Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

• sensual experience of Jonathan Harker
• Vampiress is described as both sweet and bitter, animalistic and beautiful
• "delightful anticipation"
• Breath of the vampiress: "Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood."
• "There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal"
• "I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart."

"Suddenly the horror burst upon me that it was thus that Jonathan had seen those awful women growing into reality through the whirling mist in the moonlight, and in my dream I must have fainted, for all became black darkness.
The last conscious effort which imagination made was to show me a livid white face bending over me out of the mist. I must be careful of such dreams, for they would unseat one’s reason if there were too much of them."

• Term initially used for French literature (Baudelaire, Gautier)

• Characteristics:

• Celebrates intense refinement
• Values artificiality over nature
• Characteristic pose: ennui
• Interested in perversity and paradox
• Explores transgressive modes of sexuality.

• The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
• The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what it considered the mechanistic approach first adopted by Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. 
• Its members believed the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art, hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite".
• The brotherhood sought a return to the abundant detail, intense colours and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian art.
• The group continued to accept the concepts of history painting and mimesis, imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art.
• They defined themselves as a reform movement.

• new subjects
• focus on beautiful form -> perfect workmanship
• strong focus on physicality, sexuality
• scandalous poem

• rediscovered the renaissance for art

• stance: "don’t adopt the morality / philosophies of others, test new experiences"

• the pleasure of fleeting moments is valued higher than Victorian morals

• He implores us as readers to seek out and find those experiences which move move us, claiming “To maintain this ecstasy is success in life.” 
• "Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end"
• “What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte or of Hegel, or of our own.”
• "Only, be sure it is passion .... Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake."
• These views were far removed from the typical Victorian mindset of reserved formality and repressed pleasure. 
• The Aesthetic movement, being a response to this classification and qualification of enjoyment, is given a battle cry “To be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy... The theory or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience... has no real claim upon us.” 
• This cry went out to many artists and authors still celebrated today such as Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Vernon Lee who took Pater's advice to heart. -> huge influence on Oscar Wilde!
• While the works of Pater were never as well received generally after the publication of The Renaissance, his legacy of desiring art to be made for the sake of art was continued by those mentioned above and others, and spawned a conversation about the subjective versus objective nature of art which continues today.

• focus on colour and impression

• Pre-Raphaelites (especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti),

• Algernon Charles Swinburne

• William Morris

• Alice Meynell

• Amy Levy

• theorists & critics formulated their theses through essays

• Walter Pater
• Oscar Wilde,
• Arthur Symons
• Vernon Lee (Violet Paget)• “purple prose”

• I can resist everything except temptation.
• Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
• In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.
• The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
• An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

"One of the first principles of Aestheticism is that all the fine arts are intimately related to one another; hence we see that their poets have been painters, whilst their artists have largely availed themselves of the creations of the poets as topics for their principal pictures and statues."

CYRIL: The theory is certainly a very curious one, but to make it complete, you must show that Nature, no less than Life, is an imitation of Art. Are you prepared to do that?

VIVIAN: My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything.

CYRIL: Nature follows the landscape painter, then, and takes here effects from him? (343)

• the diary entries are written about things that haven't even happened yet
• when they then happen in real life, life seems to imitate art (the diary)

Algernon. But was our engagement ever broken off?

Cecily. Of course it was. On the 22nd of last March. You can see the entry if you like. [Shows diary.] ‘To-day I broke off my engagement with Ernest. I feel it is better to do so. The weather still continues charming.’

Algernon. But why on earth did you break it off? What had I done? I had done nothing at all. Cecily, I am very much hurt indeed to hear you broke it off. Particularly when the weather was so charming.

...
Algernon. You’ll never break off our engagement again, Cecily?

Cecily. I don’t think I could break it off now that I have actually met you. (act 2)

Life imitates art: first there was the art, then there was the room built after it

Oscar Wilde as Narcissus

• Oscar Wilde: known for his writings (which were more works of art at times and were also published like that) and also mostly for his persona
• "Books and works of art exercise a powerful suggestion on the masses. It is from these productions that an age derives its ideals of morality and beauty. If they are absurd and anti-social, they exert a disturbing and corrupting influence on the views of a whole generation."

• "The ego-mania of decadentism, its love of the artificial, its aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity and movement, its megalomaniacal contempt for men and its exaggeration of the importance of art, have found their English representative among the ‘Æsthetes,’ the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde."

• "Wilde has done more by his personal eccentricities than by his works."

• "What really determines his actions is the hysterical craving to be noticed, to occupy the attention of the world with himself, to get talked about."

• "Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime."

- Dramatic increase in literacy --> bigger audience --> No longer for small elite

- Technological development, circulating libraries: literature = cheaper / more accessible

- Literature as business

- Conservative and upper class: worried about power of a reading public

- Writers / elite: worried about deterioration of taste

- Rural to urban

- Industrialization and the global market --> global advantage

- Empire: by 1890, British colonies made up a quarter of global territory

- Inventions: facilitated communication and trade

- Uncertainty of the people

- moral responsibility and moral purpose

- earnestness

- domestic propriety

- stability

- call to action (social, political, etc.)

- social relations, social responsibility

- national enterprises

• Term “literature” acquired modern meaning

• Power of literature to induce change

• Importance of individual expression

• Rejection of classical rules of composition (elegance of diction, precise rules of composition)

• First Railway

• Reform Parliament

• Rotten Boroughs (depopulated election district that retains its original representation)

• Franchise

• Chartist Movement (Chartism was a working-class movement for political reform in Britain that existed from 1838 to 1857)

• Poverty, Slums

Condition-of-England novel

• Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65; North and South), 

• Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881; Sybil, or The Two Nations)

• Prosperity and expansion

• Ideal of English energy, wisdom, sense of duty

• Ideal of middle-class domesticity

• Sense of stability, complacency, optimism

• Technological developments

• Geology: extinct species; deep time

• Biology: challenged position of humankind -> Charles Darwin, evolution, natural selection

• Jubilee years (1887, 1897) – achievement

• Colonies as source of goods and wealth

• Internal and external conflicts

• Empire: rebellions and massacres

• Working Class as a new economic and political force

• Different values: Prince of Wales

• Fin-de-siècle pose

• “degeneration”

• Beginning of modernist movement

• A development that starts in c18: increasing opposition to the tradition of highly regulated poetic expression (as in Dryden, Pope) 

• Dissent and opposition formulated as a coherent theory in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads

• Wordsworth’s “Advertisement” in the first edition (1798)

• “Preface” in 2ndedition (1800), 3rdedition (1802)

• Coleridge, BiographiaLiteraria(1817)

• John Keats, letters

• Artistic conventions as crucial filters

• poetry as an imitation of human life, a mirror held up to nature

• the impression derived from this mirror is ordered and put into a form intended to instruct and please.

• C18 regulations seen as artificial conventions that interfered with free and natural expression

• Poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth); the “expression”/“utterance” of the poet’s emotion (Charlotte Smith); an embodiment of the poet’s imaginative vision (William Blake, Percy B. Shelley)

• Source of subject is the poet rather than the outside world – feelings, mind, imagination

• Major form: lyric poem written in the first person

• Lyrical speaker – “I” – also recognisably close to poet

• Alternative way of telling stories

• Sense of belatedness, melancholy (see Arnold, “Dover Beach”, from session 1)

• Art for art’s sake: Rossetti & the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne

• New form: dramatic monologue (Browning!)

• Lyric in expression

• Dramatic in principle

• Told by speakers ironically distanced from the poet