Pride and Prejudice 1813 (Hardys Tess d' Urberville, 1891- Dickens)

Blessed Damozel 1850

The Dead 1914
The Dumb Waiter 1957
The Farenheit Twins 2005
Eureka Street 1996

ROMANTICISM early 18th century

Main English authors: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelly, Byron, Scott

Broke with Neo-Classicism but returned to Medieval Romance: love is
never realized. Courtly love convention. Medieval ballads
Interest in nature and uncivilized, primitive way of life. Cult of noble
savage. Scenery: untamed and disorderly manifestations. an association
of humor moods with the moods of nature
Spontaneity in thought an action. importance of the power of
imagination
exaltation of the individual and his needs
preoccupation with death and decay, grieving melancholy, mournful
reflectiveness, sentimentality
The supernatural
Darkness, loneliness (The Gothic)
Pathetic fallacy: weather reflects mood.

THE NOVEL end of 18th century

Realistic vs romance. Initially intended to be realistic, to differentiate itself from the

medieval romance.
Prose vs epic
fiction vs non fiction
Public: daughters of the rising middle class. Rise of industry. The new middle class
wanted to be reflected on novels. During the industrial revolution, the aristocracy
had less money. Solution: marriage

Jane Austen

sacrificed her life for writing

complex characters
Revolutionary in point of view. P&P: Austens narrator is 3 person. Through
Elizabeths eyes. Limited POV (still used today).
Social person. Jane Austen: love but also dowry and common sense.

Romantic features: expression of feelings but at the same time, repression

VICTORIAN ENGLAND (1837-1901)

Period of dramatic change. Innovation. Expansion (geographical,

economic). Social upheaval. Industrial revolution. Enclosures. Rise of the
middle class. Importance of status. Private life vs public behavior
(hypocrisy).
At the beginning it continues to be romantic. In style, Victorian poets
remain romantic.
Transition from romanticism to realism (photography). Increasing
connection between reality and fiction. (Dickens: the ugly, the poor: art
is not only beauty).

PRE-RAPHAELITES 1848

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (also known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a

group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William
Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Medieval tradition (highlighting what is important) before Raphael
(perspective, renaissance)
Romantic features
Wrote poetry based on paintings.
Blend of the mystical religious and the senses. You want the body as
much as the spirit.

THE IRISH QUESTION

Yeats (Easter, 1916) Symbolist, political poems

Civil war. Irish independence 1922

SYMBOLISM

Antecedent of modernism
Borges, Elliot, Woolf, Joyce

MODERNISM end of 19th and much of 20th century (1890-1930)

Definition: an early twentieth-century literary and artistic movement with an aesthetic
opposed to that of nineteenth-century classic realism. All of these writers developed
strategies of nonrealist
representation involving collage, montage, pastiche, stream of consciousness, multiple
points of view, and other kinds of highly self-conscious, reflexive and apparently
fragmentary techniques.

Among the factors that shaped Modernism was the development of modern industrial
societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I.
Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists
rejected religious belief.[2][3]
Modernism, in general, includes the activities and creations of those who felt the traditional
forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, philosophy, social organization, and
activities of daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political
environment of an emerging fully industrialized world.

Against the romantics. Difficult to classify (not classical nor romantic)

Symbolism (devoid language of denotation (Rimbaud) Vs. Realism
(linearity, logic)
Dramatic characterizations (characters depict themselves through
speaking).
Breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions (liquid
modernity): Denounces how social structures have become outdated.
Defamiliarization of the social rules. Religious skepticism.
fresh ways of looking at mans position in the universe
many experiments in form and style: collage
Concern over innovation: complete innovation is impossible (only upon
something old). Anxiety of influence (Bloom): originality is paramount.
you dont want to show you are being influenced. Vs. Postmodernists:
make the influence as explicit as possible and play with it,
disrespectfully.
exploration of subconscious (Freud) . Stream of thought. Randomness.
Rumbling of the mind, digressions, unconnected connections. Interior
monologue. Mimetic reproduction of the mind. Repetitions. 1 st person
narrative. Ellipsis (incomplete thoughts). Continuity of words. Words
overlapping. Verbs of perception Rhetorical questions and exclamations.
Knowledge/reality. What are they. Role of women, role of art. What is the
norm?
Anxiety, existentialism. God is dead (Nietzsche). Relativism
fragmentation (world wars: Guernica) Reaction to war times (abstract
art; all the same there is an effect of war).
concerned with language and how to use it. Fragmentation, ambiguity,
incoherence.
closely connected with structuralism
concerned with writing itself.
Self-reflection and criticism of science and progress. For elites.
Ortega y Gasset: you cant take Picasso woman to dinner.
Las vanguardias/Avant-garde 1910
o War writers vs those who do not talk about the war (speak in the
abstract: ivory tower)

o The human figure becomes distorted because of the horror.

o WWI: Disbelief in progress will be reflected in art: modernism
Isms: futurism, Dadaism, impressionism. Share dehumanization: art is
not mimetic, it does not imitate reality. People feel angry because it
makes them feel ignorant (for the elite). Surrealism: (Breton, 1924).
Open door into subconscious. Reality of dreams, drunkenness, dementia.
Cubism. fragmentation, impossible perspective (we can habe multiple
perspectives from the same object).

STRUCTURALISM

Binary oppositions. Levi-Strauss, Saussure

POSTMODERNISM since 1940s or 50s (after WWII)

Different from modernism, even a reaction against it. Influence of

modernism + play with the past (vs modernists: deny the past)
Does post mean more radicalism? The difference is in the attitude: the
past is present as a background. I dont deny the past, but will do
anything within it.
Non-traditional literature and against authority and signification.
Experimental techniques, experimentation w/form, content and
presentation (theatre of absurd)
Eclectic approach, aleatory writing, parody and pastiche,
Magic realism, neo-gothic.
Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytic criticism,
relativism (proximity with post-structuralism)
Deconstruction: there is a center from where literature is read.
Questioning and analyzing oppositions. Voicing a silent story.
no elitism: blurring between popular and high culture. They intermingle
Intermediality: presence of one media in the realm of another.
Transmedia: you have to explore the different products to make sense
of the whole of it (Harry Potters books, films): practice Blurred limits
between literature and popular culture.
Palimpsests (Egyptian tablets where you could recover what was written
before) (every text refers to another). Gennet. If you read between the
lines, you can see its sources. Intertextuality
Bajtin. Dialogism. Every text is a dialogue with all previous text you have
read. You can miss the hypotext and still make sense of the hypertext.
Our knowledge of the hypotext might affect our reading of the hypertext.
Poliphony. When a character speaks, you also hear society speaking.
Focus on the reader (context of production vs context of reception).
deconstruction.

Transvestite: disguising a genre under another one).

THEATRE OF THE ABSURD late 1950s

Absurd: devoid of purpose (depends on the author). Absurdity of the

human condition.
Challenging the tradition: No plot, No characters, No setting, no
dialogue, no theme.
Characters with no name or strange names (ahistorical). Theatre of
stasis. No setting (no place, no time).
Plot/themes: they cannot be underlined in words. You get an overall
image. The playwright conveys themes through this overall metaphor
expressing absurdity.
Dramatic metaphor: not said but shown.
Existentialism. Nothing is worthy. Life is meaningless. The only thing we
can be certain of is our own existence. Existential anguish.
Bad faith: living to distract yourself from being aware of existence. Killing
time. Characters are thrown into existence (heideggard)
Lack of communication. Denial. Language is extremely reduced, not
used to communicate. Babbling, ineffective language. Language and
meaning are not the same thing, they dont always go together.
Grotesque: exceeding what is proper
Becket. The later the play, the more the language is devoid of meaning.
Each of his plays strangles the previous one.

POST-COLONIALISM (after colonialism ended, from the moment it started

onwards)
POST COLONIAL STUDIES 1980s
British rule in India: 1848-1947. After WWII, En needed workers, so the country
opened to immigrants from the Br Empire.
Displacement, diasphora: origin (Jews escaping from Egipt). Today, people
leaving their native countries (political persecution, e.g.). Diasphoric
literatures: writer does not belong to the country of origin.
Feminism: both agree in that they give a voice to the oppressed.
Post colonial literature:
resists colonialism. Not necessarily defined by a period of time.
FEMINISM 1950s and 60s
CONTACT ZONE: space where cultures clash (Pratt)
HYBRIDITY: cultures coexist (Bhabba)

TRAVELLING CULTURES: people constantly on the move