Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Question 1

Except for Sterne and Richardson, 18th-c. novelists tended at first to observe action from a distance. In this respect the _____ _____, a new form of romance, made a great change.

Answer 1

gothic novel

Question 2

The gothic novel was ____________ oriented, and sometimes treated emotions quite minutely–or at least, a particular range of them

Answer 2

psychologically

Question 3

19th-c gothic fiction hearkened back to neogothic Jacobean tragedy, Shakespeare, and above all,

Answer 3

Spenser

Question 4

19th-c gothic fiction hearkened back to neogothic _______ ________, ________, and above all, Spenser.

Answer 4

Jacobean tragedy, Shakespeare

Question 5

The Gothic novel began with

Answer 5

The Castle of Otranto (1765)

Question 6

At first Walpole pretended Otranto was a translation from a…. but subsequently presented it as an original work.

Answer 6

16-c. Italian print of a medieval romance

Question 7

In Otranto, Walpole hoped to release what, in the novel? (Hint: it had erstwhile been damned up by involvement with ordinary triviality)

Answer 7

the “great resources of fancy”

Question 8

Otranto’s superhuman armour derived from

Answer 8

Piranesi’s Carceri etchings (morbid fantasies of overwhelming restrictions and imprisoning infinities

Question 9

Who etched Carceri d’invenzione or ‘Imaginary Prisons’? These served as an inspiration for?

Answer 9

Giovanni Piranesi; Walpole’s imagery in Otranto

Question 10

Walpole began composition, as Coleridge and Mary Shelley were to do, at the prompting of

Answer 10

a dream

Question 11

What composition-method is common to Kubla Khan, Frankenstein, and Otranto?

Answer 11

Each was started at the prompting of a dream

Question 12

The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) makes a girl’s bereavement, subsequent dependence and imprisonment among banditti the occasion for an extended study of the

Answer 12

shades of terror (rather than horror)

Question 13

Fear and awe of death, grief, pain of separation from a lover, fear of abandonment, fear of rape, fear of the dark, fear of the supernatural and terror of the mysterious, as well as terror at the very landscape. These mark the psychological aspects of

Answer 13

Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

Question 14

Even the veiled “picture” that causes Emily to faint, although it is long left mysterious with powerful effect, at last undergoes mere description. But to emphasize Radcliffe’s rationality is misleading, sincer her abnormal focus on _____ _______ itself receives no adequate explanation.

Answer 14

dark emotions

Question 15

For all the explanations of the mysteries of Udolpho, what mysteries remain by the end of the book?

Answer 15

Emily’s psyche, and also Radcliffe’s unprecedented focus on dark emotions

Question 16

In several sentences, trace the treatment of landscape from the Enlightenment to Radcliffe

Answer 16

At one point the landscape seemed to hold out a possibility for God’s continued involvement in nature after the age of cosmic emblems. If God (or any higher power) was still involved in the world, the landscape reflected an immanent meaning. The landscape became a kind of Borgesian map with a perfect 1:1 ratio–each detail was, but also meant. (See Thomson’s The Seasons). In Radcliffe we see a new terror: that under the map there is always only another map–a terror about the ultimate falseness of appearances.

Question 17

Radcliffe’s digressions gave a very special pleasure to lovers of landscape. But they are also part of an interlaced structure that keeps delaying the action and distancing it into

Answer 17

perspective

Question 18

From being a minor strain until about 1790, during the next three decades the gothic novel became dominant, and enjoyed a popularity that contrasts with the relatively limited appeal of the Fieldingesque novel. Hundreds of gothic romances were published, some of them (like Matthew Lewis’s) translations or imitations of

Answer 18

the German originals

Question 19

Radcliffe’s most obvious originality lay in her endless digressions into

Answer 19

description of Salvator Rosa-like panoramas.

Question 20

Throughout 19-th c. romance the powers of darkness often stand for the powers of the _________; while the forbidden merely signifies what is currently ___________

Answer 20

unconscious; unconventional

Question 21

The symbolism of the capacious 19th-c. gothic genre often means depression and guilt at the dwindling of _______ ______; guilt at the “haughtiness of the _______,” (Radcliffe); fascination with old emotions proscribed during the _________ of the Enlightenment; and a sense of the oppressiveness of confining _____ _________s.

Answer 21

religious belief; noblesse; rationalism; social conventions

Question 22

Scott had access to Scottish oral tradition–to ballads and personal reports that made the past alive for him. He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of history. This allowed him to be _______ with the past, in ways inaccessible to his predecessors

Answer 22

inward

Question 23

Scott’s selection of events and frequent allusions to romance writers like _______ make the work thrill with remoter associations of chivalric as well as Jacobite glamour.

Answer 23

Spenser

Question 24

Scott tried to make his landscapes picturesque; he had carefully studied whose novels?

Answer 24

Anne Radcliffe’s

Question 25

Scott’s great innovation was to realize in fiction a whole community in a

Answer 25

process of change.

Question 26

Scott’s great innovation was to realize in fiction a whole community in a process of change. In this his work, for all its involvement with romance, belonged very much to the __________. The complete societies he represented include people of every rank–all treated with equal seriousness, all participating in political crises.

Answer 26

Enlightenment

Question 27

Thackeray chose to simulate historical authenticity by a very different method than Scott, that of ________. Throughout he used a style imitated from authors of the period–a patchwork of old words, idioms and syntactic forms–such that cameos of historical figures like Addison and Steele could be slipped in without discordance.

Answer 27

pastiche

Question 28

Jane Austen (1775-1817) selected so surely from the possibilities represented by Richardson, Fielding, Burney and Edgeworth that she gave the novel

Answer 28

its classic proportions. (The ones that later came to be considered normal)

Question 29

Austen keeps description of externals to a minimum; so that anything depicted at length, like Donwell Abbey in Emma (1816), stands out and assumes a symbolic value. Similarly, she presents the actions from the moral standpoint of a single heroine–who is not, however,

Answer 29

the narrator

Question 30

In Austen, _____ ________ (“sense”) and ______ _____ (“sensibility”) are, indeed, the main activities of the protagonist, as of the involved reader.

Answer 30

moral discrimination; emotional response

Question 31

In Austen, moral action is only sparingly interpreted by the author, whose explanations in any case are often disguised as half-reported thoughts of the protagonist, or masked by irony. Consequently, values tend to be expressed through ____, or through equally _______ clarifying examples.

Answer 31

tone; implicit

Question 32

What class does Austen focus on?

Answer 32

Small gentry, with a few aristocrats thrown in

Question 33

Do the lower classes ever feature in Austen?

Answer 33

Not heavily. However, they do feature: in Pride and Prejudice, a conversation with a housekeeper constitutes a turning point of the action

Question 34

In Emma moral schemes control everything that happens. Its edifying pleasures depend on one’s seeing such patterns as the _________ of Emma’s errors, or the _________ between Mr Elton’s charade and Frank Churchill’s anagram, or between the instances of art–Harriet’s portrait, Jane’s piano, the Donwell landscape.

Answer 34

gradation; resemblances

Question 35

Realism came only with a changed attitude; and this awaited the impulse of Carlyle’s ideas about the immanence of the _____ in the ____, or of Ruskin’s subsequent advocacy of _______. Perhaps the most important figure of all was Dickens.

Answer 35

ideal; real; naturalism

Question 36

For Ruskin, the ideal was to “write about things which thou ____ ____, and the things which ___”–to represent things in all their particular weaknesses and imperfection.

Answer 36

hast seen; are

Question 37

For Ruskin, the ideal was to “write about things which thou thou has seen, and the things which are.” But even such ideas of realist art might not have been enough, without the congenial example of early works by

Answer 37

Charles Dickens

Question 38

In Pickwick Papers (1836-7), Oliver Twist (1837-8) and especially Sketches by Boz (1835-6), Dickens introduced more detail of …

Answer 38

external objects than had ever been attempted in fiction

Question 39

Sketches by Boz (1835-6) has a prolonged description of old clothes, with speculations, only partly facetious, as to the wearers who produced their signs of wear. Previously, a subject so low would have warranted….[?]…. But with Dickens, things of all sorts–an entire material world–began to throng into the novel.

Answer 39

at most a perfunctory comic treatment.

Question 40

Alongside Dickens, another important novelist in the rise of realism was

Answer 40

Thackeray

Question 41

In developing 19th-c. realism, the method of Dickens and Thackeray contrasted sharply: Thackeray’s accurate proportions and Dickens’s exaggerated realization; realism of _______ and realism of _________.

Answer 41

normality; immediacy

Question 42

Trollope has a way of taking you into his confidence about the story; sometimes directly revealing matters unknown to the characters themselves. This informal, deliberately awkward method, which acknowledges fictionality in a way _____ _____ greatly disliked, is often disparaged as a weakness. But it can be a strength.

Answer 42

Henry James

Question 43

In his decisive selection of “internal history,” as seen in Beauchamp’s Career, George Meredith almost arrives at the modernist novel of ________ plot. And in various ways he anticipates both __________ and Henry James

Answer 43

D.H. Lawrence

Question 44

Victorian novelists could attempt to carry realism further in at least three distinct ways. Paraphrase the three.

Answer 44

1. Realism of documentary experience; offering fresh, undiluted details about new aspects of the extra-diegetic world.
2. Realism of normality; rendering life in its ordinary proportions.
3. Realism of heightened feeling

Question 45

Victorian novelists could attempt to carry realism further in at least three distinct ways. Discuss the first of Fowler’s categories, the realism of documentary experience.

Answer 45

Offering fresh detail or addressing new areas of experience in the extra-diegetic. This kind of realism delved unflinchingly into even the bleakest and least charming aspects of reality, such as the condition of the working class. Early Dickens, and even more so Elizabeth Gaskell, cultivated this kind of realism. Sometimes in Gaskell it actually sacrifices realism by taking this quite far, so that it reveals her indignation, and desire to document harsh conditions, sometimes amounting to didactic exhortation.

Question 46

Victorian novelists could attempt to carry realism further in at least three distinct ways. Discuss the second of Fowler’s categories, realism of normality.

Answer 46

Rendering life in its ordinary proportions. This kind of realism is present in later Gaskell and in Thackeray, and is perfected by George Eliot. It presents life in its quotidian measure, clarified by thematic patterns but undistorted by any exaggerated emphasis. Symbolism is involved but is kept unobtrusive, always subordinated to the ordinary consciousness of common everyday life.

Question 47

Victorian novelists could attempt to carry realism further in at least three distinct ways. Discuss the third of Fowler’s categories, heightened feeling.

Answer 47

A realism of intensity rather than a realism of typicality. This style concentrates on moments of strong passion, such as may open up the depths of experience. These moments tend to have symbolic value, making this the mode of realism that most clearly identifies with its roots in allegory. This is the realism of the later Dickens, including Great Expectations (1860-1).

Question 48

The first of Fowler’s classes of Victorian realism is that of documentary experience. Offering ____ detail or addressing ___ areas of experience. This kind of realism delved unflinchingly into even the bleakest and least charming aspects of reality, such as the condition of the working class. Early ______, and even more so ______, cultivated this kind of realism. Sometimes the latter author takes this so far that it sacrifices the realism, revealing her indignation, and her desire to document harsh conditions.

Answer 48

fresh; new; Dickens; Gaskell

Question 49

The second of Fowler’s classes of Victorian realism is realism of normality. Rendering life in its _______ proportions. This kind of realism is present in later ______ and in ________, and is perfected by _____. It presents life in its quotidian measure, clarified by thematic patterns but undistorted by any exaggerated emphasis. Symbolism is involved but is kept _________, always subordinated to the ordinary consciousness of common everyday life.

Answer 49

ordinary; Gaskell; Thackeray; Eliot; unobtrusive

Question 50

The third of Fowler’s classes of Victorian realism is of heightened emotion. A realism of ______ rather than a realism of _______. This style concentrates on moments of strong passion, such as may open up the depths of experience. These moments tend to have symbolic value, making this the mode of realism that most clearly identifies with its roots in _______. This is the realism of the later ______, and of _____ and _____ Bronte.

Answer 50

intensity; typicality; allegory; Dickens; Emily; Charlotte

Question 51

When Pip discovers that his wealth has all along derived from Matwitch, allegory is giving him a chance to learn about the

Answer 51

guilty origin of wealth in general.

Question 52

In Great Expectations, Jaggers’s Pilate-like __________, symptomatic though it may be of psychological traits, is as allegorical as anything in Spenser or Bunyan–whome Dickens’s Moralities often resemble.

Answer 52

handwashing

Question 53

To Fowler’s three categories of Victorian realism, I add a fourth, called _________ realism. How does Anne Bronte employ this, and what is its relationship to Fowler’s categories?

Answer 53

dissentient; Anne’s realism takes advantage of the first of Fowler’s classes–realism of documentary content–on two levels. One of these levels comprises an expose of the evils of alcoholism, but this doubles as an alibi for another documentary theme–that of the married woman’s plight in Victorian England. Finally, this second level of documentary purports to didactically redeem marriage through Helen’s relationship with Gilbert Markham, but relies on Markham’s borderlinish continuity with Arthur Huntingdon to make the sudden shift into idealism feel forced. Thus, the final stage of realism, and the most experimental, is attained when Anne calls attention to the unreality of the novel’s realism.

Question 54

One of Dickens’s innovations was the multiplot novel, which he was probably led to by the exigencies of

Answer 54

serial publication

Question 55

Dickens’s sprawling, multiplot novels were what James would call “large loose baggy monsters.” But they actually recall _______ ________ plots, and their multifarious connections attempt to pursue a comprehensive image of life’s mysteries.

Answer 55

medieval interlace