...Submitted By: Steffy Johnson 11/PELA/026 INTRODUCTION Modernist literature is the literary expression of the tendencies of Modernism, especially High modernism. Modernistic art and literature normally revolved around the idea of individualism, mistrust of institutions mainly government and religion, and the disbelief of any absolute truths. Modernism as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the middle 1920s. Modernist literature addressed to aesthetic problems and can be viewed largely in terms of its formal, stylistic and semantic movement away from Romanticism, examining subject matter that is traditionally mundane. It often features a marked pessimism, a clear rejection of the optimism apparent in Victorian literature. It attempted to move from the bonds of Realist literature and to introduce concepts such as disjointed timelines. Modernism as a literary movement is seen, in large part, as a reaction to the emergence of city life as a central force in society. Furthermore, an early attention to the object as freestanding became in later Modernism a preoccupation with form. Modernist writers were more acutely conscious of the objectivity of their surroundings. The most prominent modernist authors are: T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Knut Hamsun, Gertrude Stein, Mikhail Bulgakov, MarcelProust, John Steinbeck, Ezra Pound, Katherine Anne Porter...
Words: 2124 - Pages: 9
...Aphra Behn the emergence of female writers. She was the one “who earned them the right to speak their minds” (Room 72) establishing her as an early example of writing as a profession for women. Woolf, then, marks the emergence of several Victorian women novel writers. Woolf highlights their problem with anger and the impact it had on some of them. Woolf praises Jane Austen for writing “without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching.”(Room 74) On the contrary, she criticizes Charlotte Bronte although she appears more talented than Austen. Bronte’s anger of her positions as a woman, Woolf comments, “will never get her genius expressed whole and entire" and in consequence “it was...
Words: 1915 - Pages: 8
...The English novel is an important part of English literature. This article focuses on novels, written in English, by novelists who were born or have spent a significant part of their lives in England, or Scotland, or Wales, or Northern Ireland (or Ireland before 1922)]. However, given the nature of the subject, this guideline has been applied with common sense, and reference is made to novels in other languages or novelists who are not primarily British where appropriate. Portrait of Samuel Richardson by Joseph Highmore.National Portrait Gallery, Westminster, England. Contents [hide] 1 Early novels in English 2 Romantic period 3 Victorian novel 4 20th century 5 Survey 6 Famous novelists (alphabetical order) 7 See also 8 References Early novels in English[edit source | editbeta] See the article First novel in English. The English novel has generally been seen as beginning with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722),[1] though John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) are also contenders, while earlier works such as Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, and even the "Prologue" to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales have been suggested.[2] Another important early novel is Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), by Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, which is both a satire of human nature, as well as a parody of travellers' tales like Robinson Crusoe.[3] The rise of the novel as an important...
Words: 4017 - Pages: 17
...1 THE VICTORIAN AGE The Victorian Compromise The Victorian Age takes its name from Queen Victoria who ruled from 1837 to 1901; it was a complex era characterised by stability, progress and social reforms, and, in the mean time, by great problems such as poverty, injustice and social unrest; that’s why the Victorians felt obliged to promote and invent a rigid code of values that reflected the world as they wanted it to be, based on: * duty and hard work; * respectability: a mixture of both morality and hypocrisy, severity and conformity to social standards (possessions of good manners, ownership of a comfortable house, regular attendance at church and charitable activity); it distiguished the middle from the lower classes; * charity and philanthropy: an activity that involved many people, expecially women. The family was strictly patriarchal: the husband represented the authority and respectability, cosequently a single woman with a child was emarginated because of a wide-spread sense of female chastity. Sexuality was generaly repressed and that led to extreme manifestations of prudery. Colonialism was an important phenomenon and it led to a patriotism deeply influenced by ideas of racial superiority: British people thought that they were obeying to God by the imposition of their superior way of life. The concept of “the white man’s burden” was exalted in the works of colonial writers (such as Rudyard Kipling). This code of values, known as “Victorian Compromise”...
Words: 9412 - Pages: 38
...is much more optimistic than the modernistic one. Talking about their characters, they were social types depicted in their everyday life dealing with their virtues, morals, profession, relationships, worldview etc. Narrative form used by realists is characterized by several narrative characters in order to create an objective vision of life. The most prominent among the writers who continued the traditions of realism were: J. Galsworthy, A. Bennett, H. Wells, B. Shaw; and their followers R. Aldington, G. Orwell, J. Priestley, and E. Waugh. The Novel is certainly the most important literary form of the period. The realistic novel is represented by such novelistic forms as: the social and social-psychological novel (J. Galsworthy, E. Waugh, R. Aldington) the social-domestic novel (A. Bennett, H. Wells) the comic or satirical novel (E. Waugh) family chronicle or epic cycle (J. Galsworthy) science fiction (H. Wells). Despite all this, realism and his representatives suffered much criticism. The main argument developed between Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf. She felt that there was something missing from the works of Bennett, Galsworthy and Wells; that there was something deficient in their approach. They still followed the Victorian tradition as far as the technique of the novel is concerned. Woolf wrote,...
Words: 2915 - Pages: 12
...light the struggles that are faced by the poor. Gaskell does this through the use of descriptive language and also by presenting a number of themes through certain characters, such as a belief of injustice in the industrial working class. As a female writer, there is much criticism against her for writing a novel so out of depth of her class and gender. However, even with this criticism Gaskell still brings to light key socio-political issues, such as the need for the worker and employer to understand each other. The era in which "Mary Barton" is written is known as the Time of Troubles. During a period of prosperity from 1832 to 1836 during the industrial revolution, Gaskell's experience of these conditions are sensed strongly in the narrative, in particular her contact with the working class in her home city of Manchester, as she "elbows" the working class everyday on the streets. This historic document therefore brings you closer to the struggles of the working class, as suggested by Gaskell: "The more I reflected on this unhappy state of things...as the employers and employed must be, the more anxious I became to give some utterance to the agony." It can be argued that Gaskell does not achieve this and instead removes you slightly from these struggles, as she in avertedly separates the reader from the working class, as suggested by the Manchester Guardian: "the authoress has sinned gravely against truth, in matters of fact either above her comprehension, or beyond her sphere...
Words: 3053 - Pages: 13
...Otherness: Essays and Studies 1.1 October 2010 Haunting Poetry: Trauma, Otherness and Textuality in Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days Olu Jenzen Early conceptions of trauma are intimately linked not only with modernity but specifically with the height of industrialisation (Micale and Lerner 2001). This is converged in the opening of Specimen Days particularly in the image of an industrial accident at the ironworks where a young man is killed by the stamping machine. His young brother, replacing him at the machine after the funeral, then experiences an apparition of the dead brother still trapped inside the machine, which leads him to believe that all machines house entrapped ghosts of the dead. Writing on the Victorians’ anxieties about internal disruption caused by the advent of the railway, Jill Matus (2001, 415) has pointed out that, Freud himself remarked in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), [that] there is ‘a condition [which] has long been known and described [and] which occurs after severe mechanical concussions, railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life; it has been given the name of traumatic neurosis’ (12). Freud’s remark brings to the fore the traumas of the industrial age as both individually and publicly experienced and negotiated. This condition of trauma as private and public, individual yet also societal is held in tension throughout Cunningham’s novel. Reflecting on the otherness of trauma and its vexed relationship to representation...
Words: 7114 - Pages: 29
.... http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sageltd. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Contemporary History. http://www.jstor.org Journalof Contemporary London,Thousand Oaks, CA and HistoryCopyright? 2004 SAGEPublications, New Delhi, Vol 39(3), 373-401. ISSN0022-0094. DOI: 10.1177/0022009404044446 Trentmann Frank Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption If there is one agreement between theorists of modernity and those of...
Words: 14844 - Pages: 60
...BRITISH SHORT FICTION IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY This page intentionally left blank British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century The Rise of the Tale TIM KILLICK Cardiff University, UK © Tim Killick 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Tim Killick has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Killick, Tim British short fiction in the early nineteenth century : the rise of the tale 1. Short stories, English – History and criticism 2. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism 3. Short story 4. Literary form – History – 19th century I. Title 823’.0109 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Killick, Tim. British short fiction in the early nineteenth century : the rise of the tale / by Tim Killick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6413-0 (alk. paper) 1. Short stories, English—History and criticism. 2. English fiction—19th...
Words: 98420 - Pages: 394
...BRITISH SHORT FICTION IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY This page intentionally left blank British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century The Rise of the Tale TIM KILLICK Cardiff University, UK © Tim Killick 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Tim Killick has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Killick, Tim British short fiction in the early nineteenth century : the rise of the tale 1. Short stories, English – History and criticism 2. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism 3. Short story 4. Literary form – History – 19th century I. Title 823’.0109 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Killick, Tim. British short fiction in the early nineteenth century : the rise of the tale / by Tim Killick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6413-0 (alk. paper) 1. Short stories, English—History and criticism. 2. English fiction—19th...
Words: 98420 - Pages: 394
...TRAVELLERS TO AFRICA Africa has always been seen as a mysterious and unexplored continent, full of ancient beliefs and religions, inhabited by different populations and cultures. Historians, travellers and scientists, have always been fascinated by the myth of a “dark continent”, so different from the neighbouring Europe, and so unique as the same time, for its traditions and way at life. This analysis is focused on two regions in particular, West and Central Africa : the region of West Africa was explored by Mungo Park first, at the end of the 18th century, and by Mary Kingsley exactly one hundred years later, while Henry Stanley went to the Central part of the continent, with the purpose of finding his companion Livingstone, in a first journey from 1871 to 1872, and he secondly came back to Africa for a new mission in 1874. This essay highlights the different approaches these authors took to talking about the country, and the different ways in which they set off for a journey into the “Dark Continent” at their time. It will be divided into three different sections, one for each author, following a chronological time. In each part the main differences and common themes Park, Stanley and Kingsley share, will be analysed. MUNGO PARK’S TRAVEL IN THE INTERIOR DISTRICTS OF AFRICA Mungo Park’s book recounts an eighteen-month expedition in West Africa [...] that commenced...
Words: 2657 - Pages: 11
...BRITISH SHORT FICTION IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY This page intentionally left blank British Short Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Century The Rise of the Tale TIM KILLICK Cardiff University, UK © Tim Killick 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Tim Killick has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Killick, Tim British short fiction in the early nineteenth century : the rise of the tale 1. Short stories, English – History and criticism 2. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism 3. Short story 4. Literary form – History – 19th century I. Title 823’.0109 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Killick, Tim. British short fiction in the early nineteenth century : the rise of the tale / by Tim Killick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6413-0 (alk. paper) 1. Short stories, English—History and criticism. 2. English fiction—19th...
Words: 98420 - Pages: 394
...OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE • Palaeolithic nomads from mainland Europe; • New inhabitants came from western and possibly north-western Europe (New Stone Age); • in the 2nd millennium BC new inhabitants came from the Low Countries and the middle Rhine (Stonehenge); • Between 800 and 200 BC Celtic peoples moved into Britain from mainland Europe (Iron Age) • first experience of a literate civilisation in 55 B.C. • remoter areas in Scotland retained independence • Ireland, never conquered by Rome, Celtic tradition • The language of the pre-Roman settlers - British (Welsh, Breton); Cornish; Irish and Scottish Gaelic (Celtic dialect) • The Romans up to the fifth century • Britain - a province of the Roman Empire 400 years • the first half of the 5th century the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (N Germany, Jutland) • The initial wave of migration - 449 A. D. • the Venerable Bede (c. 673-735) • the Britain of his time comprised four nations English, British (Welsh), Picts, and Scots. • invaders resembling those of the Germans as described by Tacitus in his Germania. • a warrior race • the chieftain, the companions or comitatus. • the Celtic languages were supplanted (e.g. ass, bannock, crag). * Christianity spread from two different directions: * In the 5th century St Patrick converted Ireland, in the 7th century the north of England was converted by Irish monks; * in the south at the end of the 6th century Aethelberht of Kent allowed the monk Augustine...
Words: 9579 - Pages: 39
...and domesticity. The habitual comfort of tea, ac- cording to Sigmond’s tea treatise, does not draw attention; it is quiet and familiar and thus goes unnoticed. Tea is represented as dependable, a frequent part of everyday life that forms a com- fortable, secure basis for the rest of life’s responses, decisions, and actions. As Sigmond declares, the English tea drinker is “in- capable of appreciating [tea’s] value” (1). What the typical tea drinker fails to recognize, Sigmond suggests, is the crucial role that tea plays in forming the foundation of everyday life. Despite Sigmond’s attempts to rectify the humble status of tea in nineteenth-century English culture, tea has remained a 1 2 introduction relatively unrecognized aspect of Victorian life. Just as Sigmond implies that the beverage’s mundane role precludes the tea drinker from appreciating its importance, the continued significance of tea in twentieth-century British society seems to have prevented scholars from adequately analyzing its role in British culture and national identity. As Anthony Burgess has speculated, “Perhaps tea is so woven into the stomach linings of the British that they cannot view it...
Words: 8564 - Pages: 35
...June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period.[1] During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular.[2][3] Born in Portsmouth, England, Dickens was forced to leave school to work in a factory when his father was thrown into debtors' prison. Although he had little formal education, his early impoverishment drove him to succeed. Over his career he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas and hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms. Dickens sprang to fame with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers. Within a few years he had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire, and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.[4][5] The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on...
Words: 8273 - Pages: 34
