Key Criticism Context Flashcards
Ian Watt on the Rise of the Novel and the middle class
argues novel made possible by shift in ‘the centre of gravity of the reading public… sufficient to place the middle class as a whole in a dominating position for the first time.’
Nancy Armstrong in ‘Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel’ (1987) …
links ‘the history of British Fiction to the empowering of the middle classes in England through the dissemination of a new female ideal’
novel the genre which…
tutored newly powerful middle classes in its manners and expectations, most often in form of realist domestic fiction
the novel promoted the idea of England’s…
superiority over other nations, as Deidre David has shown in ‘Rule Brittania: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing’ (1995)
The Blind Girl
John Everett Millais’ Blind Girl’ emphasises form of ‘Inward Seeing’ - Flint notes the eye’s physiological but also imaginative properties; “Eyes are… a symbol for the spirit, the world within’
Marxist conception of history
dialectical relationship; idea that as humans change their environment, their environment changes them
Marx, Grundrisse, 1973 materialist conception of history quote
‘Not only do the objective conditions change… e.g. the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared field etc. but the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language’
moral dichotomy constitutes the deepest guiding principle of the Victorian outlook
‘absolute moral standards based on a radical dichotomy between that which was deemed “human” and that regarded as “animal.”’
Scholar Masao Mioyshi:
‘the Victorians to often saw them [possibilities] in rigid pairs – all or nothing, white or black’
‘civilised and savage’ ‘black or white’ ‘superior and inferior’
Sexes placed in ‘separate spheres’
Rosalind Rosenberg ‘the Victorian faith in sexual polarity’
-Deemed women “by nature emotional and passive” and men “rational and assertive” clearly comes into play here
Radical standard of innocence and purity;
Victorian thought - ‘sweetness and light’ of Mathew Arnold; Victorian cult of gentility; dishonest conception of existence?
Attempt to banish evil -want to create a new world of ‘harmonious perfection’ (Mathew Arnold);
longed for a universe that was not just intelligible, reassuring, and morally challenging, but symphonic as well’
o ‘worldly prosperity’ and ‘great inward peace and satisfaction’ that Victorian ‘prophets’ like Mathew Arnold seemed to promise
the great paradox, of course, was that, in seeking that harmony, the Victorians depended on the moral dichotomy with its inherent divisiveness’;
in seeking ‘harmonious perfection’ in a symphonic universe; depends on a rigid moral dichotomy with its inherent divisiveness.
Meyer faith and doubt
‘Victorians were perhaps the last generation among English-speaking intellectuals able to believe that man was capable of understanding his universe, just as they were the first generation collectively to suspect that he never would’
Frank Kermode argued that..
the ‘sense of an ending’ is a myth of the temporal that affects our thoughts, histories, disciplines and fictions ‘we project our existential anxieties on to history’
