Victorian & Modernist Literature: Forms, Poetry, Criticism

Victorian Novel Characteristics

Defining Features of Victorian Novels

• Referred to as "Large Loose Baggy Monsters" (Henry James)
• Often published as serials or "three-deckers"
• Driven by commercial success and the novel's popularity
• Episodic, multi-plot narratives, panoramic scope
• Voracious in thematic appetites

Realism in Victorian Fiction

• Characterized by "detailism" and empiricism
• Reflects an image-based culture
• Focus on individual consciousness
• Moral realism (e.g., George Eliot)
• Utilizes free indirect discourse versus omniscience

The Comic Form of Realism

• Explores the tension between innocence and worldliness
• Contrasts dream versus reality
• Examines the role of money in society

Key Forms of Victorian Novels

Industrial Novels: Social Commentary

• Prominent authors: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Kingsley
• Contexts: Industrialization, migration, Chartism

Bildungsroman: Development & Identity

• Examples: Great Expectations, David Copperfield (Charles Dickens); Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
• Narrates a transition: from illusions to experience, leading to identity formation
• Explores Bildung and modernity (Franco Moretti)
• Contrasts male versus female Bildung: euphoric/dysphoric plots
• Anti-Bildung examples: Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)

Sensation Novels: Mystery & Unreliability

• Key authors: Wilkie Collins (e.g., The Woman in White, The Moonstone)
• Makes the ordinary strange, revealing "dirty secrets" and "other Victorians"
• Serves as a foil to domestic realism
• Emphasizes plot rather than character
• Highlights the unreliability of empirical knowledge
• Often explores themes of determinism

Victorian Poetry: Themes & Style

Characteristics of Victorian Verse

• A great number of poets, forming "tribes" of poets
• "Metromania": copiousness and length
• Often perceived as "second-rate" due to being catchy, sentimental, and easy
• Strong focus on meter and form
• Challenges the myth of the "Victorian gap" in poetic quality

Victorian Poets & Romantic Legacy

Victorian poets were heirs to the Romantics, and many generalizations about Romantic poetry still apply: distrust of organized religion, skepticism, and an interest in the occult and the mysterious. Yet, where Romantic poets made a leap of faith to assert that the received image of God did not exist, Victorian poets were more likely to have a scientific conviction of God's absence.

Pre-Raphaelitism & Aestheticism

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Principles

• A rebellion by young painters advocating "truth to nature"

D.G. Rossetti & Art-Catholic Poetry

• Explores Christianity and art in D.G. Rossetti’s "Art-Catholic" poems (e.g., The Blessed Damozel)
• Themes include female beauty, secularized Dante, and mystery

Christina Rossetti's Sacramental Symbolism

• Focus on sacramental symbolism in her work

Second Wave Pre-Raphaelitism & Aestheticism

• D.G. Rossetti’s later work: eroticism, chivalry
• William Morris: Arts and Crafts movement, The Defence of Guenevere
• Algernon Charles Swinburne (e.g., Poems and Ballads) and the Aesthetic Movement

Modernist Poetry: Innovation & Complexity

International & British Modernisms

• Includes "Anglo-Mongrel" poets and domesticated modernism
• British modernism often functioned as criticism (e.g., T.S. Eliot, William Empson, F.R. Leavis)

Hybridity of the Modernist Idiom

• High modernism and the avant-garde
• Variety of vocabularies (e.g., Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism)

Other Aspects of Modernist Poetry

• Characterized by difficulty
• Reflects a sense of a loss of certainty
• Rejects poetry as mere expression
• Emphasizes the intellectual-emotional complex

T.S. Eliot's Literary Criticism

Eliot on Artistic Impersonality & Tradition

• Advocates for artistic impersonality
• Discusses tradition: Romantic vs. Classical poetry
• Explores canon formation and the loss of coherence
• Introduces the mythical method
• Influenced by Eliot’s religious beliefs

Key Concepts in Eliot's Criticism

• The Objective Correlative
• The Dissociation of Sensibility
• The role of The Criterion in contemporary criticism