Literary History 2018

• A powerful and anticipatory role of art in society at the interface of ecological, ethical, and aesthetic concerns is exemplified in the poetry of Emily Dickinson
• she is singular figure in American Renaissance literature
• both represents and transcends the historical-cultural conditions of her time in her highly complex and experimental writings.
• style is often fragmented and syntactically broken, intensely symbolic and reflexive, and full of tensions and paradoxes
• Dickinson's poems open up new imaginative spaces and explore the interstices between body and soul, mind and matter.
• Her preferred topics range from subjectivity to society, from gender issues to religion, from death to love, from natural to artistic creativity.

Alice French was a leading writer of local color stories and journalistic essays under the pseudonym Octave Thanet.

• Grew up in Davenport, Iowa.

• Domestic partnership with Jane Allen Crawford (1851-1932).

• Divided their time between Davenport and a plantation in Arkansas.

• Pro-capitalist, anti-labor.

• Friend of Andrew Carnegie.

• Pro-imperialist.

• Anti-women’s suffrage.

• Drove a car.

• Kept a pistol.

• Liked alcohol.

• Statues to classical models in America
• People had fantasies of breathing life into statues, or enjoyed coldness of them 
• People being compared to statues
• perceived irresistible
• identification with statues
• Thanets description of her lover: statuelike, but lively

Almost involuntarily, I drew her to me and kissed her. The faintest flush tinged her cheek. I can’t describe how oddly she looked at me, saying, “Then, I don’t chill you, Constance.”

“Not to mention,” said I, laughing. Then I kissed her again.

  —OctaveThanet, “My Lorelei” (1880)

• "Augustan Age", named after emperor Augustus (63 BC-14 AD), during whose reign Roman literature flourished with writers such as Virgil, Horace and Ovid

• English literature between ~ 1688-1750 frequently goes back to literary ideas and ideals of this period

• The major authorities are Aristotle and Horace

• Major writers are John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift

• "Mimesis": imitation of nature rather than autonomous expression

• Heroic couplet as the key poetic form: iambic pentameter in couplets

• Major shift in aesthetics in the 1780s and 1790s

• M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953):

  – Classicist aesthetics: poetry is a mere MIRROR of nature

  – Romantic aesthetics: poetry as an autonomous creation, an expression of self; poetry as a LAMP rather than a mere MIRROR

• Key words: nature, heart/mind/soul, imagination, feeling

• William Wordsworth in 1800: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflowof powerful feelings ... recollected in tranquility"

• Politically dominated by the French Revolution (since 1789) and its consequences (Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars)

• The "Big Six" of Romantic Poetry:

  • First generation Romantics:

    • William Blake (1757-1827),
    • William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
    • Samuel Taylor Colderidge (1772-1834)

  • Second generation Romantics:

  • • Lord Byron (1788-1824)
    • Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
    • John Keats (1795-1821)

• Major enlargement of the "Romantic canon" in recent decades:
  Anna L. Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson ...

• Major novelists:

  • Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

  • Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (1814), Ivanhoe (1819)

• In the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads", Wordsworth complains about "the encreasing accumulation of men in cities" 
• But: He states that his interest in the theatre, despite some enthusiasm, "passed not beyond the suburbs of the mind" .
• In another passage, Wordsworth laments the state of being “[...] barricadoed evermore Within the walls of cities”

The city as a topic: 

• new phenomena, genres, and representations: vivid pleasure of his youth and remembering it is a nightmare (was not good for him)
• recreates what it was like as a young man, giving himself up at cheap pleasure
• realization that it the city so overpowering in sense impression that it kills his creativity

• “one of the chief, if not the chief characteristics of Romanticism is its almost obsessive engagement with the natural world” (Peer 2011, 1)
• James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin:
  "Romanticism, rather than being a movement against the city [needs to be understood as] an aesthetic that developed along with – and contributed to – the ascendancy of metropolitan life"

Romanticism and Nature:

• Nature is an overwhelming experience
• god is everywhere
• nature is alive
• feeling rather than visual perception, true perception comes through heart/mind/soul
• ask not what you can do for nature but ask what nature can do for you

• 1790: 77% of all English-language books printed globally where printed in London (90% in 1750).
• middle of the romantic period: more than half the adult population can read – even more in London
• New genres: the urban essay: “flaneur” perspective; “more romantic picturesqueness than in the Lake District”; walking somewhere for pleasure is a completely new idea; “Townosophy”
• a new “urban” sensibility: impressionistic, subjective, self-reflexive; abundance of things to enjoy; offers too much
• anachronistic to most accounts of romanticism

The City as

• the hub of Romantic literary production, distribution and reception and
• as a central subject matter of Romantic writing with new genres and modes of representation

• too diverse for one umbrella term to fit
• nature is more helpful than the knowledge from book learning
• idea that Wordsworth makes a distinction between books and nature to be enjoyed is simplistic
• idea is that if you want to understand how a frog works, you should not cut it open but watch it in the pond

• Rural society → urban society
  e.g. population of London: 2 million in 1837, 6 1⁄2 million in 1901

• Conditions of labour (factories, mill towns)

• Question of political representation – Reform Bills

• Expansion of Empire

• Changes in scientific theory and technology

• The Hungry Forties

• Living conditions (public health, slums)

• Conditions in factories

• Children, women (role of women changed through industrialization)

• “the poor”

Tries to

• capture atrocious working conditions

• Diagnose social problems

• Render different parts of society legible to one another

• create understanding between different classes

• Delineate the specific and detailed realities of working- class life

• Highlights the need of reform at parliamentary level.

• Dramatises poverty (melodrama, allegory, ...) to create novelistic interest

• Cautious about change

• Paternalistic view of relations between classes

• solutions provided were not really practical to the situation

• 1856-1950

• Fabian society

• Socialist, vegetarian, non-smoker, non-drinker, pacifist

• Helped turn the Royal Court Theatre in London into the centre of avant-garde drama

• Influenced by Henrik Ibsen (realism, dramatisation of ideas, social issues)

• Drama of ideas: characters argue about justification of social positions and behaviour

• Attacks complacency and conventional moralism

• plays first published in book form with didactic preface

•  

• Proliferation of print 

• development of a major publishing industry

• Technological improvement 

• printing cheaper

• Rise of literacy

• Literature published in instalments

• Importance of illustrations

• Literary Market dominated by a few publishers & libraries
  — Monopolised what we think of as “canonical literature” now.

• Affordable

• Interval between instalments raised suspense – opened interpretative possibility,

• interaction reader – writer (reviews and speculation)

• Topical (references to current affairs, seasonal and social references)

• a new link between fictional characters and reality of readers through shared horizon

• Illustrations raised popular appeal

“Realism refers to the realistic portrayal of the fictional world in the sense that secular non-fantastic explanations can be provided for the plot and seemingly fantastic experiences are eventually explained in ‘realistic’ terms.”

• psychological realism (George Eliot)

• political realism (Trollope)

• social realism

• Dickens’s realism

• Brontë’s realism

• Inaugurated by Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, 1864

• Set in the past (originally: the Middle Ages)

• Gloomy castle, dungeon, decaying mansions, ...

• Tales of mystery and terror

• The (pseudo-)supernatural and the irrational, nightmarish quality

• Persecution, sexual perversion, sadism, diabolism

• transgression

• Women writers associated with this genre: Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe

• The small details of person, place, and action that while contributing little or nothing to the narrative, give the story its atmosphere, making it feel real
• It does not add to the plot to know that the character James Bond wears Egyptian cotton shirts, but it clearly does add considerably to our understanding of him.
• By the same token, knowing that he buys his food from Fortnum and Mason makes him more real.
• Thus, as Roland Barthes argues in his essay introducing this concept, ‘The Reality Effect’ (1968) no analysis of a text can be considered complete if it does not take these seemingly insignificant details into account.

• The supernatural vs. the mundane: (possibility of) boundary crossing

  — Terror Gothic
  — Horror Gothic

• Addresses and disguises anxieties and forbidden desires

• Collapse of boundaries
  — good/evil, life/death, etc.

• Threats and desires given concrete form
  — Racial mixture, class fluidity, (d)evolution, homo-/bisexuality, incest

• Dynamics: move towards containment
   => domestic fiction

• Shrinking distance: Victorian Gothic => sensation fiction

• Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë

• Lewis Carroll

• Charles Dickens

• George Eliot

• Elizabeth Gaskell

• George Gissing

• Thomas Hardy

• George Meredith

• Robert Louis Stevenson

• William Makepeace Thackeray

• Anthony Trollope

• H. G. Wells

• Oscar Wilde

• 1816-1855

• Author of Jane Eyre (1847), Shirley (1849), Villette (1853), and The Professor (1847/1857)

• Parsonage Yorkshire moors

• Sisters Emily (Wuthering Heights, 1847) and Anne (Agnes Grey, 1847 – published as 3rd volume of Wuthering Heights; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 1848)

• Pseudonyms: Acton, Ellis, and Currer Bell

• Restricted possibilities

• Available jobs: teacher, governess

• The position of married women and their property (Married / Women’s Property Act, 1870)

• Stereotypes: “the angel in the house”

• Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

• Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

• Evolutionary dystopias, scientific gothic: H.G. Wells.

• Wuthering Heights (Emily)

• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne): contempory reviews – immoral, inappropriate, “morbid” (Charlotte); unsoftened picture of alcoholic husband; now seen as one of first feminist texts

• Jane Eyre (Charlotte): portrayal & perspective of young childand woman and her sensibility; love from a woman’sperspective

• Shirley (Charlotte): first regional novel in English, local material

• Alternative way of telling stories

• New form: dramatic monologue (Browning!)
  — Lyric in expression
  — Dramatic in principle
  — Told by speakers ironically distanced from the poet

• Debates about appropriate subjects for poetry.

  — Heroic materials of the past (Arnold)

  — Art for art’s sake (Pre-Raphaelites, e.g. Dante Gabriel Rosetti)

  — Contemporary Concerns (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

Debates about appropriate subjects for poetry.

— Heroic materials of the past (Arnold)

— Art for art’s sake (Pre-Raphaelites, e.g. Dante Gabriel Rosetti)

— Contemporary Concerns (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

• For contemporaries, one of most famous poets
  — Better known than her husband, Robert Browning

• Admired for her moral and emotional ardour, energetic engagement with issues of the day

• Poetry as a tool of social protest and reform

  — Against child labour

  — For American abolitionism

  — Support of Risorgimento (movement to free Italy and unify it as a nation state)

• Best known for Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) andAurora Leigh (novel in verse, 1857)

• The Woman Question

• Debates about appropriate subjects for poetry.
  — Heroic materials of the past (Arnold)
  — Art for art’s sake (Pre-Raphaelites, e.g. Dante Gabriel Rosetti)
  — Contemporary Concerns (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

• Highly pictorial: visual impressions create a picture that carries the dominant emotion of a poem
  — Affinity between poets and painters
  — Poems frequently illustrated by contemporary artists
  — Pre-Raphaelites

• Sense rupture

• But: continuities (political, imperial, technological, industrial, ...)

• But: sense of decline (Empire, British predominance, Boer wars)

• Rejection of “Victorianism”, Victorian hypocrisy, puritanicalnarrow-mindedness

• Scepticism

• Age of interrogation

• Literary production: influenced by demise of circulating libraries as a result of changing values

• Publishing changed

• Death of the triple decker

• Greater degree of freedom over length and structure

• Shorter, often more poetic/symbolic fiction

• Greater freedom to experiment with style, topics, views

• Naturalism arrives from Europe on America‘s shores with some delay.
• Its European roots can be traced to Emile Zola‘s influential essay „The Experimental Novel“ (1880), in which he argues for a „scientific“ representation of the world and man‘s position in it.
• Zola conceived of the novel as a laboratory for the study of human behavior under the influence of heredity and environment
• Zola’s naturalism was a method for writing novels, used naturalist philosophy as a basis for creating characters and with them a portrait of French society in the 2^ndhalf of the 19^thcent.
• Man is not the creator of his own fortune but is shaped by this environment; men is determined by forces outside,  not the other way around

• Naturalism seeks to overcome the highly-wrought language and the improbable plots of Romanticism
• with its scientistic basis in Zola: to attain a degree of truth in literary representation.
• „result“ of Romanticism -> highly individualistic focus -> can be seen as an inheritance of Romanticism
• a far cry from the Enlightenment‘s optimism and a belief in man‘s perfectionability, as well as the assumption that nature needn’t be benevolent, but rather deterministic
• both Naturalism and Realism thus are the symptoms of “transcendental homelessness”