.

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• Works and Achievement
• --The Ring and the Book, the longest and
  perhaps the greatest work of Browning.
• --He and Tennyson were the two most important
  poets of the Victorian Period.
• -- He introduced a new form to English
  poetry, the dramatic monologue.
• --praised as a gallant, courageous and
  high-hearted figure, well-known for buoyant
  optimism.

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• Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
• Elizabeth Barrett was born at Coxhoe Hall,
  Durham, England. Elizabeth's father disapproved
  of the courtship and engagement. In 1846,
  Elizabeth and Robert were secretly wed. Soon the
  couple ran off to Italy where Elizabeth's health
  improved. She continued to live in the villa of
  Casa Guidi for the remainder of her life.
• In 1861, Elizabeth Barrett Browning died at the
  age of 55. Her son, born 1849, and husband
  returned to England after her death.

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• Works
• The Battle of Marathon
• translation of the Greek tragedy Prometheus
  Unbound
• The Cry of the Children
• Sonnet from the Portuguese