ENGLISH 2321: STUDY GUIDE FOR NEW MATERIAL ON EXAM THREE

I. VICTORIAN NOVEL

1. Terms: Serialization; Wessex Novels.

2. Specific Authors: Thomas Hardy; Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, RL Stevenson

Study Guide retains material over which you will not be tested.

II. Explanations: More explanation can be found in a study guide for English 3332/3302, a course on British literature 1800-1945: https://faculty.utrgv.edu/clay.daniel/eng3332/05STUDYGUIDE2.htm (use “Find” to locate the terms). Also, most if not all, of the material is explained in the powerpoints in Blackboard (the ones on Victorianism and Modernism). Here are the basics in a mini-study guide

I. Charles Dickens (1812‑1870): Dickens advocated social reform, especially in regard to the working classes. These reforms, broadly stated, are "Christian." In an attempt to make reform acceptable, he often added sentimentality.

(i). Serialization: Dickens's novels appeared in popular magazines before appearing in book form. This serialization was standard procedure for Victorian novelists.

(ii). EARLY PERIOD: 1835-1846. After attracting favorable notice with Sketches by Boz, his first great success was Pickwick Papers (1836‑37); other youthful successes were Oliver Twist (1837) and Nicholas Nickleby (1840), The Old Curiousity Shop (1840‑41), Barnaby Rudge (1841) and A Christmas Carol (1843).

(iii). MIDDLE PERIOD: 1846-1854. Dombey and Son (1847‑48) begins Dickens' mature period, which also includes David Copperfield (1849‑50), Bleak House (1852-53)

(iv). LATE PERIOD: 1854-1870. Hard Times (1854), Tale of Two Cities (1859), Our Mutual Friend (1865)

(v). Dickens' outstanding attribute is his vivid characterization: many of his characters seem more real than human beings. There is also a fairy tale quality about them: "In a utilitarian age . . . it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected . . . A nation without fancy, without some romance, never did, never can, never will, hold a great place under the sun" (Dickens)

(vi). Reaction of utilitarian capitalists: "Dickens' invasion of the domain of political economy [capitalist economic theory] with the palpable design of substituting benevolent instincts for established laws was carelessly condoned by the statesman, legists, and economists whom he denounced and amused" (E.P. Whipple, 1877).

II. Thomas Hardy (1848‑1928), greatest Victorian novelist, after Dickens. Transformed the Dorset area of England into fictional Wessex for the setting of his pastoral novels (which focus on rural landowners, farm women, laborers, and other country folk). Known for his pessimism: he believed things did not work out the best. Instead, his characters often are destroyed in a "tragic" sequence of improbable events, beyond their control, and set in motion by an overwhelming but malevolent power that controls humanity ("fate" the gods, "President of the Immortals"). Hardy's pessimism, perhaps because they didn't believe it, appealed to the Victorians. But he quit writing novels after the furor caused by Jude the Obscure. Hardy had caused extensive controversy by his previous Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Tess, a beautiful farm laborer, is caught in a sordid series of events‑‑‑ including, seduction/rape and murder‑‑‑that ends in her hanging. Jude (1895) tells how the intellectual ambitions of a laborer are thwarted by a couple of sexual lapses. The book was denounced by critics and public as bestial and obscene. Hardy remains a celebrity, but he restricts himself to poetry (by some considered great, others disagree).

OTHER VICTOTIAN NOVELISTS

1.Brönte sisters

a. Charlotte (1816‑55), Emily (1818‑1848), Anne (1820‑ 49): daughters of poor Irishman (real name "Brunty") who had somehow managed to go to Cambridge and become a curate in Anglican Church (at Haworth, in Yorkshire).

b. Brother Branwell dies of dissipations and failures at age 30.

c. The sisters, who had little contact with world, write.

d. Novels: Anne published Agnes Grey and Emily published Wuthering Heights in 1848, under pseudonyms of Acton and Ellis Bell. Charlotte published Jane Eyre in 1847 as Currer Bell.

e. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are considered classics. They are complex gothic romances (elements of horror, spooky houses, dark secrets, love) heavily informed with psychological characterization. Novels of "passion and introspection" (rather than "novel of manners," which were popular at the time). In short, they introduced the popularity of "the Romantic novel." Jane Eyre was an immediate success. Wuthering Heights initially was attacked as morbid and diseased: ". . . people like Cathy and Heathcliff are too odiously and abominably pagan to suit the tastes of even the most shameless class of English readers."

f. Emily dies of tuberculosis in 1848; Anne dies in 1849. Charlotte, the most "intellectual" of the sisters, dies in 1855.

2. George Eliot (1819‑80; real name Mary Ann Evans)

a. Late 1870s: "greatest living novelist."

b. Known for "domestic realism," especially of rural lower‑class life, mixed with charm and humor.

c. Novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1872; considered her best), and Daniel Deronda (1876).

d. Victorian characteristics

i. From an Evangelical background, she becomes agnostic, believing that since it is impossible to know whether God exists, it is best to avoid religion (an atheist, on the other hand, argues that God definitely does not exist). Victorian agnostics often believed that the need for religion is simply a part of man's spiritual nature (and since there probably isn't a God, Man creates one)..

ii. 1854‑78: lives with George Henry Lewes, a Victorian intellectual. In 1880, at age 60, she marries a 40 year old man. Despite‑‑‑and in some strange way, because of this‑‑she was in many ways typically Victorian.

iii. Often glamorizes "artist‑hero"

3. George Meredith (1828-1909): poet (“Modern Love” sonnets [1862]), probably best known though as a novelist, though it was a struggle in the years that lead to his replacing Tennyson as the president of the Society of Authors. King Edward VII requested his burial in Westminster Abbey, but it was refused because Meredith was widely known as a “free-thinker’ in relation to religion. His best-known novels (now) are probably Evan Harrington (1860), The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), and The Egoist (1879).

4. Wilkie Collins (1824-1889): “Discovered” by his friend Dickens, Collins’ best work includes a couple of classic mystery-intrigue novels, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868).

5. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863): During his time he was the great rival of Dickens. Now his reputation is based on one novel, the social satire Vanity Fair (1847).

6. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865): Influenced by dissent and reform, she wrote “industrial” novels, although her most enduring work is the pastoral Cranford (1851-53). Many of her works were published by Dickens in his magazine Household Words; and she wrote a biography of her friend Charlotte Bronte that was considered libelous by some (apparently those who were perceived responsible for Bronte’s smothering existence and early death).

7. Anthony Trollope (1815-82): Popular, prolific novelist of the provincial high-life, especially in the Barsetshire-Palliser series. He was also a high ranking member of the postal service.

8. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850‑94)

a. Another prolific writer: works include adventure tales and "horror" stories such as Treasure Island (1883), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886), and Master of Ballantrae (1889).

b. The simple surface of his stories disguise an increasing Victorian desire to escape from a life that had become too "civilized," rational, and suffocating. These stifled individuals craved escape‑‑‑through sensuality or "adventure"

c. "I will now make a confession: It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver ... the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you." Stevenson was writing to W. E. Henley (1849-1903), journalist/poet/publisher/playwright, celebrator of Empire (Jingoism), whose best poem is probably “Invictus.” Also popular in this vein were the adventure tales of Rider Haggard (1856-1925), such as She (1887) and King Solomon’s Mines (1886).

9. Rudyard Kipling (1865‑1936)

a. Born in Bombay, raised in England; he returned to India as a journalist (1882).

b. 1889: returns to England as an instant celebrity for his tales of English adventure in India (e.g, those collected in Departmental Ditties (1886), Wee Willie Winkie (1890), and Soldiers Three (1890)) and poems with the same theme (Barrack‑Room Ballads, 1892).

c. Poet of British Imperialism: he coins the phrase "white man's burden": the burden of Englishmen and Europeans to civilize the dark races. A few people charge that Kipling is mouthpiece for colonial exploitation: white people went to India not to save Indians but to make money by exploiting a non-industrialized people, covering up this crime with pious talk about "saving" the people from whom they were stealing.

d. Very popular; he becomes an unofficial poet laureate.

e. 1907: becomes first Englishman to win Nobel Prize for Literature.

IV. EDWARDIAN-GEORGIAN AUTHORS

a. George Gissing (1857-1903): His best novel is probably New Grub Street (1891), about the life he knew well, that of struggling novelists (he wrote 23 novels, often “to pay the bills”).

b. John Galsworthy (1867-1933): Another Nobel prize winner (1932). His extremely readable novels include The Forsythe Saga (1906-21), a series of five works based on the life of an elite (rich) middle-class family much like Galsworthy’s own. He was also elected the first President of PEN International (1921)

c. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924): Conrad and Galsworthy became friends before they were famous. Conrad was a Polish seaman, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. He did not learn English until his 20s and only started actively publishing in his late 30s. He is often read as a Modernist, but like Yeats, he is one of the last Romantics. His popular, very absorbing novels are often adventure stories though often with a psychology and pessimism that become popular only after WWI. His novels include Almayer's Folly (1895), The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), The Secret Sharer (1910-“novella/short story) and Under Western Eyes (1911).

d. H.G. Welles (1866-1946): Like Shaw, he was a very entertaining writer of ideas and an upper-class socialist (Fabian) though he was from the lower middle-class. Since his ideas often remained general, his works are still widely read, especially those of science fiction, of which he is a primary modern creator. These works are often read as “prophecies” of the triumph of such things as space and air travel, eugenics, bio-terrorism, and a one world order: Time Machine (1895), War of the Worlds (1898), The Invisible Man (1897). He also wrote many first rate social-comic/satire novels: Love and Mr Lewisham (1899), Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909), and The History of Mr. Polly (1910). His Mr. Britling [Welles’ persona in the novel] Sees It Through (1916) is arguably the finest high-art/popular commentary/discussion on an on-going current event (WWI). It also points to why Modernists rejected much of Edwardian-Georgian culture as represented by sage-writer Welles: fine, superb discussion of an event that had degenerated into an unprecedented, senseless slaughter.

e. John Buchan (1875-1940): This writer too points to why Modernism was set to destroy the vanguard of Victorianism. Like many Victorians, he started his political and writing careers simultaneously, eventually becoming 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (he was the 15th Governor-General of Canada). His thirty novels include two classics of spythriller fiction and masterpieces of propaganda : The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and Greenmantle (1916). He was then recruited to become public relations officer for Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, “Commander-in-Chief” of British Forces in France and one of the war’s leading butchers.

f. G.K. Chesterton (1834-1936): Another entertaining “genius” of the man-of-letters-“great tradition”: wrote essays and criticism as well as popular, witty, provocative comic novels. This 1924 newspaper quote is typical: "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected” (cited in [Wikipedia). However, in the totalitarian cultural shadows cast by WWI, being witty is not enough, and Chesterton is often considered to be an important minor writer. Chesterton himself becomes a Catholic. The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) is perhaps his best novel: extremely witty parody not only of spy novels but the ideology that was spawning spy culture. The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) is still very readable; and his Father Brown mysteries are still popular, a series in the Sherlock Holmes tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930).

g.Arnold Bennett (1867-1931): Another popular first-class novelist: his Clayhanger series of novels (1910-1918) and Old Wives Tales (1908) represent prosperous middle-class life in the “Potteries District” of England (his own background). Appointed Minister of Propaganda for France during WWI. Virginia Woolf attacked him for representing a Victorian-gentlemanly writing tradition.

MODERNISM

A. T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (1888‑1965). Born in St. Louis; descended from prominent New England Puritans and educators. After graduating from Harvard, goes to France and then settles in London. Meets Ezra Pound, another expatriate American, who at the time was an active "promoter" of the avant‑garde. Pound promotes Eliot. This collaboration would continue, in some form, the rest of their lives. 1917‑25: Works for Lloyds Bank. During this time he publishes his best work: The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land. He also edits influential literary magazines and becomes a tentative satellite of Bloomsbury. 1925‑1965: Leaves his tellership at Lloyds Bank for Faber & Faber, a new publishing house that becomes very powerful by publishing Eliot and other modernist poets. 1926-27: Becomes British citizen. Declares himself, "classicist in literature, anglo‑catholic in religion, and royalist in politics." His poetry days are, mostly, over (works primarily on Four Quartets, a long meditative and mystical poem of religion, published 1935‑42). He writes very influential literary criticism. He also becomes a famous neo‑Christian cultural critic. In 1948 he was awarded Nobel Prize. But he never receives the knighthood that he desired.

B. W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden (1907‑1973): Biography: he was from an upper middle class English family (his father was a doctor); he graduates from Oxford. After briefly teaching school, he lives as a fashionable "leftist" intellectual in the 1930s. 1930: his first poetry book is published by Faber. It establishes Auden as leading young English poet: “Look, Stranger” “Lullaby” “This Lunar Beauty” and “Summer evening.” His political commitment culminates in his work for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War (1936). As a result, he decides writers should avoid politics. In Jan. 1939 he emigrates to the US (he becomes an American citizen in 1946). This leaving England on the eve of war, his "left‑wing" political stance, and his homosexuality (he kept it as a “public secret”) make Auden unpopular with many English. Nevertheless, he returns to England in 1956 as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. 1945‑1973: life of serious celebrity as "great Anglo‑ American poet."

C. Characteristics of Modernist literature.

a. Stream of (un)consciousness: attempt to record the continual workings of the unconscious mind. Since this is a pre‑verbal level, stream of consciousness writing often seems disjointed nonsense.

b. Elliptical style: leaves out connections and transitions, logical and linguistic.

c. Free verse: poetry that does not adhere to a formal pattern of rhyme scheme or meter. This is the dominant verse form of 20th century.

d. Dramatic monologue (owes more to the French than to Browning)

e. Investigation of unusual psychological states, often in regard to sexual behaviour.

f. His poetry is intentionally difficult verse, even obscure.

g. Sophisticated, often comic or self‑deprecating irony (a reaction to the moral poetry of earnest Victorians).

h. The themes of ennui, cultural degeneration, despair.

i. Specific images, concrete diction

j. Difficult allusions

k. Objective correlative: a term invented and popularized by Eliot, in a reaction to Victorian narrative poetry. Poetry was not to narrate a story, but record perceptions and sensations as they purportedly happen to the speaker, who for Eliot was not the poet. Poetry was to act as a telescope on a single event (walking the street, entering a room, meeting someone, eating lunch, or looking at a car) rather than as canvas to represent an entire story. Objective correlative was a set of events, things, or a situation that revealed/symbolized a psychological state, correlating with a particular emotion.

l. Elitist