Zusammenfassung der Ressource
English literature: the Enlightenment,
Romanticism and the Victorian Era
- Enlightment literature 1650-1800
- believed that the advances of science and industry heralded a new age of egaliatarianism and progress for humankind
- Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton: progenitors of the Enlightenment
- church criticised
- Western Europe and the American Colonies
- America: provided the accelerant for the fires of revolution
- Alexander Pope, the greatest poet
- Heroic couplet
- Masterpiece: The Dunciad
- Pessimistic about the future
- End of Enlightenment: French Revolution (1789)
- Romanticism: through the end of the 18th century to about 1870
- concerned with the individual more than with society
- individual imagination
- downgrading of the importance and power of reason - reaction against Enlightenment
- strong connection with medievalism and mythology
- tales of King Arthur
- English Romantic poets
- loosening of the rules of artistic expressions
- rhymed stanzas were given way to blank verse
- popular theme:country life
- mytological and fantastic settings
- William Blake:(1790s) predates the high point of Romanticism
- William Wordsworth:
- Lyrical Ballads identified as the opening act of the Romantic Period
- Victorian Era: roughly comprises from 1830 to 1901
- Change: nearly every institution of society was shaken by unpredictable change
- the economies of Europe expanded and accelerate
- non regulation of business practices: laissez faire
- peasants migrated from the countryside to cities:
- slums and shantytowns
- Thomas Carlyle:saw Industrial Revolution as engines of destruction, stripping people of their very humanity
- Charles Darwin's theories brought humanity down to the level of the animal
- The Woman Question
- Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market--early feminist imagery
- Charlotte and Emily Bronte
- poetry underwent an evolution
- First half of the 19th century: poetry was mired in the escapist, abstract imagery
- Lord Tennyson
- mid-century: more down-to-earth, realistic kind of verse
- At some point, the novel replaced the poem as the most popular form of literature
- Charles Darwin: called attention to real-world problems
- Later Victorian Novelist: Thomas Hardy: (Jude the Obscure)
- Hardy: forerunner of the Modernist Movement