The Background of Nineteenth Century Literature
Wartime Literature
There were revolutions across Europe in the 1790s. Fear of revolution and the conditions of war lead to suppression of public meetings and censorship
Wordsworth and Coleridge turned away from their initial sympathy with the French revolution to opposition to it.
Postwar Alliances
After the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, nationalist movements sprang up across Europe. Shelley, Keats, and Byron all accused Coleridge and Wordsworth of apostasy, that is, of having changed sides. Byron and Shelley both had links with such radical groups. Both chose to live in exile.
Romanticism
This means:
• Valuing of self as subject matter
• Valuing of emotion
This includes:
• Interest in the exotic, bizarre and extraordinary
• Nature as the catalyst for visionary or transcendent experience
It was the predominant literary movement of the early part of the 19th century.
The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe- especially that which is experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature. It promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical notions in the art form. It assigned a high value to the achievements of “heroic” individualists ad artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the quality of society.
Gothic Novel
The Gothic form, named for the Medieval architectural style of cathedrals and castles of the period, emerged in the 18th century. Gothic tales were set in dark castles, crypts, and churches.
Gothic fiction was written with the intention of providing audiences with a good scare. Gothic novels and tales were very popular through the 19th century, but not considered “high art”.
RISE OF NOVELS
Sentimental Fiction
• Sentimental, sensationalist or “scandal” fiction was tremendously popular
• The female authors who wrote them found ample means of supporting themselves through this kind of writing.
• These novels usually include the tale of “fallen women”
• Illicit sexuality was their main focus.
Novels Of Virtue
• Novels of virtue also emerged as instructional texts for female behavior.
• Their authors saw them as countering the looser morals of scandal fiction heroines
• These too provided with the means to be self-supporting authors.
Victorian Novels
• The novel as a form reached a peak in popularity during the 19th century.
• Often referred to as the Victorian period, after Queen Elizabeth.
• The novel gained artistic respect in the 19th century as well, expanding the form thematically and artistically.
The 19th century in Western literature ---one of the most vital and interesting periods of all --- has special interest as the formative era from which many modern literary conditions and tendencies derived.
The Lamb by William Blake
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