3332 STUDY GUIDE

PERIOD ONE: ROMANTICISM (1798‑1832)

I. Robert Burns (1759‑96)

A. Biography

1. A Scottish peasant‑farmer: "cotter"

2. Writes poetry as he works as a farmer

3. 1786: Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect published

4. Becomes literary celebrity---("Heaven‑taught Plowman")---in Scotland

5. Becomes famous for his great indulgence in wine, women, and song

6. 1789: Appointed to Excise Office (Tax office)

7. 1791: Able finally to quit farming

8. 1795: Early enthusiasm for French Revolution sours: joins "Dumfries Volunteers" to fight French

9. 1796: Dies of heart disease (probably related to heavy drinking)

B. Literature

1. Known now chiefly for lyrics, such as those of Auld Lang Syne.

2. Romantic characteristics (most of them relate to the Romantic belief that society was rotten and nature [whatever was untouched by corrupt society] was good)

a. Wrote in common people's language ("dialect")

b. He also wrote about common people

c. His occupation as a farmer endorsed him as "close to nature" (rather than "book-learned")

d. He embodied the natural genius: "the Heaven-taught Plowman."

e. His love of drink and sex made him "unconventional."

f. Enthusiasm for French Revolution

II. William Blake (1757‑1827)

A. Biography

1. Son of London haberdasher

2. Only formal education was in art.

3. Works as engraver and painter.

4. Largely ignored during his lifetime, but in old age gains small reputation (as an artist).

5. Life is largely conventional, uneventful, anonymous.

6. Considered by noted contemporaries to be "mad" because his poems seemed to be "incoherent."

B. Literature

1. Almost completely unknown during his own lifetime.

2. "Discovered" in late 19th‑century

3. Today considered perhaps greatest of Romantics

a. Blake's individualistic, nihilistic view that the only truth is the one that you create: "I must create a

system or be enslaved by another man's" he once wrote.

4. Also he believed that "the Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art": he re‑interprets this code in a very individualistic way. For example, Blake celebrated Milton not because Milton forcefully represented the truth, but because Milton forcefully celebrated his truth.

5. Songs of Innocence and Experience: memorable, deceptively simple lyric poems.

6. Wrote several "epic" scale poems: Milton, The Four Zoas, Jerusalem, The Book of Urizen.

7. Romantic characteristics

a. Represents poet as misunderstood outsider

b. Represents poet as "visionary" who envisions a new truth through his imagination

c. Was an original thinker

d. Incisive social critic.

e. "Apocalyptic" (The French Revolution, America: A Prophecy)

III. William Wordsworth (1770‑1850)

A. Biography

1. Grew up in English Lake District: his enjoyment of natural splendors was to be a primary theme of his poetry.

2. Takes a degree from Cambridge, 1791.

3. 1791‑92: lives in revolutionary France: great supporter of revolution: "to be alive then, and in France, was heaven." Supporters of the revolution, especially in its more radical phases, were often attacked as Jacobins: radicals usually of lower classes who fuelled . Reign of Terror.

4. ca. 1793‑94: Suffers purported “emotional/philosophical” crisis due to to French Revolution becoming a quest for imperial aggrandizement/traditional power politics.

5. 1795: Receives a legacy from admirer: enough to retire to write poetry and live with sister his Dorothy.

6. 1795‑98: Becomes close friends with Coleridge, who styles him the "best poet of the age."

7. 1799: Returns to Lake Country (Dove Cottage). Continues to write first-rate poetry, popularizing his reverence for nature. Many of his poems are set in the Lake Country (Northwest England). He and his friends (Coleridge and Robert Southey, who becomes Poet Laureate) become famous as The Lake School of poets.

8. 1807: Most of his worthwhile poetry is finished; he also begins to drift away from early radicalism.

9. 1810: Becomes estranged from Coleridge

10. 1813: His political conservatism culminates in his being appointed Stamp Distributor for Westmoreland. Attacked by Byron and others (even the later Browning) as "a sell-out."

11. 1830s: The mental decline of his sister greatly affects him.

12. 1843: Becomes poet laureate (succeeds his friend and fellow Lake School poet Robert Southey).

13. 1850: dies of old age.

B. Literature

1. Early poetry culminates in publication of Lyrical Ballads, with Coleridge, in 1798. Notable: Tintern Abbey (pp. 1432-35) and the Preface (pp. 1435-48).

2. His long poem was to be entitled The Recluse. Only completed The Prelude, or the Growth of the Poet's Mind, his major long poem, in 13‑14 Books: it analyzes the growth of his own soul.

3. Romantic characteristics

1. Early political radicalism

2. He is the pre‑eminent "nature poet." Wordsworth, in his youth, popularized pantheism: the belief that God did not step away from his creation (as the deists believed) but that he stepped into his creation. Nature, uncorrupted by man, was holy and mysterious because it was the home of God. Nature was temple.

3. His emphasis on "common" language for poets (pp. 1438-40, text)

4. His emphasis on "common" people and objects as the proper subject for poetry.

5. His esteem for the "irrational" part of man

6. His "noble" view of Man

7. His visionary moments (as in Ode to Intimations of Immortality).

8. His emphasis on the poet's "imagination" (rather than on learning, taste, religion, or inspiration from an orthodoxly conceived God [for Wordsworth, God spoke not in churches but in Nature]).

9. His concern with internal psychological states, especially his own, as the poet.

10. His emphasis on the poet's own personal emotions (and life) as a primary theme of poetry

11. Many of these characteristics are expressed in Wordsworth's definition of poetry in the preface to Lyrical Ballads: "Poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity" (p. 1447): emotion (rather than thought), sponataneous (rather than learned), the poet (rather than things or society), the irrational (rather than reason). Wordsworth goes on to say that Nature is the primary stimulus for such emotions.

12. His infusion of the mystical into everyday life indicates what the Victorian Thomas Carlyle will call “natural supernaturalism.”

IV. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772‑‑1834)

A. Biography

1. Son of Devon Vicar.

2. Father dies, and he is sent to a London school, where he becomes a precocious student.

3. Temperamental, dreamy child, with power of "inspired talk" that never left him

4. Leaves Cambridge in 1794 without a degree (diverted by Revolution, heavy drinking, and unhappy love affair).

5. Becomes early radical "utopian."

6. 1795‑98: Friendship with Wordsworth culminates in Lyrical Ballads.

7. 1800: Joins Wordsworth in Lake District in northwest England

8. 1801: Becomes addicted to opium, which had been prescribed for his illness.

9. 1806: Broken, addicted, estranged from his wife

10. 1810: Bitter quarrel with Wordsworth (they later reconcile)

11. 1811‑1834: Lives by literary work (poems, essays, lectures, play, and his autobiography, Biographia Literaria).

12. 1816‑34: Lives with his doctor, who helps him to regain health by controlling his drug habit.

13. Becomes politically conservative ("Tory")

14. Often attacked, like Wordsworth, as a "sell-out": "Political turn‑coat, mystic humbug, plagiarist, drug‑addict, whose wrecked promise left only a handful of beautiful early poems."

B. Literature

1. Among his most successful poems, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kublai Khan, Christabel, "Aeolian Harp,"

"The Lime Tree My Bower," and "Frost at Midnight."

2. One of greatest English literary critics

3. Romantic characteristics

a. Concern with the exotic, weird, mysterious.

b. Exemplifies Romantic view of the poet as "haunted" and extraordinary.

c. Sense of blighted promise ("tragic" quality of his life).

d. His philosophical writings emphasize the creative, dominating role of the human mind in making reality (based on German Romanticism): "visionary" poet."

e. Melancholy

V. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788‑1824)

A. Biography

1. Son of fortune hunter (Captain Jack) and unusual Scotswoman

2. Father dies when Byron's three: brought up in poverty and Scottish Calvinism

3. At 10 unexpectedly becomes 6th Lord Byron (inherited it from distant relative)

4. Inherits Newstead Abbey (ancestral estate)

5, Attends Harrow and Cambridge

6. Lives life of fashionable Regency gentleman, one of "dissipation" (indulgence in drink and women). The Regency, generally, is the cultural-political period of England during the Napoleonic wars, when fashion and mores were set by man who became Prince Regent in 1811 when his father (George III) was declared insane. Aristocratic excess, especially in regards to sex, was the norm.

7. Begins writing verse as "gentlemanly pastime."

8. Publication of first part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: "I woke up one morning and found myself famous" because the poem. "Byronmania" sweeps England. The poet becomes incredibly popular, especially with women.

9. Becomes center of fashionable London Society. Affairs with several prominent society women. Though in House of Lords, he's a "radical" (sympathizes with French Revolution and defends victims [workers whose jobs have become obsolete because of new machines] of the new Industrial Revolution, which was radically transforming not only the English economy but English culture, villages disappeared and cities boomed, as England supposedly was divided into the very rich and the very poor..

10. To settle down, he marries a conventional heiress Annabella Milbanke. She deserts him a year later, causing a big scandal. Rumors range from his use of unconventional sexual technique on Milbanke (with which London Society sympathized) to incest with his half‑sister Augusta and homosexuality (with which London Society did not sympathize). He's almost completely ostracized, but the scandal fuels his already incredible celebrity.

11. 1816: Leaves the "tight little island," as he calls it; never returns.

12. Goes to Venice: has sex with, in his own phrase, "hundreds of young, healthy animals," most from lower classes.

13. Settles down with Teresa Guccioli, young wife of elderly Italian Count, who accepts Byron as her lover (such arrangements were conventional in Italy at this time).

14. Meets the Shelleys, in Pisa (1821). Their association is denounced, along with Shelley, by Robert Southey, as The Satanic School.

15. His involvement in radical Italian politics culminates in his involvement in the Greek war of independence from Turkey.

16. Dies of fever in Greece, 1824. England mourns loss of legend.

17. Byron---along with Shakespeare and Dickens---is the most international of English authors. He is one of the most influential writers of the 19^th century.

B. Literature

1.Childe Harold's Pilgimmage popularized possibly Byron's greatest contribution to literature, the Byronic Hero: a sensitive soul of immense potential---handsome, fascinating, of titanic abilities---who is at war with a hypocritical society that opposes him, usually successfully, because the "fallen angel" is bedeviled by a ruinous fault. Readers, even before the divorce scandal, identified Byron (despite the poet's disclaimers) with his sinister heroes.

2. Writes several "oriental tales" (narrative poems set in Asia or the mideast) and stage hits starring the Byronic hero.

3. His most successful poem, which he never finished, is un‑Romantic: a satire in the 18th‑century style, Don Juan: the love affairs of this hero allows Byron to satirize English society. Because of sexual content, it was banned by the Victorians.

C. Romantic characteristics

1. Concern with the weird, mysterious, and exotic (especially in sexual matters).

2. View of "hero" (rather than poet) as "haunted" and extraordinary outcast, tinged with "evil" (which is goodness blighted by society). Also, to the public, Byron embodied the misunderstood, outcast-poet.

3. Despite immense success and fame, sense of blighted promise about himself.

4. Melancholy: Byron was subject to intense depression, often expressed in his poetry

5. Celebrates "nature" (for example see several famous passages in Childe Harold).

6. His poetry also expresses his often "radical" political views (sympathy for oppressed, attacks on the powerful).

7. His view that society was corrupt.

8. His emphasis on the poet's own personal emotions (and life) as a primary theme of poetry

9. Creation of Byronic hero

VI. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792‑1822)

A. Biography

1. Eldest son of a family of gentry (well-to-do, respectable, quasi-aristocrats).

2. Supposed to be groomed for Parliament with his education at Eton and Oxford. But his radical non‑conformity and "sensitivity" gets him bullied and makes him a miserable child.

3. Expelled from Oxford for refusing to answer authorities’ questions about writing and distributing The Necessity of Atheism (sent it to bishops and Oxford authorities).

4. At 18, elopes with Harriet Westbrook, despite his view of marriage as a tyrannical restraint to individual freedom.

5. 1812: Becomes activist for Irish rights; also, back in London, becomes disciple of radical William Godwin.

6. 1812‑1818: Shelley abandons his wife for a new lover Mary Godwin. Shelley, guided by his principles, invites his wife to accompany their elopement. His wife later kills herself: Shelley gets a reputation as an unprincipled atheist, revolutionary, immoralist (though all his actions accord with his own idealism). Shelley's problematic, complex personality fueled the controversy: while being generous (he gave away considerable sums to friends), mild, and forbearing, he also could be irresponsible, cruel, hysterical, paranoid, hyper‑sensitive, inhuman, and humorless.

7. 1818: Leaves England permanently, with Mary Godwin, for Italy.

8. 1820: Pisan Circle forms, including Byron ("the Satanic School"). During a story telling contest, wife Mary Shelley begins Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. Prometheus was the titan who stole fire from the gods to save mankind, for which he was punished by Zeus. He was a popular Romantic motif.

9. 1822: Dies in a sailing mishap: he, supposedly, had previsioned his own death. In any case, according to witnesses, a violent storm arose; Shelley calmly refused to let his companion secure the boat, ensuring his own death. Others claim his boat was rammed.

10. Buried in Rome.

B. Literature

1. Skillful craftsman with poetic forms and meters.

2. Poetry

a. Queen Mab (1813): call for destruction of organized religion

b. Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude (1815): Tribulations of the poet (heavily auto‑biographical)

c. 1819: some of his best poems: Ode to the West Wind (lyric of hope that tyranny [political, religious, and cosmic] will one day be overthrown; and Prometheus Unbound (closet tragedy), lamenting and celebrating the archetypal rebel (Prometheus) who defies evil authority (Jupiter). After eons of suffering (Shelley argues) Prometheus will prevail (this is a vast departure from the original myth).

d. 1821: Adonais, an elegy for Keats; and prose A Defense of Poetry: "poets are unacknowledged legislators of the world."

5. “Mont Blanc”---nature is more complex, darker, and mysterious thanWordsworth’s version.

3. Romantic characteristics

a. Ultimate non‑conformist

b. View of poet as divine creator

c. Lurid private life

d. Political radical, revolutionary outcast

e. Nature lover

f. Rejection of neo‑classical literary standards

g. Preoccupation with the mysterious (often, even as youth, Shelley sought contact with inhabitants of another reality, such as ghosts).

h. His emphasis on the poet's own personal emotions (and life) as a primary theme of poetry: his political beliefs, his sufferings, or his own unique moral system.

i.Belief that society was rotten

j. Emphasis on the poet's imagination as a source of truth

VII. John Keats (1795‑1821)

A. Biography

1. Son of prosperous London stable owner

2. Father dies when Keats is 8, mother dies when he's 14; large inheritance tied up in courts for the rest of his life.

3. 1815: becomes apprentice to surgeon.

4. 1816: Abandons medicine for poetry, encouraged by radical author Leigh Hunt.

5. 1816: Begins rapid development as poet.

6. 1818: Attacked by powerful reviewers as a member (along with Hunt and William Hazlitt) of the "Cockney School" (cockneys are lower class Londoners); beset with financial problems; brother Tom dies of Tuberculosis; begins frustrated love affair with Fanny Brawne; contracts tuberculosis himself by caring for his brother.

7. 1821: moves to Italy to recover his health; dies and is buried in Rome; he writes his own epitaph: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Rumor spread that the sensitive man had been killed by a savage review of his poetry. Actually, Keats knew he would probably die if he tended his sick brothers, but he did it anyway.

B. Literature

1. Considered by many to be greatest of English Romantics.

2. His philosophy is still unclear: did he advocate withdrawing into a private dream world, created by the poet's imagination,? Or did he advocate an intenser interaction with the objective world through the use of the imagination and through developing one's sensibility?

3. His early poems include Endymion (1818), about the shepherd loved by the Moon: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever": Keats appears to celebrate a sensuous enjoyment of this world, not simply through the imagination, but through experience..

4. 1819: Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame sans Merci: exotic tales, perhaps allegories of the poet's life.

5. 1819: "Great Odes": especially "Ode to a Grecian Urn ("Beauty is truth, truth is beauty‑‑‑that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know") and "Ode to a Nightingale."

6. At his death, leaves The Fall of Hyperion‑‑‑meant to be his long, great work‑‑‑unfinished. Its theme not clear, but it seems another allegory about poets and poetry.

7. Romantic characteristics

a. Intense preoccupation with the special nature of poetry and the poet, especially the poet's imagination.

b. Tragic life, blighted promise

c.Poet as divine outsider thwarted by society: Keats becomes the embodiment, especially to the Victorians of the sensitive outsider (so sensitive he was killed by a hostile review) killed by an uncaring society.

d.His emphasis on the poet's own personal emotions as a primary theme of poetry.

VIII. Romantic Novelists

1.Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

A. Biography

a. As a youth, he was fascinated by Scottish folklore and legend, especially in ballads.

b. Trained in law, he received several important government appointments (he was a staunch Tory)

c. Partner in a bookseller whose bankruptcy ruins him financially.

d. Made baronet in 1820.

e. Refused poet laureateship, recommending Southey.

f. Only acknowledged his authorship in 1827.

B. Literature

a. One of the most popular European novelists of the century

b.Largely created the historical novel

c. Transformed the “dark ages: into Romantic, fairy-tale medievalism

d. Selected Works: Lay of the Last Minstrel (poem of middle ages), Ivanhoe (novel of middle ages), and the Waverley novels (set in Renaissance Britain).

2. Jane Austen (1775-1817)

A. Quiet life as daughter of country rector.

B. Wrote about the life knew of the genteel/gentry/country gentle-folk

C. Novels were popular with upper class readers and critics.

D. Sometimes critiqued as too limited (to issues of gentlefolk, such as marriage)

E. More than Scott, still considered a first-rate writer (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, for example).

IX. Other Romantics:

1.Charles Lamb (1775-1834): popular essayist (Essays of Elia)

2.William Hazlitt (1778-1830): Critic, journalist, lecturer, essayist. “. . . first English writer to make a large part of his livelihood from descriptive criticism” (Oxford Companion to English Literature).

3.Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859): Gentleman turned journalist, Confessions of an English Opium Eater: nightmares and visions produced by his opium addiction.

4. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859): journalist, essayist, poet-dramatist, “Cockney School” member whose radical politics got him jailed for “libeling” the Prince Regent, associate of Byron and Shelley. He often now is known primarily, rightly or wrongly, as the original of Harold Skimpole in Dickens’ Bleak House.

PERIOD TWO: VICTORIANISM (1832‑1914)

I. HISTORY AND LITERATURE

A. 1832: Great Reform Bill and the rise of the dominant Victorian political party, the Liberal Party (based on an alliance between the new industrialists and the expanding middle classes with more traditional and often aristocratic ruling classes: strongly capitalist and imperialist).

1. Abolishes rotten boroughs; extends vote to working middle‑ class; ends rule by aristocratic oligarchy established in 1688 and 1714. Before: of 7 million adults, only 435,000 could vote. Before, of 658 members of British Parliament, only 234 really elected. Duke of Wellington and Tories vote down the Bill. Riots across the country. Passed by House of Lords only when King William IV threatens to create new lords who will pass bill. Increases voting population by 50%; makes district lines more representative. Entire country celebrates.

2. Marks ascendance of commercial wealthy middle classes

B. 1837: Victoria becomes Queen: longest reign in English history.

C. 1840s: explosive, disturbing decade

1. Marked by riots and worker unrest (1848 saw revolutions across Europe and the publication of Marx's Communist Manifesto). In England, agitation centered on Chartism (a form of Labor Unionism) and repeal of Corn (wheat/grain) Laws, which protected English agriculture with high import tariffs on foreign grain. This made bread expensive in England.

a. Six points of Chartism

(1) universal manhood suffrage

(2) secret ballot

(3) annual parliamentary elections

(4) salary for members of Parliament

(5) redistricting to reflect power of industrial centers

(6) abolition of property qualifications for members of Parliament

b. Chartist Petitions to Parliament

(1) 1839: 1,283,000 signatures

(2) 1842: 3,317,000 signatures: 6 miles long, could not fit into House of Commons

(3) Petitions were ridiculed and ignored by aristocratic Tory landowners who still controlled Parliament, as well as by their opponents, the Industrialists who owned the factories.

c. Corn laws repealed in 1846 (with help of Industrialists)

d. Most of Chartist 6 points adopted by end of century.

2. Unprecedented "lifestyle" changes caused by technological and industrial changes, especially in regard to railways and a burgeoning empire.

3. Intellectual trends all undermine Christianity

a. Geology, as Sir Charles Lyell popularized in Principles of Geology (1830–33), reveals earth millions of years old (not 6000, as Bible indicates) and that earth evolved for millions more (not in 7 days, as Bible maintains).

b. Impact of Higher Criticism: emphasized Bible was formed as any other book, and the text is in many places "corrupt," that is, parts are missing, authorship is uncertain, and it is not completely reliable. Rational, "scientific," investigation of stories in Bible‑‑‑ such as Noah's Flood‑‑‑did not occur. The Bible, then, is not inspired and inerrant. Undermines basis of Protestantism.

c. Impact of Utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham (1748‑1832), James Mill (1773‑1836), and his son John Stuart Mill (1806‑73). "It is the greatest good of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." Everyone acts according to self‑interest, so government should facilitate subordination of self‑ interest to "interest of the community." Ultra‑rationalist, ultra‑materialist, strongly capitalist. Bentham dismissed literature (as well as much of religion) as non-useful delusion and nonsense, though J.S Mill modified this view, also defending individual liberty. While enhancing England's political system by ridding it of outdated, "feudal‑aristocratic" methods (its "radical" influence), utilitarianism also tended to measure everything by a narrow standard of usefulness, making life colorless, narrow, and stupid (its "philistine" impact).

d. Most important, Victorian capitalist economic theory also discredited Christianity. Economic laws ran along lines that operated according to what Darwin would call, in relation to biology, "the survival of the fittest." These laws were not to be tampered with or it would ruin the economy and send the world back to the dark ages. The principle by which citizens and their government should not attempt to interfere with the economy was called laissez‑faire). Pity and compassion for the weak often were seen as nonsense generated by superstition.

e. Rise of workers: Marx (1848): "Religion is opiate of the masses."

4. Responese to crises. Looking for answers, the troubled English often looked to its writers, though often insisting that these writers tell them what they wanted to hear. To reassure themselves these were the right answers, the English public made the writer a celebrity‑prophet‑oracle‑superstar‑sage‑"bard." It is with the Victorians that the writer achieves his highest cultural: the Writer as Sage Cultural Spokesman. The powerful political figure Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81), later made an Earl, started as a novelist. Alfred Tennyson (made a lord for his poetry) is perhaps the best example of this trend.

a. Thomas Carlyle (1795‑1881) Work! Exploit the opportunities afforded by England being the first industrial nation. He also is center point for reform of abuses of capitalism: society needs to be more of a community, not simply isolated individuals joined solely by the Utilitarian "cash‑nexus." Center instead should be organized around "great men," such as Cromwell was, and as enlightened, reformed capitalists should be. His philosophy is a mixture of German transcendentalism and Scottish Calvinism. (Carlyle is often criticized today for the irrational and "fascist" aspects of his writings.)

b. John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement (called Tractarians because they produced a series of pamphlets called Tracts for the Times (1833‑41): Base religion on dogmatic authority (like the Catholic Church) rather than on reason or being so undogmatic as to include everyone in the Anglican Church, no matter what their views on Christianity. Newman converts to Catholicism (1845), shattering the movement. Later he is made a Cardinal.

c. John Ruskin (1819‑1900) (and later Matthew Arnold: see below): morality is the basis for art, and both of them are essential to a healthy society (refuting Utilitarian claims that art and "beauty" are irrational and irrelevant). Later (1860) Ruskin causes a public outcry by also denouncing the Utlitarian bases of capitalist economics. Nevertheless, Ruskin's popularity rivalled that of poet Lord Tennyson's (though Ruskin was a painter who wrote about art and society). He strongly influenced the public, including the working class. Very popular, eloquent, "poetic" prose style. His ideas, though, are not systematic or profound, and he flits from subject to observation. Other ideas: art should be representation of real rather than ideal; art is a product of the whole man rather a talent of the man. Art then becomes a matter of morality rather than of "taste."; the artist's personality, then, is of the utmost significance, and the artist himself was a prophet‑sage type. Ruskin's morality was heavily Christian, though later he became "less narrow." Also, the biography of this "Bible Christian" is one of most peculiar in English Letters, revealing much about "Victorians" and their sages.

d. The Pre‑Raphaelites (who admired Italian Art of Raphael [1483‑1520] and those before him but not his many imitators). Attacking official imitation, they became official rebels (embodied in career of Dante Gabriel Rosetti). Flourished in 1850s. Followers of Ruskin in regard to art being an accurate description of the "real" rather than "ideal" nature. They also were heavily influenced by a "dreamy, other worldly" Keats and an idealized medievalism.

e. 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. Dickens often satirized them, but his closest allies on this point were the Evangelicals: people usually from the lower classes (though many made a lot of money in "trade") who were guided by fundamentalist religious beliefs. Many were the descendents of the puritan dissenters (Chapel non-conformists). Evangelicals within the Anglican Church were called "Low Church" people (as opposed to the aristocratic High Church party). These people believed in actively "ministering"; and often their ministering prompted them to ameliorate the brutal conditions often endured by the London poor.

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

(ii). 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). Dombey and Son (1847‑48) begins Dickens' mature period, which also includes David Copperfield (1849‑50), Bleak House (1852-53) and Tale of Two Cities (1859).

(iv). 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)

(v). 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).

D. Great Exhibition of 1851 in London: a "World's Fair" celebrating all nations', especially England's, industrial and technological achievements. The doubts of the turbulent 1840s are swept away by unprecedented prosperity.

E. 1850‑1880

1. Dominated by a middle‑class/bourgeoise "morality" that has been‑‑‑often accurately‑‑‑stereotyped as "Victorianism": great emphasis on conformity to appearance of adhering to expected behavioural norms concerning manners, dress, social intercourse, and sexuality. In many ways, it is puritanism reborn without the religion.

2. Fashionable religious stance is agnosticism: a belief that it is impossible to determine if there is a God, but probably there isn't.

3. An increasing exaltation of "Man"‑‑‑especially English "Man"‑‑‑as the highest form of life in the universe. There were no angels in heaven, but there were in England, e.g. "artists" and "men of letters" and sometimes simply women.

4. The works of Charles Darwin (Origin of the Species 1859 and Descent of Man 1871), a scientific writer, though they contained disturbing speculations about Man's "ape‑like" ancestors, actually confirmed the two strongest tendencies of post 1850 Victorianism: Optimism and a related belief in Progress. Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), scientific writer, was a popular and powerful public defender of Darwin’s theories. “Darwin’s Bulldog” coined the word “agnostic” to describe his own attitude toward religion. His theories were also applied to support capitalism, by Herbert Spencer. This view that society must conform to the universal law of "survival of the fittest" is known as Social Darwinism. It is also at this time that radical journalist Samuel Smiles becomes national celebrity/self-help guru with his book Self-Help (1859) and later Thrift and Conduct.

F. 1880‑1914

1. Marked by official unshaken confidence in itself

2. "Sun Never Sets on the British Empire"

3. Victorian literature concludes:

a. Oscar Wilde (1854‑1900), dominant creative genius of the 1890s, the most well‑known and talented leader of Aestheticism.

i. This period is often called the Yellow Nineties, after a leading arts magazine of the time, The Yellow Book. This publication often was a forum for Aestheticism: "art for art's sake." A reaction against the Victorian insistence that art must be useful, especially in regard to morality. Art, according to the aesthetes, should only be beautiful, and that was enough. Walter Pater (1839-1894), a tutor of classics at Oxford, is often cited as their chief source, though Pater might have been more “Victorian” than the Aesthetes realized. Pater’s works, Studies in the Renaissance (1883), a collection of critical essays, and Marius the Epicurian (1885), an historical novel, emphasized beauty and enjoyment at the expense of truth and righteousness.

ii. An extreme form of aestheticism was decadence. The decadents believed that beauty was "holy" because of the sensation that it produced. They then decided that this exquisite sensation could and should be acquired through other exotic means, such as opium, rare liquors, exotic drugs, and illicit forms of experience, especially in regard to sex. The title character of Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray is a good example of a decadent.

iii. Wilde himself supposedly was a secret decadent. When he was imprisoned for “public indecency” amid rumors of sodomy, which fresh laws had criminalized, he had five "hits" still playing on the London stage. He wrote plays (The Importance of Being Earnest), short stories ("Lord Arthur Savile's Crime"), novels (The Picture of Dorian Gray), fairy tales ("The Happy Prince"), and poetry ("The Ballad of Reading Gaol"). He dies in Paris, after his release from prison, in 1900, a pariah. He's said to also "to have made dying Victorianism laugh at itself. And it may be said to have died of the laughter."

b. Thomas Hardy (1848‑1928)

i. 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).

ii. 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 ends his novel The Mayor of Casterbridge (who dies broken and poverty stricken after a nasty series of events) with a quote from King Lear that summarizes his view: "As flies to wanton boys, so are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport."

iii. 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).

3. Literature 1900‑14, supposedly, by post‑war standards (Modernism), stale, worn‑out: "Edwardian" and "Georgian" (for monarchs during this time ) are usually used pejoratively (negatively) when applied to literature. However, many entertaining and adept writers of first class literature, if not geniuses, emerged at this time: George Bernard Shaw, George Gissing, H.G. Welles, A.E. Housman, G.K. Chesterton, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, John Buchan, and John Galsworthy. Never had the literary scene appeared so brilliant.

4. Cultural issues

a. Socialism: status of lower, working classes

b. Suffragettes: led by the Pankhursts, women and their brothers battled, often violently, for “votes for women,” which was not granted completely until 1928.

c. Irish question: Independence?

G. 1914‑18: World War I "The Great War": Though England won, the war exploited processes, already at work before the war, to destroy Victorianism. The official victory was celebrated and cultural shifts were ignored by the status quo, but the status quo was replaced or died and radical changes in thinking were consolidated.

II. Authors (included in Norton Anthology)

A. Alfred Tennyson (1809‑1892)

1. Life

a. Son of alcoholic, unbalanced clergyman, in Lincolnshire. His 11 brothers and sisters are also somewhat strange. He later recalls that he sometimes would go to the churchyard and beat on the sod, wishing himself under it. (Father was embittered over inheritance going to younger brother).

b. At Cambridge, he wins Chancellor's Medal for poetry (1829); he also joins the "Apostles" along with his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, a leading youth at Cambridge who becomes engaged to Tennyson's sister.

c. Early volume of poetry, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) criticized as obscure, overly subjective, escapist. Tennyson was influenced in this direction by Keats. His friend R.C. Trench warns him, "We cannot live in art Tennyson."

d. 1833‑1850: Long climb to the top: Hallam dies in 1833, disturbing deeply Tennyson. Falls in love with Emily Sellwood, but is too poor to marry. He begins to refine his poetry to better suit Victorian needs. This culminates in elegy for Hallam, In Memoriam (1850).

e. 1851: Immense success of In Memoriam leads to his appointment as Poet Laureate.

f. 1851‑1892: Tennyson becomes rich and famous, a Victorian Prophet, Sage, Oracle, Celebrity‑‑‑or, as detractors maintain, mouthpiece. Representative work is "Charge of the Light Brigade": celebration of soldiers who "do their duty" in a hopeless/”wrong orders” battle in the Crimean War (1853-56), the major Victorian-British war (a costly thwarting of Russia’s taking over Turkey). Also, Idylls of the King, Tennyson's treatment of the Arthurian legends, with Arthur strongly resembling Prince Albert (Victoria's German husband).

g. Tennyson’s response to the religious crisis: strong, abiding faith, not unlike the faith of those who embodied Muscular Christianity, a movement that stressed, like now the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the wholesome manliness of Christianity (rather than it being a religion for the weak, worn-out, and effete): “The idea was controversial. For one example, a reviewer mentioned "the ridicule which the 'earnest' and the 'muscular' men are doing their best to bring on all that is manly", though he still preferred "'earnestness' and 'muscular Christianity'" to eighteenth-century propriety. For another, a clergyman at Cambridge University horsewhipped a friend and fellow clergyman after hearing that he had said grace without mentioning Jesus because a Jew was present. A commentator said, "All this comes, we fear, of Muscular Christianity" (Wiki). The Reverend Charles Kingsley, though he did not quite like it, was identified with this outlook (1819-75). Kingsley’s most well-known work includes Alton Locke (1849), Westward Ho! (1855), The Water-Babies (1863) and his clash with John Henry Newman.

g. His reputation declines in aftermath of disintegration of Victorianism. W. H. Auden‑‑‑modernist poet‑‑‑called Tennyson the most musical of all English poets and also the stupidest: he supposedly knew everything about melancholy and nothing about anything else. His reputation has been rebuilt by scholars.

2. Works

a. Early works‑‑such as "Mariana"‑‑‑are highly evocative (usually of melancholy) but don't "say anything." Tennyson was forced by criticism to turn from inward lyricism to speaking to and for Victorians on modern issues.

b. 1833‑1850: Tennyson treats typical Victorian questions of work and struggle ("Ulysses"), the need to commit oneself to the issues of modern industrial society ("The Lotus‑Eaters" and "Locksley Hall"), and the crisis of religious faith (In Memoriam). These poems tend to betray a tension between a Victorian call to duty and a deep‑seated desire to withdraw into a private world.

c. In Memoriam (1833‑1850)

i. Tennyson's masterpiece, one of the greatest longer poems in English.

ii. Genres

(a) elegy

(b) theodicy (explains "ways of God")

(c) lyric ("swallow‑flights of song" Tennyson called them)

(d) Victorian "crisis of faith" literature

iii. Prologue, 131 Sections, Epilogue

(a) Prologue

(i) Affirmation of faith before poem of doubt relates attainment of that faith

(b) Body of poem built about three Christmases

(i) Section 30: "sadly"

(ii) Section 78: "calmly"

(iii) Section 105: "strangely"

(c) Themes

(i) Scientific discoveries in biology and geology merge with senseless death of a good friend to raise a question which preoccupied the Victorians: does an omnipotent, all‑ loving God control our lives? Does man have an eternal soul? See especially sections 54‑56.

(ii) Tennyson's response:

(1) Victorian optimism: man is part of universal progress; one's duty is to strive and conquer

(2) Tennyson also had mystic moments when he felt the soul of his dead friend: "proof" of an afterlife that reassured the worried highly materialistic Victorians.

(3) See especially sections 106, 118, 131 (and Prologue, 1, 21, 27, Epilogue) for the poem's themes.

3. Victorian characteristics

a. Optimist (despite his melancholy): he believed in progress and the unshakeable foundations of Victorian society.

b. Concern with social issues

i. Rise of the working class

ii. Distrust of aristocracy

c. Concern with religious doubts caused by discoveries in science and rise of materialism.

d. The commitment to struggle and faith in victory ("stiff upper lip" and "doing one's duty")

e. His belief in the individual serving society, even at the cost of his individualism ("Victorian Conformity")

f. Persistent anxiety that, despite outward confidence, things were amiss: his "closet melancholia"

g. Motto: "Self‑reverence, self‑knowledge, self‑ control"

B. Robert Browning (1812‑89)

1. Biography

a. Born to a London non‑conformist family

b. Because of his religion, he is largely educated at home (father, a bank clerk, had a library of 6000 volumes)

c. Lives at home until he's 34, studying and writing poetry.

d. 1826: discovers Shelley: tremendous influence, intellectually and personally (he temporarily becomes an atheist, free‑thinker, and radical): he quickly returns to Victorian version of fundamentalism, though still admiring Shelley.

e. 1837‑46: writes staged, but not very successful plays. Also writes first great‑‑‑but largely unnoticed‑‑‑ poetry, heavily influenced by drama: Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances (1847).

f. 1846: elopes with the famous poet Elizabeth Barrett, a semi‑invalid bullied by her father. They elope to Italy, for her health and to escape from her father. Browning later calls Italy "my university."

g. 1861: returns to London after wife dies.

h. 1868‑69: Public success finally secured with Ring and the Book, a very long poem.

i. 1869‑89: Life of celebrity poet/Victorian sage, though Browning's gregarious, down‑to‑earth, pugnacious optimism makes him a somewhat "unliterary" literary man. His poetry becomes somewhat lacklustre.

j. 1881: First Browning Society founded: Browning becomes very popular as the "philosopher" of "hope"

k. 1889: Burial in Westminster Abbey, 1889.

2. Literature

a. Early poetry heavily influenced by Keats, and, especially, Shelley. He was criticized as "vague, obscure." His first book , Pauline (1832‑33), is a Shelleyan confessional poem that does not sell a single copy. Browning later disowns the work, calling it "an eyesore."

b. Long narrative poem Sordello (1840) derisively dismissed as incomprehensible by critics and readers.

c. 1836‑46: Changes from "confessional" poetry to dramatic poetry. Distinguishes between poetry of what men do (dramatic‑‑objective‑‑Shakespearean) and poetry based on expressing what the poet is (confessional‑‑subjective‑‑ Shelleyan)

d. 1840s‑50s: Art matures in his writing of his dramatic monologues, on which his reputation is based.

e. Dramatic monologues first appear in Dramatic Lyrics (1842): dismissed as difficult, obscure, "un‑Victorian" and "coarse"

e. Men and Women (1855): considered now his best volume of poetry: keen insights to psychology, often abnormal psychology. Reveals Browning's great zest for examining the lives of "ordinary" men and women, which recurs throughout his poetry. However, his work is still coldly received by the Victorians.

f. Dramatis Personae (1865): more dramatic monologues: also shows again his great skill in evoking an historical place and time (usually Renaissance Italy). Starts a trend toward admiring Browning.

g. The Ring and the Book (1868): Browning's long poem (over 21,000 lines). Different perspectives, presented in dramatic monologues, on a lurid Italian murder.

h. Later work (1868‑89) considered inferior.

3. Victorian characteristics

a. Very "optimistic" ("Rabbi Ben Ezra," "Abt Vogler"): though perhaps his "cheerful optimism" has been seen as more superficial than it really was.

b. Concern with challenges to religious faith, especially from science ("Caliban Upon Setebos"): Browning energetically rebuts these doubts.

c. Energetic, pugnacious, englishness in much of his work

d. Dickensian interest in bizarre characters: Renaissance artists, children, corrupt churchmen, murderers, madmen.

e. Often seen as the "intellectual poet" (opposed to Tennyson, as the "poet of feeling") and "psychological poet," who had all the matter while Tennyson had all the art.

f. His development of dramatic monologue, use of colloquial diction, and use of "non‑poetic" material made him the most influential Victorian poet for modern poets.

C. Matthew Arnold (1822‑88)

1. Biography

a. Son of Thomas Arnold, well‑known education innovator as headmaster at Rugby and leading clergyman of "Broad Church" Anglicans.

b. Attends Oxford: poses as a "dandy," possibly in reaction to his father's reputation as a serious man. (Though Arnold claimed that he thought highly of his Rugby education). Wins prestigious Newdigate Prize for Poetry (1843), elected Fellow of Oriel College (1845), later Professor of Poetry (1857).

c. 1847: becomes secretary to Lord Lansdowne

d. Publishes Strayed Reveller, his first volume of poetry (1849)

d. 1851‑86: marries, becomes inspector of schools (England had a new national school system for the masses/middle classes): he travels around England, examining schools: tedious and hard labor. Also during this time lectures and writes, becoming England's foremost cultural critic.

e. 1857‑67: holds part‑time position as Professor of Poetry at Oxford

f. 1883 and 1886: lecture tours of America (lecture tours were a common way for "important men" to make "big money").

2. Literature

a. 1850s: poetry appears, dealing with loss and isolation ("Forsaken Merman," "Isolation"), the menace of a world where religious faith was no longer possible ("Dover Beach"), and pessimism, regret, and sterility of modern age ("Empedocles on Etna")

b. 1860s: abandons poetry (because he thought poetry was supposed to encourage rather than to discourage). Writes literary criticism; takes time off from grueling inspections of schools to lecture to become England's foremost cultural critic

c. 1870s: his literary criticism merges with his social criticism "to tame wild beast of Philistinism."

i. Arnold believed that if the rising middle classes were effectively to control society, they must become more intelligent. Instead they were "philistines," a word that Arnold popularized in England: ". . . the vulgarity, the meddlesomeness, and the grossness of the British multitude."

ii. Becoming more intelligent meant exchanging the Bible (which, though it had served well during its time, was outdated) for Culture (literature, art, philosophy‑‑‑"the best that has been said, done, and written in the world": High Seriousness: The "righteousness" of the Bible must be emphasized. But miracles, prophecies, and other supernatural evidence must be de‑emphasized, re‑ interpreted, or rejected. Traditional, dogmatic, literal Christianity was no longer possible in light of Reason and Science. Yet Arnold believed that the "civilizing" nature of religion should be preserved; he advocates rejection of dogma and superstition for a religion guided by reason, common sense, and intelligence (mental agility) based upon a fluid "culture" rather than on "rigid" religious dogma. Intelligence: "free play of the mind on all subjects" should be the goal.

d. 1880s: returns to literary criticism.

3. Victorian characteristics

a. Intense concern with social and cultural change

b. Belief in "art" and "culture" as pillars of society

c. Art must be moral (but not in a narrow‑minded way)

d. His skepticism about Christianity: agnosticism‑‑ the belief that since the existence of God cannot be determined the subject should not concern us‑‑‑became very fashionable among intellectual and cultural leaders. They regretted the loss of faith, but saw no alternative, since religion had been refuted/replaced by "Science" and "Reason" and "Experience"

D. Other Victorian Poets

a.Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864). Vivid, forceful personality, best known perhaps as the original of Boythorn in his friend Dickens’ Bleak House. He wrote Latin poetry, and his English poetry is often based on Greek and Roman Models, especially epigrammatic elegance.

b. Coventry Patmore (1823-96): Known for one poem, The Angel in the House (1854-62), a long sentimental tribute to his recently deceased wife, which, as your textbook notes, celebrates the notion that while the wife is the angel, the husband is the lord.

c. Lewis Carroll (1832-1898): Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Deacon in Anglican Church and Lecturer in Mathematics at Oxford, master of Light and Nonsense Verse: Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (1871).

d. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89): At Oxford when Arnold was Professor of Poetry, his tutor was Walter Pater. Converts to Catholicism in 1866 and becomes a Jesuit priest. His poetry was not published until 1918, when he was praised as an early Modernist, by Modernists, because of his “sprung rhythm,” a metrical form that he invented and that seems to be free verse (though it isn’t). “Sprung rhythm is a poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables” (Wiki).[

e. Robert Bridges (1844-1930): Poet Laureate (1913-30) during the rise of Modernism; mentor and much later publisher to Hopkins.

f. Edward Fitzgerald (1809-83): Country-gentleman scholar, his loose translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Persian, ca 1100) became a popular masterpiece, in part because of its backing by the Pre-Raphaelites. Fitzgerald is an example of the man of letters: “gentleman” intellectual in the arts scene, often independent (not a professional teacher/professor), and often having an income that is not primarily derived from literary activity. Such persons write mainly criticism (and edit, publicly lecture, translate, etc. ) and generally engage in work that now is usually performed by university professors. Another example is Thomas Macaulay (1800-59), primarily a powerful Liberal political figure, but also a popular essayist and historian. A final example is the Pre-Raphaelite industrialist-socialist William Morris (1834-96): poet, romance writer, furniture designer, essayist, lecturer, arts and crafts enthusiast. His most memorable work might be News from Nowhere (1890), a socialist-utopian vision of the future.

g. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909): From a distinguished family, he was of small and bizarre appearance with strong tendencies towards alcoholism. His best work was written early, in revolt against Tennyson and poetry supposedly written for women and children. Swinburne, attacking “the pale Galilean,” celebrated a deeply sensual paganism. His best work includes Atalanta in Calydon (1865), “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866), and Ave Atque Vale (1868).

E. Other Victorian Novelists (some not included in Norton Anthology)

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. 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.

E. Victorian Drama: The best plays, except for Wilde’s, are what now are first rate TV series and movies

a. Sir Arthur Pinero (1855-1934): drama based on “ ‘possible people doing improbable things’” as in a modern TV sitcom, though later turning to sentimental drama. His most well-known plays are probably Trelawny of the Wells (1898) and The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893).

b. Gilbert and Sullivan: The most enduring of Victorian dramatists, they wrote satiric comic operas, ridiculing Tennyson, Wilde, the British navy, melodrama, and Japan. Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote the music, and Sir William Gilbert (1836-1911) wrote the witty verses (the libretto). The Mikado (1885), H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), and The Pirates of Penzance (1879) are just a few of their popular works.

c. See Oscar Wilde.

F. W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats (1865‑1939)

a. Biography

1. Son of a famous portrait painter, the Anglo-Irish John Butler Yeats

2. 1890s: Pre‑Raphaelite, aesthete, founding member of the Rhymers' Club in London. Later refers to himself as among "the last Romantics."

3. 1900 ca.: Becomes intensely involved in Irish nationalist politics. His poetry turns to Irish folk themes and traditions. Helps found Irish National ("Abbey") Theatre, for which he wrote plays.

4. 1900‑1939: Intense interest in spiritualism (the paranormal, even "occult"), especially spirits, automatic writing, and mystical philosophies.

5. 1922‑28: Senator in Irish Free State.

6. 1923: Nobel Prize for Literature.

7. 1939: Dies in France.

b. Poetry

1. Early poetry is "Romantic": emulates especially Shelley and pre‑Raphaelites.

2. 1900 ca.: Turns to simpler style and Irish themes. Yet these more austere poems often express a complex mystical philosophy that Yeats developed through contact with "the spirit world." Imitates Blake (whom he helped popularize) in creating his own unique philosophical system.

3. ". . . beyond question the greatest 20th‑century poet of the English language" (Norton Anthology, 2267).

F. Edwardian-Georgian authors

f. G.K. Chesterton (1834-1936): Another entertaining “genius” of the “great tradition” of the man-of-letters: 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 tradition of 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.

h. 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”).

i. A.E. Housman (1859-1936): From 1892 to 1936, a professor of Latin at University College in London then Cambridge. His poetry often is in the tradition of Latin lyrics: short, graceful, somber, and epigrammatic. A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922) are all he published. He also is an interesting example of what it was like for some to be gay in late Victorian/Edwardian-Georgian Britain.

j. World War One writers: The War Poets, soldier poets who began as conventionally Georgian celebrants of patriotism (e.g. Rupert Brooke, d. 1915) but ended as embittered quasi‑modernists (Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, the most significant of this group). Probably the best-written English novels about the war are Welles’ Mr. Britling Sees it Through (very intelligent propaganda); Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924-28, and recently a miniseries), an often grim, dispassionate account; and the poet’s Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress (1928-1936), about his becoming a war-hero then a conscientious objector---his letter refusing to return to duty was read in Parliament.

PERIOD THREE: MODERNISM (1914‑Pres)

I. T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (1888‑1965)

A. Biography

1. Born in St. Louis; descended from prominent New England Puritans and educators.

2. After graduating from Harvard, goes to France and then settles in London.

3. 1914: 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.

4. 1917‑25: Works for Lloyds Bank. During this time he publishes perhaps his best work. He also edits influential literary magazines and becomes a tentative satellite of Bloomsbury.

5. 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.

6. 1926: 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).

7. 1926‑1965: writes verse plays that are inferior in quality to his non‑dramatic poetry but successfully produced, especially in late 40s and 50s. He writes very influential literary criticism. He also becomes a famous neo‑Christian cultural critic.

8. 1935/38: In effect, commits his wife to a mental hospital.

9. 1948: Awarded Nobel Prize.

10. 1965: Dies. Eliot concludes a life that resonates with breakdowns, "nerves," hospitalizations, "bad health," heavy drinking, avowals of his love for music‑hall culture, and the "mystery" (Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot: A Life p. 233) of his treatment of his wife, and, as commentators also point out, the misery and suffering she had caused him.

B. Literature

1. According to the introduction to Matthew Arnold in the Norton Anthology, Eliot's poetry "provides a record of a sick individual in a sick society" (2075). Eliot, however, claimed to reject Romanticism (in which a poet expresses his individuality). Eliot wrote that poetry was not expression of, but escape from personality.

2. Eliot was a radical innovator in English poetry, which, in 1914, was very "English." Eliot popularizes French poetic techniques (developed by Mallarme, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue).

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.

3. John Donne: Donne was a neglected poet before Eliot and the modernists re‑popularized him. These techniques Eliot said he derived from Donne:

a. Specific images, concrete diction

b. Metaphysical conceit: Reacting to the commonplace nature imagery of the Georgians, Eliot often used metaphors based on his knowledge of forgotten forms of literature or difficult aspects of 20th‑century philosophy.

c. A model for thinking, intellectual poetry

d. Difficult allusions

e. The use of dramatic monologue in general.

4. 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. Skeptics have charged that the concept is meaningless.

5. The Wasteland (1921‑22)

a. Because of the characteristics listed above, the poem was initially ridiculed or dismissed as unreadable by many critics.

b. It, however, quickly becomes probably the most influential English poem of the 20th‑century. Its message of cultural decay appealed to a post‑WWI England. Eliot's critique of Victorianism‑‑‑ artistically and culturally‑‑‑was in many ways in the right time at the right place. "Victorianism" was in many ways discredited by the badly botched victory of WWI. Actually, all the pre-war powers lost.

c. The poem attracted the interest of reactionaries who blamed England's woes on the excesses of Victorian liberalism and were convinced that to restore a prosperous order, the country should be ruled by elites. Eliot's poetry‑‑‑in the most avant‑garde fashion‑‑‑confirmed the moral bankruptcy of Victorian liberalism (the Liberal party‑‑‑the great party of Victorianism‑‑‑fragmented with WWI). Modernism, in fact, in many ways becomes a formidable force for intellectual Fascism, a powerful political movement that emphasized a popular leader at the head of a strong government as a response to the problems created by WWI, which was blamed on middle-class liberals, socialists, and weakling aristocrats. The co‑writer of The Wasteland, and a founder of modernism, Ezra Pound broadcasts for the fascists during WWII and is later charged with treason by the USA, escaping with a plea of "insanity." Eliot, though ostensibly too aesthetic to be political, becomes a powerful cultural symbol of respectable reaction. Another modernist, the artist/writer Wyndham Lewis, was also known for alertness to the threat (to art, "culture," political stability) that he perceived in an English working class stirred by Bolshevism and swayed by labor unions, and in a middle class that was perceived as the carcass of Victorian philistianism. Bolshevism is a name for the radical Marxism of Lenin’s Bolsheviks, who had overthrown the Tsar to create the Soviet Union. Marxism---“Scientific Socialism”---was based on the writings of philosopher-scholar-actvist Karl Marx (1818-1883), who argued that history was based on a class struggle that must be won by the workers who will create a dictatorship of a proletariat without private property. Lewis founded the Vorticist movement, heavily indebted to the European (especially Italian) movement Futurism. Started right before WWI and active until WWII, Futurists celebrated action and movement, the more violent and faster the better, whether in cars or planes or any other new technology. Many Futurists became enthusiastic Fascists.

d. The Wasteland uses the mythic‑symbolism of the Grail Quest/Fisher King to recount in flashes of related vignettes the sterility of modern life. Eliot and Pound present this theme with memorable free‑verse, arcane allusions, telescopic imagery and episodes, and some foreign phrases. The ability to detect fundamental (archetypal) patterns in a work of art is known as archetypal criticism, which is a type of Formalism/Structuralism, a perspective that stresses the “skeleton”/basic structure of art rather than its surface content (for example, nearly all stories have the basic form of antagonist vs. protagonist, with variations like Father vs Son, Hero vs Nature, Savior vs. Society, etc.). For example, the The Wasteland's representation of the sterility of modern spirituality enacts a pattern that can also be found in medieval stories of the Grail Quest, which in turn enacts a pattern that can be found in pre‑literate stories of a mythical Fisher King. This emphasis on the patterns that structure or generate the work‑‑‑ rather than on how the works relate to society or the authors what they "mean"‑‑‑is called structuralism (in linguistics, structuralism is the application of the idea of generating sub‑structure to literature).

II. James Joyce (1882‑1941)

A. Biography

1. Born in Dublin. Irish Catholic, both of which he later attacked.

2. "By 1902, when he received his A.B. degree, he already was committed to a career as exile and writer" (textbook, page 2487).

3. He goes to Paris (1902), then back to Dublin (for his mother's funeral), then to Switzerland, and then back to Paris again, where he lives from 1920‑40.

4. Despite fame as a writer, he ekes out a living as a language teacher, receiving extra money from an array of sponsors. He also is subject to physical ailments, including loss of the sight in an eye. In his later years, he's troubled by daughter's mental illness.

5. Ulysses (usually considered his best work, and the best novel in English of the 20th century) was banned in 1922 as obscene in England and America. In 1933, a US District Court decided the book was not obscene.

6.He reputedly had a difficult but amiable personality. Also he was a heavy drinker and wrote, purportedly, while he was drunk.

B. Literature

1. Dubliners (1914): compelling stories, traditionally told, of Dubliners. It was ublished after great delays. The original publisher destroyed the work because he feared libel suits.

2. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): a less traditionally told novella.

3. Ulysses (1918, 1922)

a. Vast and revolutionary (in form) novel. The novel recounts one day in Dublin (June 16, 1904). The novel is loosely based on The Odyssey (Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus). In The Odyssey, Odysseus is reunited with his son Telemachus. In Ulysses, the father‑figure Leopold Bloom is (re)united with a son‑ figure, Stephen Dedalus. Many of the incidents in the book are comic/ironic/profound translations of incidents in The Odyssey.

b. The Norton Anthology summarizes the book on pp. 2488-90.

c. Joyce represents a common day's life in Dublin with complexity, subtlety, vivid and exact detail.

d. Radical literary innovations

i. Extensive use of stream of consciousness: attempt to record the pre‑verbal level of thinking makes it difficult.

ii. Much of the novel anticipates surrealism (formally founded in Paris, 1924). The novel switches from scene to scene without connection, transition, or comment. Normal logical sequence and definition vanishes. Reality becomes dreamlike, working on several levels and from several perspectives simultaneously (the levels of modern Dublin and ancient Greece being only the most obvious). Instead of meaning disappearing, it multiplies, freed from the restrictions of logic. No definitive perspective is created, as the work represents the Relativism of the new physics based on Einstein’s theories (the laws of physics are not uniform but depend on time and place and factors such as speed-velocity). This use of myth also points to Formalism/Structuralism, Also, the layering of a scene with multiple perspectives links Joyce with Cubism, a visual arts movement headed by Pablo Picasso. Ulysses also includes elements of Dadaism, a WWI era (1915-early 1920s) arts movement that emphasized the arts as a toy, with emphasis on the child-like, the random, the anti-logical. For example, the novel’s first page is mostly the letter “S.”

iii. Joyce had a greater linguistic talent than probably any British writer of English since Dickens. His exuberant use of words to represent the unconscious and the flux of daily experience revealed the language's enormous, untapped potential.

iv. Joyce's record of living includes sexual impulses and visits to the bathroom. These caused the book to be denounced as obscene.

III. Bloomsbury

A. Bloomsbury is a fashionable area in central London that includes the University of London and the British Museum. From 1905 until WWII, "Bloomsbury" often denoted an extremely influential avant‑garde group of artists/writers/thinkers who became identified with the area, often meeting at Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury house. These people included Lytton Strachey (biography), J.M Keynes (economics), Clive Bell (art critic), Roger Fry (art critic), and E.M. Forster (novelist). These rich, respectable people were in rich, respectable revolt against "Victorianism." Virginia Woolf, a writer, was the daughter of the typical Victorian man‑of‑ letters, Sir Leslie Stephen. Not really modernist artists, they helped popularize modernists, such as Eliot and Joyce.

B. They were especially instrumental in promoting Freud. The complete edition of Freud's works is edited by L. Strachey's brother. Many of the Bloomsburyians, though respectable, were also unconventional sexually.

IV. W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden (1907‑1973)

A. Biography

1. He was from an upper middle class English family (his father was a doctor); he graduates from Oxford.

2. After briefly teaching school, he lives as an official "leftist" intellectual in the 1930s.

3. 1930: his first poetry book is published by Faber. It establishes Auden as leading young English poet. He also writes several political plays, inferior to his poetry. The “Auden gang” included many talented writers: Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day‑Lewis, and Stephen Spender, probably the most important of Auden’s associates. His political sympathies culminates in his work for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War (1936). The Republicans lost. Auden, witnessing Republicans (sponsored by Stalin). Thought they were as bad as the Fascists. Never a political type, he abandons politics for role as private, though famous, intellectual.

4. In Jan. 1939 he emigrates to the US (he becomes an American citizen in 1946). This leaving England on the eve of war, his satire on the British upper and lower classes, and his homosexuality (“an open secret”---known by the literary world but not discussed by anybody), make Auden unpopular with many English. Nevertheless, he returns to England in 1956 as Professor of Poetry at Oxford.

5. 1945‑1973: life of serious celebrity as "great Anglo‑ American poet."

B. Literature

1. Extremely skillful at versification, both traditional and free verse.

2. His early radicalism, which produced satire and comic verse aimed at the remnants of Victorianism, gives way to modernist philosophical observation. Also, the implied Christianity of his 1930s verse becomes an overt official Christian element in his later work. This later work is often seen as inferior.

3. Modernist characteristics

a. His early verse presents England as an industrial and psychological (rather than Eliot's spiritual) wasteland. Auden's initial solutions often draw upon Marx and Freud. Freud was the psychiatrist‑philosopher who founded psychoanalysis. Freud emphasized the unconscious motivation for behavior. This unconscious (reposited in the Id) was often filled with thoughts and desires that the conscious (the ego) refused to admit into consciousness because of the personality's exalted self‑concept (the super‑ego). These repressed thoughts and desires were usually of a sexual nature. Their repression caused psychological dysfunction (neurosis [mild disorder] or psychosis [serious disorder]).

b. The tone of his poetry is "tough," terse, serious, ironic, and unsentimental. The stance of the Victorian Sage is rejected for that of a citizen of a modern industrial state. Artist as Hero gives way to the Poet as Technician.

c. Variations of dramatic monologue and metaphysical wit/conceit. Auden's metaphors are often new and striking.

d. An emphasis on articulating perceptions and sensations rather than on story‑telling.

e. Concern with sexual behaviour.

4. His poetry is more varied but also more uneven than Eliot's (he wrote much more poetry than Eliot).

5. Auden's best poetry: "Look, stranger" (p. 2686) and "Lullaby" (pp. 2690-91); and "This Lunar Beauty," "Casino," "Out on this lawn I lie in bed," and "Oxford" (not included in the book).

6. His poetry was widely imitated.

V. Dylan Thomas (1914‑1953)

A. "Welsh‑poet," who couldn't read or write Welsh.

B. His poetry seems very "Romantic" when compared to other major 20th‑century poets, i.e. his poetry seems an expression of his own views and feelings often using evocative nature imagery.

C. He also lived the role of "the reckless Romantic poet": a comparatively uneducated poet from the wilds of Wales who drank hard and pursued women and wrote about it. As the textbook states (p. 2698), some people were amused by this behaviour, while others saw a sort of rustic oaf acting out his fantasy of "the artist's life."

D. His poetry readings were purportedly "magic"; recordings are available in many bookstores.

E. His poetry in many ways defies description. His vast use of the language is not as capacious as Joyce's, but sometimes as effective.

F. He wrote only about 100 poems.

VI. Other Earlier Modernists

A.Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)

1. Often considered a “late modernist” because his major works---Endgame (1955-57) and Waiting for Godot (1948/49)---were written after WWII.

2. From affluent Anglo-Irish middle-class, lived like his friend Joyce in Paris for most of his life (Waiting for Godot first being written in French).

3. Works as decorated member of French Resistance during WWII.

4. In 1945 changed his concept of art: Joyce had taken “art as knowing” as far as it could go. Beckett would focus on not knowing. In his most well-known play (Waiting for Godot) nothing happens.

5. Beckett often is associated with minimalism. This (Post-)Modernist movement emphasizes getting rid of all non-essentials, in plot, scenery, everything.

6. Won Nobel Prize in 1969.

B. D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

1. Son of coarse miner father and genteel and demanding-though-loving mother.

2. His treatment of sexual issue causes many problems, and he was often denounced (and at least once prosecuted) for obscenity.

3. He was also skeptical about industrial society, liberalism, socialism, and vehemently against the war (and was married to Frieda von Richthofen, the Red Baron’s sister.

4. Leaves England in 1919 for many places including France and New Mexico. He dies young, of TB.

5. His masterpieces are Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, novels that explore heterosex with “uncanny psychological precision and intense poetic feeling” (Norton, 2315). Heavily symbolic with few “messages,” the works record/represent/create rather than .

C. Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)

1. Born into British upper-class, father a publisher, attends Oxford.

2. 1920-1940: gains fame and praise for “light” satire-novels of fashionable/”fast” life of upper class young adults (e.g. Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934)).

3. Conservative and upper-class, he converts to Catholicism in 1930.

4. Friend of Randolph Churchill, he serves as commando in WWII

5. WWII provides basis for his more serious---but still often satiric---work, Brideshead Revisited and his Sword of Honor trilogy.

6. Probably the major “traditional”/modernist British novelist. Known as a “stylist” as well as a satirist, he wrote many works (including journalism), and probably all of it is first-rate.

D. J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973)

1. Read the Wikipedia entry for a common experience in WWI.

2. Professor of Anglo-Saxon Studies at Oxford (1925-59)

3. Though not often included in textbooks, his works might endure as rare epic achievements.

4. The Hobbit (1936) and Lord of the Rings (1954-55) are based on his knowledge of Anglo-Saxon culture.

VII. Post‑WWII Literature (sometimes called "post-modernists")

A. Often very good writers, they lack the force and innovation of pre‑WWII modernists.

1. Literature is controlled by being subsumed as part of the entertainment industry.

2. Rise of newer media in creating and popularizing new ideas, especially film (movies), TV, and radio (rock music); though these media aren't nearly as powerful in England as in the US.

3. In general, tighter and non‑official methods for managing culture in a "global village," in which sudden cultural shifts (often associated with artists) in one region can affect the entire world, in an age of nuclear weapons, deadly chemicals, designer diseases, and other forms of mass terrorism.

B. Post WWII authors

1. George Orwell (1903-1950): maverick socialist, imperial civil servant (in Burma), anti-authoritarian, anti-communist. Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1948) are classics of dystopian literature. Also a dystopian classic is Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), grandson of Thomas Huxley and affiliate of Bloomsbury.

2. Ted Hughes (1930-98): Poet laureate, 1985-98. Poetry often realistic record of natural processes, often brutal. Best work, though, is often considered to be the mythic Crow. Also, his marriage to American poet Sylvia Plath (1932-63) receives extensive interest.

3. Tom Stoppard (1937--- ): playwright of many successful, witty comedies that retell classic stories/genre/history; received several Tonys and an Oscar.

4. Philip Larkin (1922-1985): Oxford graduate and librarian, poet of a supposedly dismal post-imperial, post industrial Britain. Identified with “The Movement,” a group of British writers (including Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, and Kingsley Amis) who countered “modernism” with a more “English” poetry. These are sometimes linked with the Angry Young Men, another 50s movement: “the "Angries" included writers mostly of lower-class origin concerned with their political and economic aspirations. They included John Osborne (whose play Look Back in Anger is a basic "Angries" text), Harold Pinter, John Braine, Arnold Wesker and Alan Sillitoe” (Wikipedia). Refused offer to become poet laureate in 1985 because of sickness.