Late Victorian Prose and Drama

1. Late Victorian Prose & Drama

Late Victorian Prose &
Drama

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“Grand Old Man of English literature, towering over
his fellow writers”
a great novelist and a great poet
1860s - late 1890s – fiction (are quintessentially of
the 19 th century, not Victorian though, not in pursuit
of the standards of morality)
The Return of the Native
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Jude the Obscure
From the turn of the century until his death, he was
principally a poet (poetry properly belongs in the
Modern period )

4. Thomas Hardy

Ah, are you digging on my grave
My loved one?--planting rue?"
--"No; yesterday he went to wed
One of the brightest wealth has bred.
'It cannot hurt her now,' he said,
That I 'should not be true.'"

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Then who is digging on my grave?
My nearest dearest kin?"
--"Ah, no; they sit and think, 'What use!
What good will planting flowers produce?
No tendance of her mound can loose
Her spirit from Death's gin.'"

6.

But someone digs upon my grave?
My enemy?--prodding sly?"
--"Nay; when she heard you had passed
the Gate
That shuts on all flesh soon or late,
She thought you no more worth her hate,
And cares not where you lie."

7.

Then, who is digging on my grave?
Say--since I have not guessed!"
--"0 it is I, my mistress dear,
Your little dog, who still lives near,
And much I hope my movements here
Have not disturbed your rest?"

8.

Ah, yes! You dig upon my grave . . .
Why flashed it not on me
That one true heart was left behind!
What feeling do we ever find
To equal among humankind
A dog's fidelity!"

9.

Mistress, I dug upon your grave
To bury a bone, in case
I should be hungry near this spot
When passing on my daily trot.
I am sorry, but I quite forgot
It was your resting-place."

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11. Lewis Carroll 

Lewis Carroll
an English
author, mathematician, logician, Anglican
deacon and photographer.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Through the Looking-Glass,
acute representation of childhood without a
trace of moralism (characteristic of much of
Victorian writing)
the poems “The Hunting of the Snark" and
“Jabberwocky"
examples of the genre of literary nonsense.

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“You used to be much more..."muchier."
“I don't think..." then you shouldn't talk”
““If everybody minded their own business,
You've lost your muchness.”
the world would go around a great deal
faster than it does.”

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20. Joseph Conrad

he's born Jozef Teodor Konrad
Korzeniowski in 1857 in the Ukraine but to
a family of Polish nobles
His father - a Polish revolutionary - was a
writer of politically themed plays, and he
also translated a lot of really
important English literature (like
Shakespeare and Dickens) and French
literature (like Victor Hugo) into Polish.

21.

At 16 - moves to Marseille, becomes an
international citizen, and a seafaring man.
In 1878 - moves on to British ships,
learns English

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1895 Almayer's Folly
1896 An Outcast of the Islands
Heart of Darkness, in 1899-1902
1900 Lord Jim
1904 Nostromo
1907 The Secret Agent
1911 Under Western Eyes
1913 Chance
about 20 novels + novellas, short stories

23. Heart of Darkness

two important themes:
colonialism, which is how a ruling power
treats its subjects - is a slightly
fictionalized exposé on late 19th-century
colonialism. Based heavily on Conrad's
own seafaring experiences (Conrad
himself steered a boat up and down the
Congo)
actual darkness

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32. English theater

began with the miracle and mystery plays,
dramatized stories from the Bible
1590 - 1610 reached sublime heights with
Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson
later - fell under the iron rule of Puritanism and
middle-class moralism
drama withered
no drama until the 1st half of the 20th century
a few comic dramatists

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34. Oscar Wilde

A celebrity author is one whose public image is better
known than his or her works
Wilde himself liked to assert that his major work of art
was himself.
was born in 1854 in Dublin
still in school – helped popularize aestheticism - art
for art's sake; it doesn't have a greater purpose. It's not
trying to do anything socially, politically. It's beautiful,
and it's art. ”The beauty of objects might improve the
quality of life”
I find it harder every day to live up to my blue china…

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primarily wrote poetry
He also tried lecturing & journalism
short stories
the only novel he ever published - The
Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891

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Vera or The Nihilists (1880) - set in Russia, full of
revolutionaries, assassinations, tsars and other things
that are very Russian.
The Duchess of Padua (1883)
Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) - a comedy. It's a satire
of Victorian society
dark comedy A Woman of No Importance (1893) - a play
about the secrets of the Victorian upper class
the tragedy Salome (1893)
An Ideal Husband (1895) - comedy about blackmail,
politics and all sorts of great upper class type things,
also about relationships and marriage
The Importance of Being Earnest - satire on
Victorian seriousness, moral orthodoxy, and earnestness

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was born in Dublin in the aftermath of the famine of the
late 1840s, a catastrophe during which Ireland lost half
its population
was educated in Dublin as a modestly privileged child of
the Protestant ascendancy
his parents separated when he was 16; families and
family relationships would mean nothing to him
thereafter. Shaw came to see marriage as nothing more
than licensed prostitution: Every marriage was a
marriage of convenience (Getting Married , Mrs.
Warren’s Profession)
School was not much to Shaw’s taste: schools were
“prisons” in which children were kept to prevent them
from “disturbing” their parents.

39.

moved to London in his early 20s
educated himself in the British Museum Library
wrote mediocre novels
wrote brilliant criticism of music and drama
turned his hand from drama criticism to plays
first play - Widowers’ Houses (1892)
In total, he wrote over 60 stage productions,
many of which achieved substantial financial and
popular success.

40. common elements in Shaw's work

a sharp critique of society.
used his plays as a vehicle to challenge
social ills in Western society.
a strong sense of humor
He tempered his social critiques with laughs,
though these were often of a darker,
sarcastic and witty sense of humor

41. An Introduction to Modernism in Literature

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Literary Modernism is a subset of a larger
artistic movement called Modernism that
embraces painting and music
In the literary realm, it's basically
responsible for some seriously weird
literature produced roughly between the
end of World War I and the beginning of
World War II.

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46. Why????

a response to a lot of the destruction and
disruption caused by World War I (technology
that was better than the warfare style it was
designed for, trench warfare and poison gas)
the city transforms
It provoked a lot of artists, writers, and also
painters and musicians, to really think that they
need a new art to make sense of this new world

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“As far as literature is concerned
modernism reveals a breaking away from
established rules, traditions and
conventions, fresh ways of looking at
man’s position and function in the
universe and many experiments in form
and style. It is particularly concerned with
language and how to use it
(representationally or otherwise) and with
writing itself”
(Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary
Theory).

48. Characteristics of Modernism in Literature

doesn’t usually make sense
different perspectives
nonlinearity of plot or sequence of things
– unexpected plots, puzzle
irony and satire (verbal irony, situational
irony, dramatic irony ) - mismatch
voices and the idea of stream of
consciousness
allusions

49. Perspectives

Literature Exhibits Perspectivism
– Meaning comes from the individual’s
perspective and is thus personalized;
– A single story might be told from the
perspective of several different people, with
the assumption that the “truth” is somewhere
in the middle

50. Characteristics of Modernism in Literature

Inner psychological reality or “interiority” is
represented: Stream of consciousness—portraying the
character’s inner monologue
Organized non-sequentially: Experience
portrayed as allusive, discontinuous, using
fragmentation and juxtaposition.
Ambiguous endings—open endings which are
seen as more representative of reality.

51. Who????

James Joyce
T.S. Eliot
Virginia Woolf
D.H. Lawrence
Samuel Beckett
Ezra Pound
Gertrude Stein
Katherine Mansfield

52. Ezra Pound

Comes to London in
1908
hangs out with Yeats
and T.S. Eliot
created artistic
movements
Short poems
The Cantos, which is
unfinished 800 page
epic poem
a fascist in Italy

53. Voiticism

54. Imagism

direct treatment of the “thing” as "thing" (an
attempt at isolating a single image to reveal
its essence)
short
use absolutely no word that does not
contribute to the presentation.
As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence
of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the
metronome.

55. In the Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Ezra Pound

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57. Gertrude Stein

American living in Paris
difficult-to-understand
poems, mostly characterized
by wordplay as greater than
meaning. She's more
interested in how words
sound
A classic Steinian phrase is 'A
rose is a rose is a rose.'
"There is no there there“
The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas
Tender Buttons 1914

58. Tender Buttons

A BOX.
Out of kindness comes redness and out of
rudeness comes rapid same question, out
of an eye comes research, out of selection
comes painful cattle. So then the order is
that a white way of being round is
something suggesting a pin and is it
disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary
to be analysed and see a fine substance
strangely, it is so earnest to have a green
point not to red but to point again.

59. Tender Buttons

A RED STAMP.
If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise
and distance and even dust, if they dusty
will dirt a surface that has no extreme
grace, if they do this and it is not
necessary it is not at all necessary if they
do this they need a catalogue.

60. Tender Buttons

MILK.
Climb up in sight climb in the whole utter
needles and a guess a whole guess is hanging.
Hanging hanging.
EGGS.
Kind height, kind in the right stomach with a
little sudden mill.
Cunning shawl, cunning shawl to be steady.

61. Katherine Mansfield

from New Zealand
a pretty bohemian lifestyle
Anton Chekov
In a German Pension (1911)
The Garden Party & Other
Stories (1922)
Bliss and Other
Stories (1923)
died at the age of 34

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63. Virginia Woolf

She was born in 1882
father - a historian/writer, involved in the art
world; mother - a model for paintings
mental illness
self-educated
married Leonard Woolf in 1912, they
started their own printing press the Hogarth Press - publishing arm of
the Bloomsbury Group .

64. Major Works

The Voyage Out 1915
Night and Day 1919
Jacob's Room 1922 - success !
(more experimental. It's an indirect character study of
Jacob)
Mrs. Dalloway 1925 - breakthrough novel!!!!
To the Lighthouse 1927 - even more experimental
Orlando 1928
A Room of One's Own 1929
The Waves 1931 - extremely experimental
The Years 1937
Between the Acts 1941

65. Mrs. Dalloway, 1925

a novel that takes place in a single day in June
Characters: Clarissa Dalloway, her
husband Richard, her daughter Elizabeth;
Septimus Smith - a shell-shocked World War I
veteran, Peter Walsh, who's an old friend of
Clarissa's
book is about their memories and their thoughts, a
lot of the internal narrative of these characters
death of SS seems to CD as a way of saying
something or preserving some sort of
independence, something that she and her friends
haven't been able to do as they've gone through
life

66. Style - free indirect discourse

free indirect discourse (reads a little like stream of consciousness)
- a third person representation of a person's thoughts, but without
the 'he said,' 'he thought', 'he considered' tags.
'He wondered why he hadn't thought to try Pepsi before. How
effervescent the bubbles, how lovely the taste!‘
'Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy
had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their
hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought
Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning - fresh as if issued to children
on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge!'

67. Style

interweaving plot
the style of the novel: indirect to direct, thoughts and
description, all going on at once without really
letting readers know the difference between the two stylistic effect where we're always in the characters'
thoughts and we're always out of the characters'
thoughts.
a meditation on perspective and thoughts - the
characters are constantly thinking about what could
have been in their pasts
how people observe the same thing differently

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69. D.H. Lawrence

was born in 1885 in English coal-mining
country. His father was a coal-miner.
showed from pretty early on that he was a
good writer
ended up becoming a teacher in London
got discovered by writer Ford Madox Ford.
He starts publishing novels in the early
1910s.
Frieda Weekley

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71. Sons and Lovers - first major book, published in 1913

semi-autobiographical
set in coal-mining country
in coal-mining country a lot of oedipal issues
(an unconscious sexual feeling of a son to his
mother)
his primary concerns in literature relationships

72. Other novels

The Rainbow (1915) is D.H. Lawrence's
first brush with obscenity (a word or action
that is sexually offensive).
Women in Love, which is its sequel, comes
out in 1920.
Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928) - published
in a heavily abridged form until 1960
(Obscene Publications Act passed in 1959 )