bicc2的部落格

其實強大的是老師...小的工作微不足道 註解有錯煩請不吝告知 感激不盡:)

The Victorian Age (1837-1901)

I. Three periods

A.1832-48, time of social unrest

1. 遠因Industrialization brought wealth to the middle class: first Reform Bill (1832)—right for wealthy middle class to vote, extended the influence of the bourgeoisie over the old aristocrats.

2. 近因Industrialization brought misery to the working class: workers’ demonstrations, second Reform Bill (1867) —right for all men to vote. (Women 1928).

B. 1848-79, time of economic prosperity and religious controversy, heyday of the Victorian age

1. Economic prosperity:

a. Worldly—workshop (great industrial inventions, e.g. train replaced stage wagons), banker (labor conditions improved)

b. Nationally—factory

c. Worldly and nationally major event: Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace (1851)

2. Religious controversy: time of complacency, stability and optimism.

C. 1870-1901, time of crisis

1. Economically: 1890 British Empire, colony, the sun never sets.

2. Politically: rivalry powers like Germany, US, Japan, Russia.

II. Philosophy and Ideas

        A. Utilitarianism& opponents

B. Social commentary, Naturalism: Exposure of the cruel and darker side of life, inequality, lack of social justice, condemned industrialization, longed for rural life.

1. Social/class problems: Dickens v.s. Thackeray

2. Women Question: Women’s colleges established in Cambridge in 1869 and Oxford in 1879, women could not take degrees until 1920.George Eliot& the Brontës: Currer, Ellis, Acton Bell.

C. Aestheticism/aesthetic movement

III. Religion declines, natural and human science↑: Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) shook the foundation of Christianity; worship of science, skepticism, religious uncertainty, spiritual unrest and inquiry, and interest in other non-Christian religions.

IV. Rise of the Novel:

A. Reader population: Urban population↑+ Education Acts (1870)= new reading public

B. Technology and facility: Printing and paper-making innovation, book prices↓=serial publications appear+ libraries set up by philanthropists.

C. Writer: possible as profession.e.g.Dickens

D. Specific reader’s need: middle class women living in leisure, need for recreation=> female characters esp. by female writers, women’s struggles for equality and better life.

E. General reader’s need: religion declined, novel= powerful secular form to reflect life.

V. Victorian novel:

A. Early: Charles Dickens

1. Characteristics:

a. Reflection— Background and characters: broader social background, complex relations => rapidly changing society.

b. Revision— Plot: “linear causation,” a motive giving rise to an event, leading to an effect on character, prompting him to do something leading on to another event; cause-effect sequence=> better constructed than before.

c. Promotion—Form: published in serial by installments(連載) before full publication in a single book(單行本), author responds immediately to readers’ reaction to keep them interested.

d. Ideology— Theme and purpose: morality (to success), e.g. being earnest. Didactic. Appeal to reform.

                2. Compare and contrast btw. Dickens and Thackeray

        B. Mid: George Eliot, Influenced by Comte’s positivism, religious belief should give way to a religion of humanity, love and compassion for all mankind should triumph. No villains in her work, all acting with the influences upon them. Middlemarch her masterpiece.

                1. Characteristics:

a. Character: women as central

b. Theme: Individual self realizationàagainst conventions and social pressure, questions middle-class ethics, yet still concerned with the right moral choice.

c. Style: Psychological inner states of characters more than social behaviour

                2. Mill on the Floss: unsentimental portrait of childhood a renovation in Victorian novels. The Tullivers stand for the inner life, passion and bonds with a pre-industrial life, while the Dodsons stand for commerce and pragmatism. Maggie’s father lost out in a commercial age and the mill, standing for childhood harmony and unified consciousness to Maggie, is gone. Tom and Maggie set out for their individual quests. Tom submits himself completely and at great emotional cost to the commercial system which defeated his father, to focus on getting the mill back (family duty). Maggie is torn by this passion and inner life that is rejected by Tom, the dreams and demands of the self (individual passion), reconciled to the world through a reciprocated love (first in Philip, then Stephen, finally and always Tom and in the mill). Looking for love to fill a torn self. With the incident with Stephen, she recognizes the duties to others and thinks of others like Lucy’s feelings. Tom is the means, the other complementary half, to the pastoral holism of childhood. The first separation comes when Tom goes away for school. They drift increasingly apart, with only the final flood bringing them finally together, unified and restored to harmony. Two lines here: Childhood as pastoral harmony and adulthood as separation and alienation; self and concern for others should go together, just as spiritual life and pragmatism should go together.

C. Late:

1. High art: Thomas Hardy, achieves the tragic intensity of Shakespeare, ancient Greek dramatists. The tragic flaws in men as built in by natural forces that compel them irrevocably to pain and defeat. Yet man still achieves dignity and integrity in their doomed struggle against fate, the immanent will. Everything in the universe is determined by the Immanent Will, which is impartially hostile toward human beings’ desire for joy and happiness.Tess

l   Character:

♂Alec=body, Angel=a. spiritual in Tess, imprisoned by his ideas and spirituality (more so than Tess) and only loves the idea of Tess as a pure country girl, not as a living woman.

♀Tess=limited by education to forsake the body in her, though she is very much of the body herself. She is pure because she did not commit the crime of rape (Hardy does not think sex is wrong, though violence in sex is). Society (her mother) expects her to marry her rapist in order to stay pure, which is actually impure, but she refuses because she doesn’t love Alec, which is really pure. She has pride and would not beg Angel’s parents for help. It is only after she despairs of Angel’s love that she agrees to be with Alec again.

l   Theme: natural law (more real, everlasting) v. human moral law (temporary, hypocritical). Ex.(1). people’s fate determined by their inner nature (Tess’s heredity and her passion) and external hostile fate. (2).Priest’s struggle between human sympathy and rigid Christian morality

l   Setting: Nature, also as a character=>Elemental man-nature relationships set in remote, rural countrysideàother Victorian novels: middle-class’ social relationships in towns

2. Mass art (best-seller, popular novels): Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland (1865), imperial adventure novels by Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island; sentimental novels. Detective stories. Science fiction of H. G. Wells The Invisible Man (1897)

3. Colonial novel: Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness, E.M. Forster A Passage to India

a. Def:

Time: most popular since the 1870s till the 1930s, during the peak of the British empire.

Theme: journey by a white person, often male, to the colonies=>justifies the colonial conquest as a generous act to save or civilize the colonized people.

b. Ex. showing that India and England are differently described: racial prejudice, colonial mimicry(Aziz)

l   People: Indian's emotionality, lack of rationality

l   Event: (1) Bridge Party, (2) trip to the Marabar Caves.

l   Place: Marabar Caves, river Ganges.

                        c. Rape narrative and the issues of race and gender: Def. of the rape narrative in the colonial novel, how it usually describes the non-white man as both barbaric, uncivilized, ignorant, as well as physically and sexually superior, and thus both a danger and attraction to the white woman. The white man both warns the white woman from this danger but is also secretly afraid that the white woman might be attracted by the non-white male, who will thus rob the white man of their property (the white woman). (British Men>British Women>Indian Men>Indian Women)

d. (1) E. M. Forster's central idea: Only Connect. He believes that as long as people use humanism and liberalism, different classes and races can connect with each other. Use his other works together with this novel to show how this is his central idea. Why does he have this idea? Any influence? (2) This idea belongs to liberal humanism. Def. of liberal humanism, how this idea may seem rational, but is actually connected with colonialism, because behind this idea that believes that there is a common human core and essential self that all people share in common, this "common" self is actually composed of the white middle-class standards of reason and rationality.

VI. Victorian Poetry

A. Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-92), leading the “age of Tennyson,” poet laureate, champion of bourgeois orthodoxy and ethos

1. Mature work “Ulysses”: blank verse, dynamic force makes it popular

2. Early work “In Memoriam A. H. H.” iambic tetrameter (4-feet), riming abba, infrequently used in English poetry, In Memoriam stanza. Portrayal of tortured soul makes it valuable. E.g. “Break, Break, Break” daring and effective.

a. Full of different poetic effects: meditations on death &scientific factàto gaiety of wedding&New year parties.=>Gradual rise of spirit with the Christmas seasons.

b.“Way of the soul”:bitter grief &doubtàprogress to acceptance, fear: universe governed by indifferenceà to certainty: by love.

B. Robert Browning: bold, unconventional, unbiased and objective portrayal of the psychological states in his characters.àagainst Tennyson’s moody monologue, interpretation of the poet himself through poetry=> dramatic monologue: imaginary speaker addressing an imaginary audience.

1. Early monologue: “My Last Duchess”

2. Mature monologue:“Andrea del Sarto”: painter neither loved nor honorable, his craftsmanship is faultless but he lacks the soul for great art.

C. Matthew Arnold: preeminent university poet in England. Withdrawal from chaotic world into intellectual thought and feelings. “Dover Beach”: spiritual unrest, modern dilemma, sad and gripping depiction=melodic lyric(audile)+sharp visual symbols==>e.g. flinging in and out of the pebbles=rise and fall of human faith

D. Gerard Hopkins: forerunner of modern poetry, famous for “sprung rhythm”—imp.=number of stress in line of verse, not imp=number of unaccented syllables=>old Anglo-Saxon verse.

1. Tone: colloquial+unusual=“explode”

2. Language: density in words and feelings, no superfluities(多餘)

3. Overtone: multiple meaning and ambiguity, leaps from image to image to show the inner mind and division.

4. “The Windhover” (1877)

a. 20^th 雙璧: “The Waste Land”

b. His most daring sprung-rhythm sonnet; the most commonplace things of Nature can suddenly flash out their own peculiar beauty and symbolization of Christ’s wounds and suffering.