Victorian Novel
THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
SPIS TREŚCI
INTRODUCTION 1
I THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NOVEL 2
II KEY AUTHORS 3
III KEY TEXTS 3
IV TOPICS 3
INTRODUCTION
Many associate the word “Victorian” with images of over-dressed ladies and snooty gentlemen gathered in reading rooms. The idea of “manners” does sum up the social climate of middle-class England in the nineteenth century. However, if there is one transcending aspect to Victorian England life and society, that aspect is change. Nearly every institution of society was affected by rapid and unforeseeable changes. As some writers greeted them with fear and others embraced the progress, this essay will guide a reader through an important era in English literary history and introduce with the voices that influenced its shape and development.
It was the novel that was the leading form of literature in the 19th century England. The term ‘novel’ itself was a simple narrative form, which in opposition to its forerunner, the ‘romance’ focused on the affairs of everyday life such as scientific discovery, religious debate, politics or colonial settlement. Though there are many arguments among critics which dates frame the period of Victorian literature, it is commonly accepted that it was the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) that saw the novel emerge and flourish, all the more that the 1937 was the year when Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the first major work of fiction.
The first readers of both, Dickens and Eliot were not conscious they lived in the ‘Victorian period’. They thought that this was a modern era marked with turbulent transition. However, the most crucial writers of the period grew up in the earlier years, and had been influenced by the age of English Romanticism. Therefore, although Victorian was modern, materialist, factual and concerned with ‘things as they are’, Romantic, associated with Gothic, melodramatic, idealistic influenced the way novelists wrote in the beginning of the 19th century.
I
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE
SPIS TREŚCI
INTRODUCTION 1
I THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NOVEL 2
II KEY AUTHORS 3
III KEY TEXTS 3
IV TOPICS 3
INTRODUCTION
Many associate the word “Victorian” with images of over-dressed ladies and snooty gentlemen gathered in reading rooms. The idea of “manners” does sum up the social climate of middle-class England in the nineteenth century. However, if there is one transcending aspect to Victorian England life and society, that aspect is change. Nearly every institution of society was affected by rapid and unforeseeable changes. As some writers greeted them with fear and others embraced the progress, this essay will guide a reader through an important era in English literary history and introduce with the voices that influenced its shape and development.
It was the novel that was the leading form of literature in the 19th century England. The term ‘novel’ itself was a simple narrative form, which in opposition to its forerunner, the ‘romance’ focused on the affairs of everyday life such as scientific discovery, religious debate, politics or colonial settlement. Though there are many arguments among critics which dates frame the period of Victorian literature, it is commonly accepted that it was the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) that saw the novel emerge and flourish, all the more that the 1937 was the year when Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the first major work of fiction.
The first readers of both, Dickens and Eliot were not conscious they lived in the ‘Victorian period’. They thought that this was a modern era marked with turbulent transition. However, the most crucial writers of the period grew up in the earlier years, and had been influenced by the age of English Romanticism. Therefore, although Victorian was modern, materialist, factual and concerned with ‘things as they are’, Romantic, associated with Gothic, melodramatic, idealistic influenced the way novelists wrote in the beginning of the 19th century.
I
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE