Do you want to know what happened to literature during 19th century? Well, do not just catch a glimpse but stay put and have time to read!
THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE DURING 19TH CENTURY
WARTIME LITERATURE
There were revolutions across Europe in the 1790s. The fear of revolution and the conditions of war lead to suppression of public meetings and censorship. Moreover, Wordsworth and Coleridge turned away from their initial sympathy with the French revolution to opposition to it.
POST-WAR ALLIANCES
•After the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, nationalist movements sprang up across Europe.
•Shelley, Keats, and Byron all accused Coleridge and Wordsworth of apostasy, that is, of having changed sides.
•Byron and Shelley both had links with such radical groups. Both chose to live in exile.
ROMANTICISM
At this time, valuing of self became as a subject matter. Also, it values emotion, interest in the exotic, bizarre and extraordinary. They also viewed nature as the catalyst for visionary and transcendent experience.
GOTHIC NOVEL
•The Gothic form, named for the Medieval architectural style of cathedrals and castles of the period, emerged in the 18th century.
•Gothic tales were set in dark castles, crypts, and churches.
•Gothic fiction was written with the intention of providing audiences with a good scare.
•Gothic novels and tales were very popular through the 19th century, but not considered “high art”.
RISE OF NOVELS
SENTIMENTAL FICTION
•Sentimental, sensationalist or “scandal” fiction were tremendously popular
•The female authors who wrote them found ample means of supporting themselves through this kind of writing.
•These novels usually include the tale of “fallen women”
•Illicit sexuality was their main focus.
NOVELS OF VIRTUE
•Novels of virtue also emerged as instructional texts for female behaviour
•Their authors saw them as countering the looser morals of scandal fiction heroines
•These too provided with the means to be self-supporting authors
VICTORIAN NOVELS
•The novel as a form reached a peak in popularity during the 19th century.
•Often referred to as the Victorian period, after Queen Elizabeth.
•The novel gained artistic respect in the 19th century as well, expanding the form thematically and artistically.
The 19th century in Western literature is one of the most vital and interesting periods of all. It has special interest as the formative era from which many modern literary conditions and tendencies derived. Romanticism, Symbolism, and Realism influences origins or in development in this period are reflected in the current modern literature, and many social and economic characteristics of the 20th century were determined in the 19th.
ROMANTICISM
•It was the predominant literary movement of the early part of the 19th century.
•The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe- especially that which is experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature.
•It promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical notions in the art form.
•It assigned a high value to the achievements of “heroic” individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the quality of society.
GREAT AUTHORS IN 19TH CENTURY
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)
•Born on April 7, 1770 in Cockermouth
•Died on April 23, 1850
•A major English poet
•His magnum opus was “The Prelude”
•Wordsworth was Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
•Wordsworth was a defining member of the English Romantic Movement. Like other Romantics, Wordsworth’s personality and poetry were deeply influenced by his love of nature, especially the sights and scenes of the Lake Country, in which he spent most of his mature life. A profoundly earnest and sincere thinker, he displayed a high seriousness tempered with tenderness and a love of simplicity.
VIEW OF POETRY
Poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions that recollected in tranquillity.
THE PRINCIPAL OBJECT OF HIS POETRY
1.To choose incidents and situations from common life.
2.To relate or describe them.
3.Throughout, as far as possible in selection of language really used by men.
4. And, at the same time, (A) to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, (B) whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.
5. The Primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. (spontaneous overflow of emotion.)
HIS SUBJECT OF POETRY
He chooses humble life because it’s simple, easy to remember in tranquillity, easier to express, they’re essential through the passions, they’re easily understood, they’re durable, and it’s not only about man or Nature, it’s between both.
LANGUAGE USED IN POETRY
•Speaks out against figurative language, but still uses it occasionally.
•He chose everyday language that’s suitable because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derive.
•He saw a relationship between nature and human life.
•He believes that nature can have an impact on emotional and spiritual life.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)
•Born on October 21, 1772 in Ottery, St. Mary, United Kingdom
•Died on July 25, 1834
•He was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher.
•He was the leader of Romantic poetry.
•He use opium for inspiration.
•During the 18th century the catchphrase of literature and art was reason.
•But, the 19th century was heralded by major shift in the conception and emphasis of literary art and specifically poetry.
SUBJECT MATTER
•The most important characteristic of his literary text, he used supernatural elements, visionary elements in his poems.
•Supernatural elements, extraordinary and mysterious that can be found in human nature.
•Nature is not the only subject matter, he also talk about psychology of character.
LANGUAGE
•Sophisticated, elaborated and ornamented
•The best part of human language is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself. It is formed by a voluntary appropriate fixed symbols to internal acts, to process and results of imagination, the greater part of which no place in the consciousness of an educated man.
•The language of poetry undoubtedly comes from imagination. The way the poet perceives the world and translates it for everyone.
PUPOSE OF POETRY
•The purpose of poetry is to give pleasure and this pleasure is from whole part and from each component part.
•If you read a novel, you take pleasure from the whole part.
•If you read a poem, you take pleasure from each part.
POETRY
•Coleridge sees that poetry is a source of knowledge.
•The poem must be cohesive unit with every part working together to build into a whole.
•Philosophy was so important, because it was the sum of all knowledge.
POET
•“No man was ever yet a great poet, without sometimes being a profound philosopher.”
•He valued scientific thinking as a branch of philosophy. According to him; if a person is a poet, he should also be a philosopher otherwise he is not a poet.
LYRCICAL BALLAD
•It is a collection of poems by Wiliam Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in Literature. The immediate effect on critics was modest, but it became and remains a landmark, changing the course of English literature and poetry.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLY (1792-1822)
•Born August 4, 1792 in Sussex, England.
•Regarded by some critics as amongst the finest lyric poets in the English language.
•A radical in his poetry as well as his political and social views, Shelly did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death.
•The central thematic concerns of Shelley’s poetry are largely the same themes that defined Romanticism, especially among the younger English poets of Shelley’s era: beauty, the passions, nature, political liberty, creativity, and the sanctity of the imagination.
•Shelly fervently believed in the possibility of realizing an ideal of human happiness as based on beauty, and his moments of darkness and despair almost always stem from his disappointment at seeing that ideal sacrificed to human weakness.
•The center of his aesthetic philosophy can be found in his important essay “A Defense of Poetry”, in which he argues that poetry brings the moral good.
•No other English poet of the early nineteenth century so emphasized the connection between beauty and goodness, or believed so avidly in the power of art’s sensual pleasures to improve society.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)
•Born on May 25, 1803 in Boston Massachusetts
•Died on April 27, 1882
•He was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement in the mid-19th century.
THE POET
•It was written between 1841 and 1843, and published in his Essays: Second Series in 1884. It is not about “men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in meter, but of the true poet.”
•In the essay, Emerson expresses the need for the United States to have its own new and unique poet to write about the new country’s virtues and vices.
Emerson considers the nature and the functions of the poet, “the man of Beauty”, to whom he ascribes a superior calling. Unlike the intellectual, who sees no dependence between the material world and the world of thoughts and ideas, or the theologian, who relies exclusively on historical evidence between the spiritual and the material worlds.
•This relationship between the ideal --- that which we aspire to be --- and the real ---- that which is --- is a central issue in the discussion. Continuing the image of the child from the epigraph, Emerson states that we are “children of the fire,” and the energy and brilliance of this fire is similar to the spirit in each of us.
MATTHEW
ARNOLD (1822-1888)
•Born on December 22, 1822 in Laleham, Middlesex, England
•Died on April 18, 1888
•He was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools.
•He has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues.
•He was “the first modern critic”, and could be called “the critic’s critic”, being a champion not only of great poetry, but of literary criticism itself.
•The purpose of literary criticism, in his view, was “to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.
•He was the founder of the sociological school of criticism and through his touchstone method introduced scientific objectivity to critical evaluation by providing comparison and analysis as the two primary tool of criticism.
•To Arnold a critic is a social benefactor. In his view the creative artist, no matter how much of a genius, would cut a sorry figure without the critic to come to his aid. Before Arnold a literary critic cared only for the beauties and defects of works of art, but Arnold the critic chose to be the educator and guardian of public opinion and propagator of the best ideas.
•To Arnold poetry itself was the criticism of life: “The criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty”, and in his sentimental essay “The Study of Poetry” he says that poetry alone can be our sustenance and stay in an era where religious beliefs are fast losing their hold.
THE BIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM BLAKE
William Blake was a 19th-century writer and artist who is regarded as a seminal figure of the Romantic Age. His writings have influenced countless writers and artists through the ages. He began writing at an early age and claimed to have had his first vision, of a tree full of angels, at age 10. He studied engraving and grew to love Gothic art, which he incorporated into his own unique works. He rejected the 18th century literary trends, preferring the Elizabethans and ancient ballads instead. A misunderstood poet, artist and visionary throughout much of his life, Blake found admirers late in life and has been vastly influential since death in 1827. Unappreciated in life, Blake has since become a giant in literary and artistic circles, and his visionary approach to art and writing has not only spawned countless, spellbound speculations about Blake, they have inspired a vast array of artists and writers.
THE LAMB
by: William Blake
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice.
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little lamb, God bless thee!
Little lamb, God bless thee!
GOD BLESS!
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